SensoryAbyss

Lighting & atmosphere

• Fixed a client crash on some GPUs (notably Intel) caused by the atmosphere shader. A shader compile failure now just disables the effect for that session instead of taking down the game.

Performance

• Reduced render-thread CPU load from a hot vanilla path that was eating roughly a quarter of frame time and causing GC stutter. Smoother frames during chunk loading and movement.

Spells & Mastery

• Spell mastery no longer resets when you die. Cast counts now persist through death — no more watching a spell slide from Adept back down to Practiced.
• Mastery expanded from 5 ranks to 8. New high ranks: Grandmaster, Ascendant, Eternal. A fully-mastered spell now hits 85% harder, comes off cooldown twice as fast, and — new — costs 25% less mana. Mana cost still rises slightly in the early ranks before mastery makes the channel efficient. (New journal entry "Spell Mastery" explains all of this in-game.)
• You can now craft any grimoire and learn any spell regardless of class. Removed an old affliction gate, and fixed a bug where a grimoire placed on an altar or pedestal wasn't recognized as a grimoire — which could block learning entirely.

Classes

• The Shattered now correctly receives the Blinded light/dark stat pool and its health regen. These bonuses were silently being dropped for Shattered players.
• Rebalanced the Blinded stat pools downward (~20–25%). The pools stack with no cap, so long-played characters were snowballing — especially health regen, where a single high pick could out-heal most incoming damage. Sustain now scales more gently over a long game.

Death Remnants / Abyss Recall

• Recall to a distant remnant now works. If your remnant was far away (its chunk unloaded), recall used to report "nothing remains there." It now loads the remnant in, waits for it to resolve, and lands you with your contents — with a graceful fallback if the remnant is genuinely gone.

World & zones

• Sensory plants now slowly spread and renew. They have no seeds and can't be bonemealed, so a planted patch will occasionally seed a nearby tile of its preferred soil (with a density cap — it's a trickle, not a crop).
• Rebalanced sensory distortion zones. Sense-corruption now accrues per second instead of per tick, so a zone fills your corruption over minutes rather than near-instantly — a hazard you leave, not an instant wipe. Gravity Fault zones are now escapable: levitation pulses with gravity-normal gaps instead of holding you airborne, and slowness no longer ramps to a level that traps you.

Small fixes

• Fixed the absorption-upgrade chat confirmation showing things like "+50% armor" for what is actually +0.5 flat armor. Flat stats (armor, health, damage points, regen) and percentage stats now display correctly.