Following last month’s mint for weapon-focused Artifact Boxes, the developers of sandbox MMORPG WorldShards are now launching a new Armor Artifact Sale this July 19th.

Sale Details

For the price of $199 per box, buyers can now find 3 Armor Crafting Artifacts of varying rarity in each box, plus Gems or a Tradable Access Key. These crafting assets can be used to create collectible armor with magical enhancements by connecting to the Armor Forge, marking what seems to be a “new era” in armor crafting.

There are only 3750 boxes up for grabs, with 2000 reserved for whitelisted users. Players can buy 10 boxes per person, with only 1 per transaction during the whitelist period, while the public period allows for 2 boxes to be bought per transaction. The whitelist period runs for 1 hour or until all assets are sold out.

The sale takes place on Big Time’s Open Loot platform, and you can check out the loot table before purchasing to see the probabilities of each item and their rarities. A total of 4 items seems to be included in each box, 3 of which are randomly picked Artifacts for crafting armor, while the 4th item could be either a random number of Gems or a Tradable Access Key that can be resold to anyone who’d like to play, or activated to play the game for yourself in Early Access, burning the key in the process. Gems are a premium currency that were added in the latest update.

Artifacts are said to be important for the game’s upcoming economy, as once its activated and the $MWKN token goes live, these assets will help in gaining tokens, discovering treasures and improving your collection.

Latest Dev Updates

This week marked the launch of update 0.5.0, which brought in visual improvements, gameplay enhancements and various new features and content for players to enjoy.

Specifically, players can now place their Artifacts on the Home Island if you want to use them as decoration, and you can also now start crafting collectible items of up to 5 levels and 3 tiers, with random chances of crafting a rarer item depending on supply availability.

There are also 2 new mobs: a fiery movable piece of tree trunk called Treant and a hyena-like humanoid creature called Gnoll. You will now no longer find bandits in your adventures, as they’ve been replaced by Gnolls, which has been the developer’s plan all along according to their patch notes. Speaking of adventures, the team has added in 3 new adventures while upgrading the visuals of existing ones to give them more variety. A new island mechanic has also been introduced: Mushroom trampolines! Hop on them to reach areas that you couldn’t get to before.

As mentioned before, the update introduces a premium currency called Gems, but there’s also another economy-based addition, and that one includes the release of Luck charge, which is a new attribute for collectible items.

For more details on all the improvements and bug fixes, you can check out the official changelog in this Medium post.

After releasing this update, the team published a new dev diary revealing the progress they’ve made so far on the Winter Biome, which they say they’re actively working on as it has now become a “key part of our project.” In fact, it’s been in the works since the earliest stages of development, with the team implementing some of the ideas for it in the latest updates as they’ve continued to constantly revisit development on this biome. The plan was to properly begin development on it together with the Summer Biome, but the developers realized that doing both at the same time was harder than initially expected if they wanted to give the biome the proper level of quality, time and attention they think it should have.

Various new and unique effects are said to have been made to give this biome a proper atmosphere through graphics, and since winter islands are also part of the game’s overall world, you can expect to see plenty of new content and potentially some familiar objects in adapted form, including the known Wargs.

While no exact launch date is yet available, the dev diary teases that the biome is coming soon. For more details, be sure to check out the official entry to learn more about what goes on behind the scenes when creating new atmospheric environments.