Emmaerzeh

Greetings Skylords!
A new month; a new Community Update! It's time to bring you up to speed with everything going on in Skylords Reborn!

• Season #1 - Primordial Fire - Month #2

Last month, we released a patch that kicked off our very first Season, and the reception has been largely positive! Player numbers have gone up, and Skylords are enjoying the fresh challenges the season brings. This season will last for four months: June, July, August, and September.
Unfortunately, with so many moving parts, some bugs were inevitable. Our team has worked hard to fix as many of them as quickly as possible. We've addressed these issues through several hotfix patches, which you can find in the patch notes here. Some of these hotfixes include minor touch-ups related to the season, such as description clarifications and small UI improvements. The update from June 29th also included minor balance changes, so be sure to check out the patch notes.
We'd like to take this opportunity to address a few topics that have come up frequently since the season's release:
 
Connection Problems for Russian Players

We've noticed that some Russian players are experiencing issues connecting to our server, which is located in Germany. Although these issues began around the time of our patch release, they are actually the result of sanctions outside of our control.
We're currently exploring alternatives, such as hosting a VPS in another region to forward traffic. We expect to have more information within the next 1 to 3 months. In the meantime, we advise affected players to use a VPN to connect.
 
Nightmare Challenges

We’ve seen some players expressing frustration about not being able to complete certain challenges or finding them too difficult. We want to emphasize that Nightmare challenges are intended for the highest-level players and are not required to earn the top rewards. You will be able to unlock Promo Sunderer this season without completing any Nightmare missions. However, you will need to complete the second and third batches of challenges (along with most repeatables), which will be released today and in August.
We highly advise players not to burn out on a specific challenge if you are not having fun. We’ve tried to include content for everyone this season. That means some challenges may feel too easy, while others may feel too difficult, depending on your playstyle. But remember: you don’t need to complete everything. We do encourage you to try strategies outside your comfort zone, but at the end of the day, it’s all about enjoying the game. And if you do want to conquer a particular challenge, the community is more than happy to help. Be sure to check out our Discord if you're looking for advice or teammates!
 
Dwarfen Stronghold

Challenge 2.5 requires players to complete two community maps. It reads: 
Win the 4-player featured community maps Dwarfen Stronghold Rework and Twisted Legends on advanced difficulty or higher, with all team members using decks that contain 10 or more Fire, Twilight or Bandits cards.
Some players experience a crash or error when trying to host the map Dwarfen Stonghold Rework.
To fix this, close the game, go into your doc/BattleForge/map folder and delete all instances of Dwarfen. After restarting the game, you should now be able to download the correct map and host your match.
 
Filtering for Twilight Edition

Challenge 2.8 has caused some confusion among the player base. It reads:
Complete 5 different campaign maps or featured community maps on advanced difficulty or higher, with all team members using decks that contain only Fire, Twilight or Bandits cards, none of which are from the Twilight edition.
Back when the original BattleForge came out, cards were released in expansions, with the base set being called the Twilight Edition, and cards were purchasable in boosters from specific expansions. When we overhauled the economy to free-to-play, we actually removed those edition-boosters, and replaced them for faction-boosters instead. While this was a great improvement, it also means that non-veteran players were never really exposed to the "Twilight Edition'' naming. This was an oversight on our part when we created this challenge. 
 


To clarify; cards from the Twilight Edition all have the Sunrise Icon, are only Nature, Shadow, Frost and Fire (so no hybrid/neutral), and have no affinities. Even though the name might imply it, the Twilight Edition contains no cards from the Twilight faction.
For this specific challenge, there is actually a filter you can use to exclude every card from the Twilight Edition. If you write the following text into the search bar of your inventory, you are left with all cards that are not included in the Twilight edition:
!(edition=twilight)
Just remember that challenge 2.8 also restricts you to Fire, Bandits or Twilight (the faction, not the edition!) cards, though you can easily filter for those with the elemental buttons on the left. 
If you want to know more about filtering options, have a look at our Advanced Filtering document. It goes into detail what is possible with the search bar, and how it came to be. 
 
Fire Wormlings

Fire Wormlings, unfortunately, hold the questionable honor of being the most problematic card in the history of this project. Initially intended as a new type of archer to be placed on walls, it had to be completely redesigned after model issues made that original concept impossible. Then, after finally being released, the card caused lag spikes when played for extended periods. Thankfully, we were able to fix those lag issues relatively quickly, but soon after, another problem surfaced: players began reporting widespread desync issues.

Unfortunately, we have not yet been able to identify and fix the root cause of these desyncs.
To better understand the complexity of the situation, consider the following:
- Fire Wormlings is a resized version of an XL model.
- It's a squad unit, based on a model that was never originally intended for use in a squad.
- Its attack lays down a unique visual effect that deals damage over time.
- It has a buff that checks for specific unit classes nearby, activating and deactivating accordingly.
- It uses the worm model, which moves in a very unique way, basically teleporting across the map while appearing to burrow underground.
- Desyncs are reported in most matches where Fire Wormlings are played.
- In single-player matches, the desync warning does not appear, but replays are often out of sync with the actual match.
- None of our tests so far have been able to pinpoint the issue with certainty.

