New Light - August 2025 Updates

WHAT A MONTH! It feels like I say this all the time, but dang if it isn’t true! 

In July, Guardians worked together to bring about the defeat of Crota himself. They coordinated fireteams, prepared their equipment, and dove into his ascendant realm without hesitation. It looked really rough in the beginning, but with some careful management of resources and a couple lucky dice rolls, they managed to plunge a sword straight into Crota’s heart, ending this threat once and for all.

Server Rewards

The defeat of Crota ushers in a whole new era for Guardians. Everyone gets +1 XP, and the level cap is increased to 16th. 

Hey, remember when the level cap was 4th? Guardians are now four times more powerful than they were when Riksis started terrorizing kinderguardians in the Cosmodrome. Talk about improvement!

Surely, nothing could possibly threaten you now, right?

...Right?

Vault of Glass Patrol Zone

While PCs were organizing the death of Crota, one of our NPCs, a krill nightstalker named Erebus, set up a field camp at the entrance to the Vault of Glass. She’s looking for any enterprising fireteam willing to step inside and gather data for her. 

The conquered Vault of Glass is now a sub-zone of the Ishtar Sink. Similar to the Hellmouth, Guardians may choose to venture into this highly dangerous area whenever they visit Venus. You’ll need to complete every encounter in your adventuring deck by the end of session to make it out alive. High risk for sure, but think of the riches you could find!

Iron Banner is Back

After being away for quite a while, Lord Saladin is back in the Tower. He’s brought Iron Banner weapons for Guardians to earn by participating in Iron Banner matches. In particular, anyone who manages to reach a reputation of 7 or higher will be able to purchase the Crest of Alpha Lupi, a Superior exotic armor piece.

There’s also a whole new reward structure for our winners. At the end of the month, the top three PCs with the highest Iron Banner reputation, who aren’t already Iron Wolves, will receive an offer to join the Iron Wolves, a specialized group of fighters being taught by Lord Saladin himself. These same PCs will be given Young Wolf’s Howl, a Superior exotic longsword, to mark their induction to the Iron Wolves.

Drake Tanks Rolling Out

Firebase Nula, with help from humanity’s new Eliksni allies, has finished research & development on a brand new class of ground vehicle: the Drake tank, which is now available for purchase from Amanda Holliday. 

But now the Vanguard has a weird problem: there isn’t enough room in the Tower hangar to store all the new vehicles Guardians are acquiring! They’re implementing a temporary rule until something more permanent can be figured out: PCs can now only store one vehicle in the Tower hangar. (No, your sparrow doesn’t count against this, that’s small enough it can be stored in your Vault or in your jumpship’s onboard server.) The vehicle cannot be bigger than a Regulus jumpship (30 ft x 40 ft).

Huge Back-end Updates

Believe it or not, this month’s major update work went into GM tools and other back-end development. We can’t go over everything in detail (we gotta keep some of our secrets), but here’s the major highlights we want players to be aware of:

• We’ve updated all the roll20 games to use jumpgate. This gives us a few extra tools for running games. We’re particularly excited about jumpgate’s Foreground map layer and can’t wait to make proper use of it.

  • You will have to re-join our games. The new links to games will appear on our schedule sheet during the session sign-up window. (We want our GMs to join first and make sure everything works.)

• We modified the stats of several existing monsters. Be on the lookout for familiar creatures acting differently than they have in the past.

• We’ve also added nearly two dozen new monsters to the roster, bringing our general-purpose monster count up to 124. Players will start running into creatures such as the Cabal sapper, the Vex sentinel, and Chosen creatures of the Hive in their general patrol sessions. 

• Older battlemaps are being updated to modern standards. You’ll also start to see some new battlemaps in the rotation, too.

Origin Story Change

New players now have the option to jump straight into a Patrol session, instead of having to explicitly schedule an Origin Story session. You’ll have to add yourself to the Optional: Origin Session column on the schedule. You won’t play for the entire session, but instead, the fireteam will find your PC as an encounter in their patrol. You'll roleplay with the fireteam, maybe shoot some bad guys, and then be escorted safely to the nearest Vanguard base.

We’re updating SEG material to reflect this change. There might be some leftover artifacts here and there as we pour over 55,000 words and get relevant information updated 😅 (Did you know the SEG is now over 55,000 words long? I only realized this today.)

