Devlog: April 2026
Hey adventurers! Big one this time: skills are in.
Goodbye classes, hello skills
We want Eldria to be a deeply customizable journey. In many games you need to decide between Knight or Mage, but what if you'd rather be a heavily armored fishing magician? Yeah, no class selection screen in Eldria. No picking Knight or Mage at character creation and living with it for 2000 hours. Your character should be shaped by what you actually do - swing a sword, get better at swords. Cast spells, your magic improves. Only your imagination and dedication set the limits for creating character builds.
The skills
So what can you actually get good at? Here's the list so far.
On the combat side: Mace, Sword, Axe, Fist, Wands, and Archery each have their own skill track. There's also Guarding, which determines how well you block and absorb hits. A maxed Guarding skill is the difference between tanking a boss and getting flattened by one.
Magic has two schools: Sorcery covers neutral and chaotic spells, Divinity covers holy and healing. They're not mutually exclusive - some spells draw from both, so hybrid caster builds are very much possible.
Then there are professions! For now just Fishing but we are super excited about this as a genuinely chill activity that pulls you into corners of the world you'd otherwise have missed. We have lots of plans for more skills like this.
One thing worth knowing: skill levels are capped by your character level. You can't just grind one skill while ignoring everything else. As you level up, the caps rise, and you can push your skills further. It's a system that rewards playing the game broadly while still letting you specialize.
Casting spells, for real this time
Once we had Sorcery and Divinity as proper skills, we couldn't help ourselves and went on a spell design binge. Sorcery gets Emberstream, a channeled fire spell you hold down to keep burning your enemy, and (of course) Fireball, which loads up and then fires. Divinity gets Flash Heal as a first spell, as well as Sanctified Focus which makes your next cast uninterruptable. This will matter a lot in PvP.
The bigger change is how casting feels. We added cast bars with two modes: channeling (hold to maintain) and casting (wait for the bar to fill, then it fires). Magic feels really fun to use now.
The cast bar system is actually more general than just spells. It's a progress bar we can reuse for things like opening chests, crafting, or other interactions where you need to wait and can be interrupted. One of those changes where you build it for one thing and immediately see five other uses for it.
What's next
There's a lot of room to grow here. More skills, more spells, more ways to combine them. We don't want to design all of that in a vacuum though and we'd love to shape the profession and spell roster together with the community. If you have ideas for builds you'd want to play, spells that should exist, or professions that would make the world more fun to hang out in, come tell us in Discord.