We’ve been testing a variety of solutions, including removing the passive ability, resizing the worm, or converting it to a single unit. While we still lack a definitive answer, current evidence suggests the desyncs are related to the movement behavior of the worm model. Similar reports have occurred for the original XL worms in the past, but those units are played less frequently, and later in matches, due to them being Tier 4. Additionally, those issues have been rare and hard to reproduce consistently. We suspect that the combination of smaller size and squad mechanics increases the likelihood of movement-based desyncs. For instance, if the squad moves over uneven terrain or is knocked around, parts of the squad can get separated or stuck, increasing instability.
We considered temporarily restricting the card in multiplayer, until we discovered the same issue also affects single-player matches. Adding to the challenge is the open in-game market. While Fire Wormlings is part of the season rewards, some players have paid a significant amount of BFP to acquire it. Simply removing the card and refunding players isn't viable, since that also raises questions about how to handle those who sold the card. We obviously don't like players not being able to use their new cards. At the same time, players are currently asking each other to stop using the card, basically banning it from play anyway. 
We considered replacing the model entirely and reworking the card from scratch, but this would also require new artwork, effectively meaning we’d need to remove the Wormlings and create a completely new unit. This would be a months-long process and would seriously disrupt our planning. Fire Wormlings is also heavily featured in our marketing for the season, so removing it is something we hope to avoid.

So, where does that leave us?
We are currently testing a version of Fire Wormlings that removes the squad mechanic, and results so far have been promising. However, we still haven’t found a consistent fix for the desyncs, and we’re increasingly concerned that the worm model itself might be inherently problematic. 
Because of this, we’re also exploring the option to rework the burrow movement, potentially replacing it with a more generic movement style while maintaining a similar visual through existing animations. However, we are limited in our options here, considering we don't have the source code and can not create new models or animations yet. 
We hope this breakdown helps players understand why Fire Wormlings is still not fixed and why solving the issue has been so challenging. Due to our limited testing capacity, we are now considering deploying the most promising version of the card to the live server soon, to collect feedback and data from the broader player base. We would also like to expand our internal testing, so if you want to help out as a tester, consider reaching out. 
With your help, we hope to finally identify the exact cause and deliver a stable version of the card for everyone to enjoy.
 
Changes mid-season

Many of you have already shared what you like and dislike about various aspects of the season. From challenges and rewards to UI and descriptions, your feedback is incredibly valuable in helping us determine whether we’re on the right track. While we’ve already been able to implement some quality-of-life improvements based on your input, not all suggestions can be incorporated mid-season. That said, we are carefully observing what works and what doesn’t, and we will take this into account for future seasons.
Common feedback includes the option to play Standard difficulty on certain challenges, less restrictive deck-building, and the concern that neutral/legendary cards are not playable in any future season with the current setup. We’ll definitely keep this feedback in mind as we prepare for Season 2. 
 
Non-seasonal content

We’re also hard at work on a new patch unrelated to seasonal content. While we believe it’s important to offer exciting rewards through the seasonal track, you can still expect new cards and new map releases through content patches, just like we did before the introduction of seasons.
While we don’t have anything concrete to share just yet, we expect to have more to announce soon!
 
• Seasonal Challenges Batch #2

As we enter the second month of this season, a batch of additional challenges is now available!
The following challenges are now active:
 
 20+10 1  3.1 - Survive until the end on the survival community map, The Last Soultree on advanced difficulty or higher, with all team members playing only Fire cards.     20+10 1  3.2 - Win the 1-player scenarios Behind Enemy Lines and Siege of Hope on advanced difficulty or higher, with you playing only Fire cards and no building cards.     20+10 1  3.3 - Win the 2-player scenario, Crusade and the 1-player featured community map Spooky Encounters on advanced difficulty or higher, with all team members playing only Fire cards of Tier 2 or below.     20+10 1  3.4 - Win the 4-player scenarios Empire and Raven's End on advanced difficulty or higher, with all team members playing only Fire or Neutral cards, with units of Tier 2 and above being Neutral units.  
We hope you enjoy the current batch of challenges! The final set of challenges (including new Nightmare missions) will release in August. Players will then have the entire month of September to complete any remaining challenges before we wrap up this first season.
After the season concludes, players will be able to use the new Relic resource to purchase any missed seasonal cosmetics rewards, including the Promo Sunderer, through the Relic Shop. Relics can be earned during the season by completing challenges and by beating the weekly map affected by a map modifier. The Fire Boosters and the cards Fire Wormlings, Hellhound and Treasure Wagon will not be purchasable with relics however. The new cards will drop from boosters after the season has concluded. 
Our next season will also feature relics that can be used to purchase rewards from Season #1 – Primordial Fire.
 
• New Card Reveal - Amii Ashrider

While players continue with the first season, we are constantly working on additional content and are once again able to give you a sneak peek into a future new card. We have already expanded the Amii unit roster with various new cards: Amii Paladins, Amii Sentinel, Skydancer and Energy Core. Now that Elkondo has settled into our art department, we are able to create a new tier 2 unit for the faction.
Let's take a look at Amii Ashrider!

Please note: We are still working on the card. While we are generally happy with it, numbers and effects might still change before release.  

 
Ride of the Amii
When the unit is surrounded by 3 other friendly Ashriders in a 25m radius, it moves at high speed (8.0 m/s) and knocks back small and medium units dealing 25 damage, up to 100 in total.
 
Elusive
Units with Elusive have the duration of the immobilizing effects of Freeze and Paralyze reduced by 10%.
 

Design notes:
There are several cards in the game with movement knockback mechanics that deal damage. These are mostly confined to the higher tiers and besides the reworked Colossus are found on ranged units like the Worms or the hybrid melee-ranged unit Thunderwagon. When we were thinking of a new Amii T2 unit, we thought it was time to finally put the movement damage effect on a lower tier unit. Particularly, we thought it would fit with a horse-based Amii unit, therefore allowing players to simulate performing a cavalry charge. As can be seen with the new Treasure Wagon card, having a perpetual M-sized trample effect in T2 provides a substantial amount of crowd control.
Ashrider is our first non-T4 Amii unit made specifically for PvE. Other Amii units, towers, and spells are on the way to flesh out the faction's T2 and T3 arsenal in PvE and allow players to enjoy a full Amii deck from T2 onwards.
Amii Ashrider will release in an upcoming content patch, date to be announced. 
 