Misc. Updates

Other changes to New Light.

• The Vanguard spent Strength to increase the BNS of the Cosmodrome and the Ocean of Storms to Good status.

• The Vanguard spent Strength to finish the research and development of Wordline Zero and Apotheosis Veil. These items are now in the Known & Craftable Exotic list.

• With Strength generally being so high for so long, the Vanguard’s decided to increase the amount it pays for successful Patrol tasks to 4,000 gl each. This also increases the amount of Strength the Vanguard must spend each month to pay Guardians for Patrol tasks.

In Case You Missed It

Updates we rolled out throughout the month of July. There were a lot! But if you’ve been keeping up with the event-announcements channel on our Discord, this is old news to you.

• Corrected an issue with Repair or Service a Vehicle DT: removing 1 stress also restores 10% HP.

• Renamed Appendix B to Limited Items (was Cycled Out Items).

• Reverse Engineer DT activity had changed so that bloodbound and limited items can’t be used with the DT activity.

• Tyra Karn updated her resource prices.

• Added the Fixer reputation tracker (located after Cryptarchy).

• Added the Run Goods DT activity.

• Reworded a few sections to be vehicle-agnostic. While the majority of these mods will always apply to jumpships and other spacecraft, we're preparing for the day when this becomes the all-around vehicle mod mechanics.

• Moved information on universal mods (including the renamed Jumpship Overview table) to be under Universal Mod Options.

• Added information on compartments. Some vehicles, like Eliksni skiffs, have individual compartments with their own mod options separate from the general mod list.

  • Added terminology and mechanics to differentiate which compartments mods can be installed in.

• Specified that weapon capacity is the number of weapons that can be to the general mod list of a vehicle. Some vehicles come with weapons pre-installed, and others can have weapons added via compartments.

• All universal weapon mods now listed as requiring a Helm station to be installed. (This isn't the same as installing to the helm compartment.)

• Added new unique mod options, most of which require an internal compartment. This is stuff like Captain's Quarters, Basic Medical Facility, and Cargo Space.

• Added skiff to the list of spaceship vehicles, and added the skiff's stat sheet to the vehicle folder.

• The Arcadia, Nautilus, and Regulus jumpships now each have two internal compartments: a Helm (1 slot) and a Hold (3 slots). Their size also increased to 30 feet by 40 feet.

• The Echo now has a single internal compartment: a Helm (2 slots). Size increased to 25 feet by 25 feet. Also got a new unique mod just for it, Echo Retrofit.

• Regulus weight increased to 70k lb., and maximum load increased to 65k lb.

• Arcadia weight increased to 60k lb., and maximum load increased to 30k lb.

• Fixed a couple typos in the skiff stat block: weight is 220k lb., HP is 550, and maximum load is 200k lb.

• Ulurant (land vehicles) added to Cryptarchy archives.

• Added a note to the SEG that, in DT forms, you are meant to delete the italicized text and replace it with relevant information. DT reports that don't appropriately delete the italicized text will be rejected.

• Fixed a typo in the Regulus stat sheet: Damage Negation should be Damage Threshold

• Added a new vehicle mod option, Smuggler's Hold.

• Updates we had for the server throughout the month of July.

• Added options to solicit an NPC to the Catalyze a Weapon, Repair Equipment, and Craft a Custom Armor Set. Like normal, it won't cost you any days to use this option, but it will cost more glimmer.

  • When you solicit an NPC to Craft a Custom Armor Set, you're only able to select viable perks as shown in the New Light Crafting table. The total weaponsmith level of the server will determine how many of these perks are viable for this service. We'll have more info in the August update!

  • The goal is to free up the DT of our crafters so they can invest in other areas.

• Reduced the cost of Remove a Jumpship Mod to 1,000 gl.

• Service a Vehicle NPC option altered to follow modern rules for this (costs no days, but 10% more glimmer).

• Re-organized the information in the Repair Equipment DT activity. Also generally reduced the DT cost of this activity.

• DVC303–WAU should now be much easier to break. This is a boon, I promise!

• Grand Overture, Wanderer’s Rifle, Wordline Zero, Apotheosis Veil, and Don’t Touch Me added to the Known & Craftable Exotic list.