Brighter Shores dropped a small but purposeful patch on March 2 that ties fishing expansion directly to Fallen Monument progression. It's a smart bit of design: rather than gating new spots behind a separate grind, Fen Research is weaving the Monument's odd-numbered stages into the Forager profession in a way that actually gives you a reason to care about each individual stage clear.
The specifics are clean. Every odd-numbered stage you complete adds fishing spots for a particular fish type. Clear stage 1 and you unlock two new Ray spots in Ray Bay. The Forager professions tab tracks all of it, so you're never left guessing what opens next. The final stage still rewards a new venture slot, keeping that carrot intact.
This is exactly the kind of incremental reward structure that makes a game like Brighter Shores feel less like a checklist and more like a world that responds to what you do. Fishing mains finally have a concrete reason to push the Monument further.
Full patch notes below.
Additional fishing spots can now be unlocked by completing the odd-numbered stages of the Fallen Monument. Each odd-numbered stage will add additional fishing spots for one kind of fish. For example, completing stage 1 of the Fallen Monument will unlock two new Ray spots in Ray Bay. Because the additional spots are unlocked by Forager, you can see all the information on them in the Forager professions tab.
Completing the final stage of the Fallen Monument still unlocks a new venture slot.
You might think these new unlocks mean that you should just level up Forager before every other profession, and that is indeed the case this week. However, we are going to add many more cross-profession unlocks like this over the coming months.
Here are some examples of more cross-profession unlocks we are going to add in the future:
• At each milestone of Leatherworker you will be able to make a new tier of "Forager's Gloves" which will improve Forager.
• At each milestone of Miner you will be able to mine a special gem which you can trade with the gnomes for their assistance in improving your Leatherworker stations.
etc...
Balancing
• In Miner, the Mythstone and Purpladium passive activities have been swapped so that they line up better with the level of the Mythstone Bowls and Purpladium Jewelry passive activities.
• In Fisher, the respawn times of all fish have been adjusted such that the downtime between respawn cycles is better balanced. The XP has also been adjusted such that this does not change the average XP per hour. i.e. The XP rate without the fallen monument boost is the same as previously, and the fallen monument boost is an ADDITIONAL boost on top of that.
Quality of life improvements
• The route finder will now try to take you through bramble shortcuts if you have a sufficient Woodcutter level and a sufficiently good hatchet to use the shortcut. You will still need to manually chop the brambles when you get there.
• When you hover the mouse over a map label it will now go transparent so you can see the map behind it.
• When using the watering can or greenfly sprayer, a status icon now indicates how much water or greenfly spray is left. This indicator will disappear after 30 seconds.
• The keybinds and mouse binds editors now support mouse button 4/mouse button 5. For example: you could set one of these mouse buttons to trigger 'sense spell' or 'activate action boost'.
• Off-faction combat items now display the faction as an icon adjacent to the level, instead of dimming the entire item.
• The 'Auto Withdraw' quantity for pastry will now change between 8 and 12, depending on your highest unlocked Chef recipe (similar to what weapon crafting does).
Bug fixes
• Fix position of anchor icons on the ore bank and shop.
• Fix bug where recycling scrap metal did not resume properly on login.
• Fix portraits for some of the Giant Rats.
• Fix tile you could not walk on in Logging Area.
• Fix various typos.
Brighter Leek
We have decided to change the format of the Brighter Leek. The new format is much quicker for us to keep updated and still provides the most critical information. This will help us achieve our new 'weekly update' goal.
We have replaced the Brighter Leek with a new 'What we are working on' interface, which can be accessed via the button on the title screen. This information will be updated regularly to reflect the current state of affairs. To save time we will NOT be cross-publishing this information to the website and Steam.
We want to extend a huge thank you to Valerie for creating a video version of the leek every week.
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