• Art Spotlight - Amii Ashrider

Amii Ashrider was drawn by our artist Elkondo. Below, he will share what went into creating the new unit. Take it away Elkondo!   "The first challenge was to come up with a clear and distinct pose for the unit. Since Skylords Reborn already features multiple horseback units, it was important to differentiate it with a unique silhouette as well as colors."          "After some exploration, the pose was quickly decided, and with a quick paint-over, the general vision for the artwork became clear."     "At this stage all that was left was cleanup. The 'Ride of the Amii' skill causes the unit to leave behind a trail of green smoke - this was something we wanted to show in the artwork."
  "As cool as it was, however, it looked too much like flames. At the same time, we wanted to simplify the background to make the unit stand out a bit more. It took a few attempts to finally find contrast that works best."          "With the background done, it was time to polish the main subject a bit and add some much-needed details. We realized the attempted strong perspective on the rider didn't really work any more. The green flames were also removed to try a different look later."     "Lastly, alongside additional polish and new smoke effect, the lance was simplified and moved, as the previous intricate design didn't really fit the Amii aesthetic."  

And that is how our latest Amii unit got its artwork! We hope you are looking forward to Amii Ashrider! 
  • Team Changes
  We are happy to announce that two new members have joined our volunteer team!   First off, VicRattlehead has joined our team as a Discord Moderator, while also showing interest in helping out with development in the future.    Secondly, Arphox has already offered a lot of help in regards to improving our updater, and has now properly joined the team as a Tool developer with the goal of making more improvements.      Thank you both, and welcome to the team!  
• Contribute to Skylords Reborn
Skylords Reborn is a community-driven project fueled by the passion and dedication of over 50 volunteers. We are always on the lookout for like-minded individuals. If you have a passion for gaming, programming, design, or marketing, we invite you to have a look at our open positions!
 


Don't have time to formally join the staff, but still would like to help out? Please check out this guide on how to support Skylords Reborn as a community member.
 
• Events

In between our monthly Community Updates, we host various events and tournaments, so be sure to keep a close eye on the in-game event tab and the forum calendar to stay informed and not miss out on any exciting events!

Current events:
• STREAM - WINNER REVEAL: Battle of Tactics #9: The Great Mage Magician - 04.06.2025
Find out who is the greatest of the Great Mage Magicians and their mighty generals in the winner reveal stream of this 3-player event. Join Ultralord on July 4 at 7:00 PM on Twitch.
 
• FINISHED - The Skylords Reborn Spring Cup 2025
The Spring Cup was our second PvP tournament of the year, and it included some great matches. The tournament was hosted and livestreamed by Ultralord, and you can watch the action here. 
 
• NEW - PvP Tome Tournament - 06.07.2025 15:00 CET
Tome was a PvP game mode in the original BattleForge where players had to build their decks with cards from boosters. With everyone playing with random cards, there are bound to be some unconventional strategies! Please sign-up in advance. 
 
• COMING SOON - Crystal Solid Defence - PvE Event - Starting 11.07.2025 until 27.07.2025
While we arent ready to reveal this event just yet, be sure to check back in on the 11th for a new PvE Event!
 
 
• Host your own tournament / event
Want to host a tournament or event? Please reach out to our Event Organizers @Metagross31 or @Ultralord. We can help you out with various topics and are glad to discuss potential ideas. We can also sponsor the prize pool for your event. If you have a cool idea for a PvE event, or want to host a PvP tournament, please don't hesitate to reach out to us; we will gladly assist you.
 
• In Conclusion

That's all for this Community Update! We appreciate you taking the time to read through it.
As is tradition, we're including a scratch code as a small token of our appreciation for your support.
The code will reward you with a Fire booster: HEAT-LAVA-FIRE-CARD
This code is valid until August 1st, when we will bring you another Community Update.
We're always looking for ways to improve and value your feedback. If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, please don't hesitate to share them with us. We'll be back next month with more updates on our ongoing projects and upcoming features.
You can also sign-up to our e-mail newsletter here.

Archive
• Skylords Reborn Documents (Deep Dives, Behind the Scenes, PvP Guide)  
• Overview Community Updates
• Community Update June 2025

