Greetings, Tibians!

Welcome to the test server for the Winter Update 2025!

This thread is dedicated to the new hunting grounds introduced with the quest Roost of the Graveborn.
Before you venture deep into the crypt, here's an overview that may prove useful on your journey.

The quest introduces three interconnected hunting grounds, each offering unique challenges and rewards:

• Outer Crypt:
  Always accessible and designed primarily for team hunting. Here, you may obtain fetid hearts, which grant access to the Inner Crypt.
  
  
• Inner Crypt:
  A solo hunting ground for those who dare to face the undead alone. Inside this part of the crypt, you can find cryptic fossils that open the path to the Forgotten Crypt.
  
  
• Forgotten Crypt:
  A team-oriented area that offers greater efficiency and higher rewards than the Outer Crypt. The fetid hearts can also drop here.

Note: On the test server, the fetid heart and cryptic fossil can be bought from the testserver assistant.

The monster distribution in these hunting grounds looks as follows:

Outer Crypt

• Walking Dread
  
• Crypt Construct
  
• Haunted Hunter
  
• Bone Bear (Summon)
  

Inner Crypt

• Roaming Dread
  
• Cyclursus
  
• Crypt Mage
  

Forgotten Crypt

• Crypt Fiend
  
• Creepy Crawler
  
• Crypt Construct
  

In terms of difficulty, the new hunting grounds are comparable to Soul War.

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If you want to make us aware of a balancing issue, please use the following template:

Title/Abstract: What's it about?

• Provide a short and clear headline that captures the essence of your feedback.
  

Situation/Problem: In a nutshell, what bothers you and why?

• Be specific, concise and to the point while giving enough detail for understanding.
  
• Tell us about your own personal experiences, observations and your point of view.
  

Goals and Suggestions: What do you propose?

• Explain what you want to see changed and why.
  
• Make a reasonable suggestion on how to remedy the situation/problem.
  

In general, make sure that your feedback...

• fits our overall goals/vision as described in the FAQ.
  
• is split into focused and manageable chunks instead of mixing multiple balancing topics or suggestions together.
  
• is posted in an organised, easy to read way.

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We are looking forward to your feedback and wish you happy hunting!

Shazaya

Official Replies:

2025-11-06: Some clarifications
2025-11-07: Prevent trapping and Inner Crypt changes
2025-11-13: Hunting ground adjustments
2025-11-13: Visible cues of access and renamings
2025-11-14: Hunting ground adjustments and new mechanic

Hi Tibians,

we hope you like the design of the new hunting grounds.

We would like to clarify the intention for the two items fetid heart and cryptic fossil that regulate the access for the Inner Crypt (fetid heart) and Forgotten Crypt (Cryptic Fossil).

• When using the fetid heart you gain five uses of the teleport to the Inner Crypt.
  
• When using the cryptic fossil you gain two uses of the teleport to the Forgotten Crypt.

This should introduce a market driven cycle of supply and demand. Of course we have to closely watch the drop rates and the demand (which is hopefully high). We will also think about a way to visually tell the player if one the hunting grounds with limited access is already in use by another party or player. So that players do not waste their uses.

You already mentioned some critical points regarding the strength of the monsters, respawn time. We will collect some more feedback before making changes to these hunting grounds. Preferably there will be feedback from different level ranges.

First thing i want to say is that, whenever you jump to any of the new areas by teleport, you apear in the open space. That means this can be easliy abused to make 8 box traps with ek to kill people.

This will be adjusted in one of the next testserver updates. Thanks for reporting.

Just to confirm, fetid hearts are tradeable items, correct?

Yes, both fetid hearts and cryptic fossils are tradeable.

Happy hunting,
Shazaya

Hello Tibians,

Thanks again for your testing and feedback!

With the following testserver update you can expect the following changes:

• Adjusted the player coordinates where a player will arrive after using the teleporters into the hunting grounds to prevent trapping.
  
• Inner Crypt - Reduced loot and increased xp.
  
• Inner Crypt - Increased the respawn rate for some monsters. This probably needs more fine-tuning but let's see how it works.

Happy xp hunting,
Shazaya

Hello Tibians,

First we would like to thank you for testing and your feedback!

With the next testserver update the following changes will go live. Some of them are a little bit experimental so please try them and provide feedback.

Outer Crypt

• Reduced movement range of monsters
  
• haunted hunter - reduced probability for summoning spell

Inner Crypt

• Reduced movement range of monsters
  
• Increased elemental sensitivites by approximately 10% (death 20%)

Forgotten Crypt

• Reduced movement range of monsters
  
• Increased respawn time
  
• Creepy crawler - increased probability for fear spell

EDIT

Another question is, how often do access items drops? Are they suppose to be rare or common?

These items are rare and should be valuable but we will closely monitor the situation after release. Nobody wants an empty hunting ground because supply is too rare.

Happy hunting,
Shazaya

Hello heroes of the test,

In one of the next iterations on the testserver there will be visible cues when people are in the crypts that need special rights to be entered.

The crypts have been renamed to align with the naming in the questlog:
The solo huntinggound is now: Forsaken Crypts
The special huntingground is now: Unhallowed Crypt
The normal huntinngound is now: Forgotten Crypt

Tibian Greetings,
Knightmare

Hello Tibians,

Thank you for testing the hunting grounds and for providing valuable feedback!

Based on this feedback you can expect the following changes (should be live now):

Outer Crypt

• Reduced summons from the haunted hunter to 1
  
• Reverted movement range to original values

Inner Crypt

• Reverted movement range to original values
  
• (experimental) Increased monster spawn rate

Forgotten Crypt (now Unhallowed Crypt)

• Reverted movement range to original values
  
• Reverted monster spawn rate to original values
  
• (experimental) Implemented new mechanic
  
  • For high kill rates the sensitivities of the monsters will decrease moderately.
    
  • For very high kill rates the sensitivities of the monsters will decrease significantly

What are our goals with this new mechanic?
This new mechanic (numbers are experimental and might change) allows us to better fine-tune the scaling of a hunting ground. While sometimes the hunting ground works well for specific level ranges, often extreme high kill rates allow for very high experience gains and loot.

If we would nerf dependent on these high kill rates all lower levels will suffer and probably leave the hunting ground. On the other hand, changing for example the "poofing" range feels cheap as we also do not want to destroy the feel of high level hunting.

There should be a more or less linear increase by player level, so that higher level players still get better results but without getting disproportionate high yields.

You can help us by trying to break the spawn as more data helps us to find a fair middle ground between the lower level players for the spawn and high level players.

Happy weekend,
Shazaya

Hello Tibians,

With this post this thread will be closed as the external test comes to an end.

Thanks again for all your feedback regarding these new hunting grounds!

We will carefully monitor the hunting ground data and if necessary will make more adjustments
as more data is available.

For release you can expect the following changes:

Forsaken Crypt (formerly known as Inner Crypt)

• slightly lowered skill debuff and duration
  
• cyclursus - reduced fighting distance from 4 to 3

Unhallowed Crypt (formerly known as Forgotten Crypt)

• removed kill rate limiting mechanic
  
• slightly reduced probability for fear
  
• reduced fear duration to 2 seconds
  
• slightly reduced density
  
• decreased respawn rate

Happy winter release preparation,
Shazaya