Developer Zillion Whales has announced plans to introduce a variety of features and updates for Wild Forest during Q1 2025.

What Are the Q1 2025 Plans for Wild Forest?

For these first few months of the year, the studio plans on introducing various new game modes while expanding their ecosystem and improving gameplay in their free to play RTS title.

The team has provided a large list of features that you can look forward to seeing go live in the coming months. Here's everything that's planned to be included in the Ronin-powered game:

  • Leaderboard fixes, rebalances, and $WF rewards
  • Inker Unit release and Unit Fragments redemption
  • Open Unit Minting with $WF fee
  • Expeditions mode for new casual gameplay and increased Unit utility
  • Perk re-roll
  • Lords staking multiplier for deposits
  • Elixirs, ingredients, and crafting
  • Game engine update to reduce lag and improve stability
  • Trophy Road rework
  • Battle Pass rework and balancing changes
  • Private Battles and Tournament support
  • Arcade Mode rework, addition of Rating competition
  • Direct Ronin Wallet login
  • Units & Lord Rent
  • PvE mode
  • Skin NFT utility
  • DAO voting system

As you can see, the first quarter of 2025 is super packed with new updates to improve the overall blockchain gaming experience in this strategic mobile title. Only time will tell whether all of this actually goes live early this year of course, but it’s great to see the team transparently lay out to the community everything they plan to work on during this quarter.

Let’s go over the leaderboard changes, the new game modes, Unit redemption, and Unit minting.

The team knows that the leaderboard needs fixing, and as such is prioritizing adding various fixes in order to get more players into competitive matchmaking. You can also soon expect to see Trophy Pack prizes replaced with direct $WF rewards, with the new leaderboard only rewarding $WF tokens for the top division. Lower divisions will be rewarded with resources used to improve decks instead.

As for new game modes, these are set to include PvE, Expeditions, Private Battles, and Tournaments. Details on the PvE mode aren’t really available, but the team plans on making this a more accessible mode that not only aims to attract new players who don’t want to dabble in competitive PvP, but to also give existing strategists a new alternative mode to casually enjoy. The official post states that “various game scenarios” are being considered for PvE, including “co-op multiplayer raids and survivals.”

For those who want to play tactical PvP battles with their friends, the team has the Private Battles mode coming up to allow you to easily do exactly that. If you’re more interested in competitive gameplay, then you can look forward to Tournament support getting added, opening up more esports opportunities and delivering the tools needed to host local tournaments, all potentially drawing in more players to this web3 game.

Expeditions is set to be a new idle game mode where you send Units on dangerous missions in hopes of having them return with valuable rewards. This adds more utility to Units and offers new gameplay to enjoy. More details on this mode were revealed in an updated whitepaper for Wild Forest last year, and you can check out our coverage on it to find more in-depth info on this new mode.

Unit Fragments redemption is said to open up “a source of initial supply for the newly released units.” This means that Lord NFT holders but also active players who have enough Unit Fragments will be able to mint Inkers and other new Units that get added in the future.

Unit Minting is planned to be officially open for any player to use this year. You will have to pay a mint fee in $WF whenever you want to mint a new unit, thus adding more utility to the token while limiting unit supply and potentially preventing bots from abusing the system.

Check out the official X article to learn more about the studio’s plans for Q1 2025.

Specific timeframes for each of these features are not available at the time of writing. You can look forward to more exact release dates getting revealed over time. We already have one actually, and that is for the new unit: Inker!

New Unit Inker Is Coming to Wild Forest on January 17th

Inker is the newest Unit coming to Wild Forest as a new counter for Flying Units, giving players more room to create new strategies that work better against certain tactics. Details on its unique abilities are not yet known, but will be revealed closer to release.

This new Unit launches on January 17th, allowing players with enough Unit Fragments to start minting. You will need 20 Unit Fragments to mint 1 Inker. Once minted, you can already start deploying this anthropomorphic squid in-game. This means that you get 10 days of exclusive early access to this new Unit, because Inker will be added to the Battle Pass on January 27th. So, if you can’t or don’t want to mint Inker, then you can look forward to earning this Unit as a reward in the Battle Pass.

The developers have also clarified their decision to introduce Inker to the Battle Pass. According to the announcement, there are 2 reasons for doing this: to have a larger playerbase testing the Unit in order to better be able to balance him out, and also to lower unfair competition by giving more players early enough access to play him in battles.