Introduction
Hello there,
After receiving several questions about this, I decided to make a short guide on solving the current Nightmare challenge of solo-ITJ with a pure Fire deck. The challenge is definitely one of the hardest ones the Fire season has to offer, but with some tips and tricks it is certainly managable. I will mostly try to cover the general concepts you need to understand in order to solve the map consistently. For those who just want to see a replay, I attached my personal solution at the end of this post.
In terms of deck building I will try to cover alternative options for expensive cards, whenever possible. Based on my experience, the only completely mandatory card from a high price range would be Mine (fortunately no charges required), even though I would heavily suggest running Shrine of War as well. Every other rare/ultra-rare can be replaced in some form. 
The goal of this guide is about offering a consistent way to clear all three camps before the timer runs out. Theoretically, it is also possible to lean towards defending at later stages of the game as Tower of Flames, Pyromaniac (r) and Morklay Trap are reasonably powerful buildings, but this would be significantly slower and much more difficult to pull off. Every missed timer can potentially lead to a loss. After you learned how to clear the three camps in time consistently, it will be much easier to solve this challenge.
T1 Stage
Required Cards: Strikers*, Mine, Suppression, Blaster Cannon
*Can be replaced by Nomad (green), but I highly recommend using Strikers for this map. For those who don't know, damage reduction buffs get amplified on targets with unity effects like "Gang Up" making them almost twice as effective. This allows Strikers to scale as tanks into T2 when paired with Fire Force (blue), making them a stronger choice than Nomad on this map. 
Task 1: Defending the waves
First of all you need to deal with two waves attacking your main base right away. Dealing with this isn't difficult per se, but when playing alone you want to spent as little power for your defense as possible. It is important to make a lot of early progress on the map and ideally clear some power wells to make up for the economy deficit as quickly as possible.  
The important thing you need to know is that each of these two waves respawns two minutes after being cleared. Keeping one unit alive will delay the respawn of the entire wave. Clear the eastern wave first with Strikers and your Amii Phantoms, but keep one of the Maulers alive. The wall at your main base will keep it busy for minutes and you don't need to worry about additional attacks as long as the Mauler stays alive. Do NOT do this freeze with one of the ranged units as they are much more prone to follow your units around the side path instead of staying at the wall. It is the preferred method for speedrunning, but overly complicated for a normal playthrough. Also make sure you don't lose a unit until you have 4 Strikers. Once the Gang Up effect is active, it will be way easier to keep them alive. You can then clear the wave to your left entirely afterwards, you will be in time to deal with respawns without spending additional power besides keeping the wall. 
Task 2: Clearing the first camps
After getting 5 Strikers you can move on to clear the first southern camp. I recomming using one mine for the melee units while charging onto the Spirit Hunters or some of the other small units. Use the Amii Phantoms to clear the spawn building quickly as the units do respawn quite early. If you keep this in mind, the camp is quite easy to clear. 
Now there should be enough time to clear the camp to your left as it provides two power wells. Getting these early will make your life easier at later stage of the game. Prepare a Blaster Cannon for the Mana Wings. It can also be used to heal up your damaged units. Pull the nature units away from the Living Towers, so you don't have to deal with them at the same time. I would recommend pulling with a phantom as it doesn't get knocked around by the Living Tower. Use one Mine for the Fathom Lord and focus it after pulling. The Blaster Cannon will deal with the Mana Wings and can be destroyed afterwards. At last you can take out the buildings and use the Amii Phantoms to get those power wells quickly.
From here the wave you cleared at your main base will be respawned, you can just use your army to clear it again. Do not spend any additional power. It is not necessary and will be needed later on. The Mauler used for the Freeze can be ignored as it just dies to the orb eventually. 
Task 3: Razorleaf fight
Fighting a buffed XL unit on T1 seems intimidating at first glance, but Fire has a very easy solution to this. You can stack three Mines in right in front of the Razorleaf as the explosion radius is larger than the spell placement blocking. The Razorleaf won't move, but you can pull the Dryads through those Mines to trigger them. This is already enough damage to kill the Razorleaf even without focussing it at all. Upon placing the third Mine you can engage with your Strikers (I usually have 6 of them at this point) and run right to the main camp. The Razorleaf might not respawn, but the Dryads and Mauler do, so getting rid of that spawn building should be the priority. Cast Suppression on the Living Towers. If you are fast you can suppress before the tower gets its first shot. You can keep the Phantoms out of the fight for safety reasons, but using them to clear the Strangleholds can save a few seconds. Now you can unlock your T2. 
T2 Stage
Required Cards: Fire Force, Wildfire*, Firedancer**, Pyromaniac (red), 
*Wildfire can be replaced by Lavafield. Having a damage spell at this stage of the game is important and Wildfire is certainly the stronger choice (more damage for lower cost), but alternatively this can be played whenever I mention the use of Wildfire. 
**Firedancer can be replaced by Firestalker. It's slower due to inferior building dps, but you gain good S knockback when fighting units and as its base mode is melee, Firestalker will benefit from the Fire Force buff. If you delay your engagement on the second main camp and add 1-2 extra units, you should be fine. 
Task 1: Preparations for the next stage
While building T2 you should use the side path to get the three Windweaver squads from the jungle path to your left. Then move back to your main base. Once your T2 is finished, cast Fire Force (blue) on one of your Strikers right away, keep all of them until T3. On a sidenote: There is a small bug, which probably will be fixed eventually, but right now the Amii Phantoms do count as melee units. They most likely won't get in danger here anyways, but the bonus damage reduction being an extra safety net is a nice bonus.
For the solo run it's probably best to ignore the Eastern and Southeastern camps for the entire game, so you need to continously defend against waves here. Rebuild the right wall and build Towers to defend. At first one Pyromaniac will be enough, but once the Island starts attacking, there needs to be a stronger defense. 
Task 2: Clearing the way to the second camp
The next two camps are quite easy to clear as long as you keep an eye on two things: 1) Always use Suppression onto the Mindweavers. 2) Do not forget about the wave. If it overlaps while you are in the middle of a fight things might get tough. At this point you should have the power to use Wildfire to support your attack. You will get two additional power wells on the way, take them as soon as possible. If you have some spare power afterwards, you can start summoning Fire Dancers to progress more quickly and get rid of any annoying structure on the way. The second camp has the spawner for one of the waves, so you can leave the left side of your main base unguarded for the rest of the game. 
10 Minutes into the game the Island will start sending waves to your main base. These will always hit the right wall, so you need to build more Towers there. At the bottom of your wall you might want to consider a second Pyromaniac to defend against the ground units and one Blaster Cannon at the top as there will be Parasite Swarms aswell. If you use only one Pyromaniac you probably need Wildfire against the big waves of Drones and Deep Ones, otherwise you might get in trouble once the wall goes down. Always make sure to repair these buildings between fights as these waves will hit your main base for the rest of your game and losing your orb might lead to a loss. 
Task 3: The Bramblethorn fight
Once you have 6 Strikers and 5 Fire Dancers and enough power for one Wildfire you can start fighting the second main camp. You can just pull everything by destroying the Healing Gardens with your Fire Dancers from a safe distance. The key unit to considere here is the Bramblethorn. This Tempest-like unit deals massive damage over a long distance and roots on hit. Your Strikers can tank the damage, but once your Phantoms start getting hit, things will be dangerous. It is important to note, that unlike the units the Bramblethorns do not respawn after getting taken down. Bursting them early with Wildfire and unit focus is beneficial for that reason. Keep your Strikers close together and let them tank everything for your ranged units. Use Wildfire whenever possible. Move your Firedancers to the top and destroy the Living Towers one by one until you can focus the spawn building. From here you probably win rather easily, so keep an eye on your main base and check what happened to the wave from the Island.
T3 Stage
Required cards depend on strategy:
1) The Spitfire strategy: Spitfire, Hellhound*, Shrine of War, Unity (green), Dying Breed (purple), Morklay Trap (optional), Disenchant (optional)**
*Can be replaced by Juggernaut or Sunreaver (low budget)
**Can be replaced by Gladiatrix (also counts for strategy 2) 
2) The Hellhound strategy
Hellhound, Aura of Pain, Shrine of War, Unity (green), Disenchant, Morklay Trap, Disenchant
3) The camp skip strategy
Any melee unit, Unity (green), Inferno, Magma Hurler, Eruption, Scorched Earth (red) (optional)
Task 1: Clearing the Hurler boss (strategy 2 & 3) and the first camp 
After taking the power well and T3, build two Shrines of War and keep the buff up at all times. Void return is such a powerful mechanic and enables much more frequent spell usage. You can sacrifice your Strikers and Firedancers to get more power for T3 units. Clearing the Magma Hurler Boss opens up a path to ignore the fully buffed Razorleaf later on. This is good for the previously mentioned strategies 2 and 3. If you have either Hellhound or Virtuoso, this can be done quickly as they are L-counters and the Hurler Boss only takes less damage from ranged units. The next camp is rather weak, so you can clear it easily. If you have Dying Breed, use it to generate some extra power, also wait for SoW activation to get void return.
Keep an eye on your main base and always repair your buildings. The attacks will continue as there is no time to destroy these spawners, but at least they won't grow any stronger. Your T3 orb will be attacked by Energy Parasites from the River. A Blaster Cannon at this position does solve this, but also needs to be repaired afterwards.  
Task 2: The Abyssal Warder camp (difficult)
This is probably the hardest camp the map has to offer. Apart from the triple XL units with formidable dps here are numerous mechanics you need to consider here. 
1. The Primeval Watcher's Statis Field: An AoE cc, which will be cast right at the start. It lowers your upfront damage significantly. 
2. The Grove Spirits and their Revive mechanic. This will be cast onto some of the XL units, making the fight extremely tedious, especially when cast on the Abyssal Warders. This buff can be removed by Disenchant. 
3. The Abyssal Warders: Apart from their tankiness due to summoning smaller versions on death the Crystal Spikes are a huge threat as they circumvent damage reductions, which can kill units through unity+fire force.
4. Mark of the Keeper prevents spell casting at the camp, so it's worth pulling units away from it.
5. The Spawner: Will resummon the Abyssal Warders quite quickly, so pulling to far bears a risk. 
You need to approach this fight differently depending on the strategy you are using. Either way you should collect some power before taking this fight. Morklay Traps or maybe even Tower of Flames can be used for extra damage on a pull and you need a plan to destroy the spawner here. When playing Spitfire you want to pair them with melee units like Hellhound or Juggernaut, which tank the upfront damage. You can pull by destroying one of the Towers from huge range, ideally the Mind Weaver as it's in front of the spawn building), then focus the Primeval Watcher right away. The Primeval Watcher does not respawn, whereas the Abyssal Warders do. Then try to focus the spawner if possible and use unity to keep your units alive. Once it's destroyed you can play hit and run and slowly destroy the camp. If you play for Hellhounds I recommend stacking Aura of Pain, a quite underrated spell with incredible damage potential and pull the XL units into morklay traps to weaken the XL units. Then focus the spawn building and finish the fight. The ramp up on the damage reduction will make them incredibly tanky and as long as you keep an eye on Crystal Spikes and disenchant the Revive, this fight will be managable if you have at least 6 Hellhounds. 
Now the slowest, but also easiest strategy to deal with this camp is to ignore it completely. You just stack a bunch of units, ideally bait out the Statis Field and try to reach the other side of the camp with at least one unit. You have to clear it later on, but prioritizing to clear the last spawner will guarantee you a win as this is the last hard loss condition which exists. Then you can clear this camp later with unlimited time to create a path for the Amii Phantoms. This can also be achieved with low budget strategies like the classic Magma Hurler stacking. 
Task 3: The Razorleaf camp
If you cleared the Magma Hurler boss you can just use the new path and circumvent this one entirely (melee/skip strategy), but with Spitfires you can use melee units to bait and tank the razorleaf shots and focus it with Spitfires. Always try to resummon melee units to make sure your Spitfires don't get attacked, otherwise it will be devastating. From here you mainly fight Living Towers, that can be easily outranged or tanked by Hellhounds. 
If you use the Spitfire strategy it is recommended to go into the south-western cave and kill the swamp drakes. Not only does this stop the Energy Parasite waves from spawning, it also will give you a unique angle onto the final camp to destroy it in time. 
Task 4: The final timer
If you destroy this camp in time, the map is essentially won. It can be achieved in different ways, but difficulty usually depends on remaining time and your performance in previous encounters. If you use the Spitfire strategy, you can circumvent most stuff by flying across the River and attack the camp from there. For killing the units at the cave you will also get some free Swamp Drakes, which provide an additional health pool for Unity. Focus the spawner directly, it's fine to lose all units for it as long as it goes down in time. The Hellhound strategy can just take down the camp directly. Disenchant the revive from the Forst Elder and focus it with unity being active all the time. Suppression on the Howling Shrine is a game changer here. You can just use a brute force approach through this camp with Aura of Pain stacking. When playing the camp skip strategy you just build a massive army, and charge onto the spawner. Use unity (and fire force) to keep your units alive, then cast Scorched Earth, Inferno and Eruptions onto the Spawner. A small trick to remain ground presence for spells a little bit longer is to summon units right before losing your army as they are untargetable for a very short time depending on their spawn animation. As long as you destroy the spawner in time, you will win the game eventually as you have unlimited time from here to clear the remaining camps.
T4 Stage 
Recommended cards: Moloch*, Fire Dragon, Bloodthirst, Fire Sphere
*Other unit card combinations will work aswell, but Moloch is the most reliable one as it makes your army virtually unkillable with unity. Comet Catcher is a good and reliable alternative to an army based approach. 
Final Task: The Boss Fight
This is the easiest part of the map as there is no time limit anymore (still keep an eye on your main base and repair your towers). But to make the boss fight as smooth as possible, you need to clear the Living Towers first. This can be achieved by building a large XL unit army and supporting it with unity + bloodthirst. If you are afraid of running out of unity charges, you can guarantee full unity uptime by playing both affinities. Otherwise, Comet Catcher is a great tool to make permanent progress step by step. Once the Living Towers are destroyed you can enter the boss fight and focus Terra until the Howling Shrines lose their immunity. Switch their focus onto them and finish off Terra afterwards. If you reached this point, congratulations for finishing the achievement! 
Replay and final words
Here is my replay for the map (used the Hellhound strategy for T3). Execution wasn't flawless, but it follows the strategy I described above. If you have any suggestions, further advices or questions, please let me know. I will try to improve this guide whenever possible and I hope this can help lots of players to tackle this challenge. 
ITJ_solo_26min.pmv

Great greetings, People of the Sky
I hope you are all enjoying the Fire challenges of our current season. 
But what is this? A call for help?! -> Quick, join "Crystal Solid Defence" and help Crag!


The Challenge:
Play the Community map "Crystal Clear Intentions".
You need to defend waves on different tiers of levels, but without building any structures,
while keeping Crag, the friendly elemental, safe.

The Ranking:
Main Ranking:
   Beat the map as fast as possible on a difficulty you feel comfortable with.
   An Expert run always ranks higher than an Advanced one. The same applies to Advanced and Standard.
Crystal Ranking:
   On the Map will spawn "Anger Crystals". Can you destroy them all in time?.
 

The Event Timeline / Send in your Replay:
Map:                   Crystal Clear Intentions
Difficulty:            Standard / Advanced / Expert
Goal:                   Beat the map quickly
Until when:         27.07.2025 23:59 CET
Winner Stream:  03.08.2025 19:00 CET via my Twitch (https://www.twitch.tv/ultralord_t1421)
How to join:        Upload your Replay at https://t1421.de
                            You can upload as often as you like. The page keeps the best in the ranking.
                            Replays can be found in your Documents folder (C:\Users\xxx\Documents\BattleForge\replays\)
Note:                   The community map will be featured during the event. So you can use it for your Pure Fire Season Challenges.
How to play the map:
 

The Prizes:
Main Ranking:
Place 1: 7 General Boosters + Ravenheart (Promo)           Place 2: 6 General Boosters + Viridya (Promo)        Place 3: 5 General Boosters + Lyrish Knight (Promo)     Place 4: 4 General Boosters + Avatar of Frost     Place 5: 3 General Boosters + Shadow Worm     Place 6: 2 General Boosters + Thunder Wagon [R]     Place 7: 1 General Boosters + Forest Elder [B]     Place 8: + Abyssal Warder [B]       Place 9: + Batariel [P]       Place 10: + Overlord        
Crystal Ranking:
When you destroy one Crystal, you get one random common card:

Destroying two will add a random Rare Card:

Three will add a random Ultra Rare Card:

Destroying all Crystals will add 500 BFP:

 
Random Draw:
For every 10 Players in the event, 5 Fire Boosters will be added to the random draw.
So 10 Players = 5 Boosters, 20 Players =10 Boosters, etc.
 -> And more?
 
A New Star Is Rising:
Every Player with a PvE Rank below or equal to Level 10  will receive a Wrathgazer.

 

Thank you to:
SR-Team                                             For all of the Boosters
@Hrdina_Imperia @Emmaerzeh  For making the map and helping to get this event on the road
@ElementG                                     For the Wrathgazers
@Nostek                                        For up to 30.000 BFP!
@banana                                           For Lyrish Knight (Promo)
Anonymous 1                                    For Ravenheart (Promo) , Viridya (Promo), Avatar of Frost, Shadow Worm, Thunder Wagon [R], 
                                                                 Forest Elder [B], Abyssal Warder [B], Batariel [P], Overlord

I don't know how you feel, but after playing a lot of fire matches, a challenge like this is even more fun 🙂
If you want to host your own event, feel free to contact me or @Metagross31
See you in the forge, fellow Skylords
Ultralord 🎩

Greetings Skylords,

Our latest patch released on Sunday, bringing with it our first Season. With so many moving parts, there were bound to be some bugs, and our team has worked hard on fixing as many of them as fast as possible. 
The server-wide freezes that plagued the game during the first few days seem to be resolved. There was also an issue regarding Fire Wormlings causing extreme lag spikes, which has hopefully been fixed as well with our latest hotfix. While there are still reports coming in of crashes, lag spikes, desyncs and other issues, they seem to be mostly individual based at this point. 
We would like to ask for your help in further pinpointing these issues, so we can solve them as fast as possible.
To do so, please report bugs, freezes, crashes and weird interactions you come across. Let us know what you were doing when the issue happened, and please share your crash log data and replays. If you are experiencing a desync, please collect two different replays from players on the map, so we can investigate. The best way to do so, is through our Discord channels "report a bug" and "technical support". 

While we absolutely understand the frustration in regards to these issues, raging at the team is not productive, and highly demotivating during these stressful times. Please try to be a bit more understanding. We are all volunteers here, combining our work on Skylords Reborn with our other life responsibilities. We would love to hear your feedback and reports, but the way you phrase it matters a lot. Please keep that in mind. 
Thank you for your patience and understanding.

Greetings Skylords!
A new month; a new Community Update! It's time to bring you up to speed with everything going on in Skylords Reborn!

• Skylords ReBOOM

Today, we have a very exciting announcement to share! After introducing new cards, campaign maps, features, and even new game modes, we feel it's time to branch out even further. Please check out the trailer below.
That’s right—Skylords Reborn is entering the first-person shooter genre! Join Bandit Sniper Guy on his adventure as he faces familiar foes from the world of Nyn. While we will continue releasing new content for Skylords Reborn, the majority of our development focus will shift to Skylords ReBOOM. We hope you'll join us on the battlefield!
Pre-orders are up now, so get your copy!  

 
• New Card Reveal - Hellhound

Back in 2023 we held a card-creation contest, inviting the community to share their ideas for potential new cards, which were then judged anonymously by our designers. While many great designs were submitted—some of which have already made their way into the game, like Energy Core and Gate of Akylos—we might have saved the best for last. The highest-rated entry was Hellhound, an upcoming L-sized unit for Pure Fire. Let’s break down the card!

 
Magma Armor
Takes 25% less damage from ranged and magical attacks. After 5 seconds in combat, damage reduction increases to 40% less damage, and after 10 seconds in combat, the damage reduction increases to 60% less damage from ranged and magical attacks. Resets after 10 seconds out of combat.
 
Pyroclastic Flow
Cause Magma Armor to explode, dealing 660 damage to enemies in a 15m radius, up to 1980 damage in total. Magma Armor is reset to 25%. Requires Magma Armor to be fully charged. Reusable every 20 seconds.

Design notes:
Hellhound was the overall winner of our first ever Card Creation Contest, where we asked members of the community to submit ideas for new cards. The original design has seen little change since then. Hellhound is an L-sized T3 Pure Fire unit. Similar to Moloch, it has resistance to ranged and magical damage, though in Hellhound's case this resistance begins at 25% and scales up to 60% the longer the unit remains in combat. Once the armor fully scales, Hellhound can activate Pyroclastic Flow, exploding its Magma Armor to deal up to 1980 damage to nearby enemies.
The general concept behind Hellhound is to have a Fire unit that slowly scales in durability as it fights, but which can then transform that durability into damage. This will allow Hellhound to quickly clean up camp remnants, including flying units, using Pyroclastic Flow when Magma Armor is no longer needed.
Hellhound will be released in a future content patch—details to be announced!
 
• Art Spotlight - Hellhound

Hellhound started out as a trial task for Psyagita, who was interested in joining our art team. Unfortunately, they ended up being too busy to continue, but were kind enough to let us move forward with the work. We dove into our archives and found some early sketches from the art process!     Psyagita first provided us with these three sketches. Our lead artist at the time, Tweeto, had this to say about the initial batch: "I think I prefer the 3/4 view of the face over the profile version and am interested in seeing a more dramatic and imposing angle of the creature itself. Could you try sketching it from a lower perspective to highlight its intimidating presence?"    Psyagita came back with two new attempts. We preferred the second one, as it had more of an action pose—which tends to look better in a card frame. Work then began on finalizing the pose and adding color.
     At this point, Psyagita unfortunately became too busy, so our artist SpiritAlpha took over the task. Since we were working on the model simultaneously, we made a few adjustments that were reflected in the updated artwork—most notably, a new color for the flames and fur.     The piece was coming along nicely, but we felt it stood out a bit from other Fire cards, particularly due to the grey background. We also wanted to make sure the card felt cohesive in the deck bar alongside other Fire cards, so we looked to other units in the faction for inspiration.     By adding purple elements to the cave background, the artwork popped more and felt more in line with the rest of the Fire faction. After several rounds of feedback with our art group, we finalized the artwork for Hellhound.     We’re very happy with the result and hope you’re excited to play the card yourself in the future! A big thank you to Psyagita for laying the groundwork for this unique piece, and to SpiritAlpha for bringing it across the finish line!   • Team Changes
We’re excited to announce a new addition to our art team—Elkondo has joined us as a 2D artist! We hope you'll get to see some of his card artwork in the near future. Welcome, Elkondo!
We’re also happy to introduce Sabri as our new audio designer. Sabri has joined the team to support various audio-related tasks, including creating the sound effects for the recently released card Spirit Gate. We really appreciate the help!
Meanwhile, Prof_Emezy has stepped down from the team. He contributed as a Discord Moderator, Proofreader, and supported some exploratory work in marketing. We'd like to thank him for his efforts and dedication during his time with the team.

• Contribute to Skylords Reborn
Skylords Reborn is a community-driven project fueled by the passion and dedication of over 50 volunteers. We are always on the lookout for like-minded individuals. If you have a passion for gaming, programming, design, or marketing, we invite you to have a look at our open positions!
 


Don't have time to formally join the staff, but still would like to help out? Please check out this guide on how to support Skylords Reborn as a community member.
 
• Events

In between our monthly Community Updates, we host various events and tournaments, so be sure to keep a close eye on the in-game event tab and the forum calendar to stay informed and not miss out on any exciting events!
 
Current events:
• NEW - Rookie Tournament - 12.04.2025 at 16:00 CET
Interested in PvP, but intimidated by the veterans? We got you covered! Join this Rookie tournament, where only rookies can join and there are prizes for all participants! The tournament will be hosted and livestreamed by Ultralord, please sign-up in advance. 
 
• NEW - Battle of Tactics #8: Maximum Support - Until 13.04.2025 23:59 CEST
Battle of Tactics returns in 2025 with another tricking and exciting challenge! Play a modified version of the map Oracle, including a special pre-game twist, allowing you to scale the difficulty up and down! More information. 
 
• COMING UP - Skylords Reborn Mega Quiz - 03-05-2025 at 20:00 CEST
Win prizes with your knowledge of BattleForge! Join the Mega Quiz live on Twitch for a chance to win BFP and boosters. Come hang out with us, win some prizes, and perhaps learn a new thing or two! More information. 
 
• FINISHED - Skylords Reborn Winter Cup
The first PvP tournament has been completed! You can rewatch the action with commentary by Ultralord and special guest Toggy, with this highlight video. 
 
• Host your own tournament / event
Want to host a tournament or event? Please reach out to our Event Organizer @Metagross31. We can help you out with various topics and are glad to discuss potential ideas. We can also sponsor the prize pool for your event. If you have a cool idea for a PvE event, or want to host a PvP tournament, please don't hesitate to reach out to us, we will gladly assist you.
 
• In Conclusion

That's all for this Community Update! We appreciate you taking the time to read through it.
As is tradition, we're including a scratch code as a small token of our appreciation for your support.
The code will reward you with a general booster: WARM-FIRE-CATS-PURR
This code is valid until May 1st, when we will bring you another Community Update.
We're always looking for ways to improve and value your feedback. If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, please don't hesitate to share them with us. We'll be back next month with more updates on our ongoing projects and upcoming features.
You can also sign-up to our e-mail newsletter here.

Archive
• Skylords Reborn Documents (Deep Dives, Behind the Scenes, PvP Guide)  
• Overview Community Updates
• Community Update March 2024

Greetings Skylords!
A new month; a new Community Update! It's time to bring you up to speed with everything going on in Skylords Reborn!
• Feedback Survey

We'd like to start this community update with a big thank you for providing your feedback through our Yearly Feedback Survey. Over 1.400 Skylords took the time to share their thoughts with us, which is much appreciated! 
Just like last year, we have gathered all the responses and condensed them into a brief presentation. While this presentation mostly focused on graphs and general data, rest assured we read your personal comments and will take your feedback from open-questions into account as well. 



• An update on Gate of Akylos

Exactly a year ago, we announced the exciting new Lost Souls card Gate of Akylos. Sadly, we ran into technical limitations and underestimated the amount of work this card would take to implement. The card was put aside in favor of focusing on other content. We recently picked the card up again, and figured out a way to make the card work as intended. We are currently testing out this iteration, and things are looking hopeful for its release sometime in the future.    Gate of Akylos is a powerful tier 3 shrine, making use of our hybrid orb to allow deck diversity among Lost Soul decks looking to play it. You can check out the original card reveal here. We are excited to bring this new card to the faction, and want to thank you for your patience!       • New Card Reveal - Treasure Wagon

Today we have a very unique new card to reveal. Treasure Wagon gives you control of one of the wagons from the legendary Treasure Fleet. How will you use this card to your advantage? Let's break down the card!
Please note: We are still working on the card. While we are generally happy with it, art, numbers and effects might still change before release. 

 
Fool's Gold
When the unit is destroyed, 2 Thugs will spawn out of its remains.
Relentless Stomp
Tramples small and medium units. Additionally, Treasure Wagon cannot be slowed by unit collision.
Resilient
This unit takes 50% less damage.
Slow
This unit has Slow movement.

Avarice - Mode-Change 20p
The lure of immense wealth attracts the attention of every hostile unit within a 20m radius around Treasure Wagon. Affected enemy units within this aura will then be forced to only attack the caster and cannot be controlled any more. Reusable every 3 seconds.

Design notes:
Treasure Wagons are an icon part of the campaign and we wanted to find a way to put them in the player's hands. While legendary cards are already hard to design, Treasure Wagon suffers from the additional issue that it has no attack. This required us to get creative to develop a viable unit design for a non-attacking XL-unit in T2. Taking inspiration from the lore, we gave it a taunt, Avarice, which allows Treasure Wagon to function as a tank unit, drawing fire away from the player's offensive units. Taking more inspiration from the lore, we made it spawn 2 Thugs on death, as the Wagons were used to hide Fire units during the Treasure Fleet campaign mission.
Treasure Wagon will release in an upcoming content patch, date to be announced. 
 
• Team changes

Our team is constantly evolving. As new Skylords join the team, old ones move on to other projects or life responsibilities. We would like to thank Hirooo (card implementation/faction designer), Runeseeker (marketing), Linkz (moderator) and Pierakor (tool development) for their contributions during their time with us. 
With our team spanning members across the globe, developments in the world, such as the war in Israel, have sadly also impacted our team. While we do not know if something has happened, or if he is simply focused on other priorities, after a year of radio silence we unfortunately have to accept that Tweeto has left the team. Tweeto has been with us since Community Update #1 and was responsible for the artwork of many Rebirth-edition cards, such as Coat of Protection, Burning Spears, and most cards from the Amii faction. He also inspired and supported our other artist SpiritAlpha, offering advice and encouragement. We are extremely grateful for his work on the game, and hope we will hear from him again. Thank you for everything Tweeto, we all hope you are safe.  
In happier news, we are happy to welcome RainZy as our new outreach coordinator / brand manager. He will focus on reaching new players to grow our playerbase. Meanwhile, Prof_Amezy will take over our social media, working together to inform our current playerbase and grow our channels. 

A warm welcome to both of you! 
 
• Contribute to Skylords Reborn

Skylords Reborn is a community-driven project fueled by the passion and dedication of over 50 volunteers. We are always on the lookout for like-minded individuals. If you have a passion for gaming, programming, design, or marketing, we invite you to have a look at our open positions!
 


Don't have time to formally join the staff, but still would like to help out? Please check out this guide on how to support Skylords Reborn as a community member.
 
• Events

In between our monthly Community Updates, we host various events and tournaments, so be sure to keep a close eye on the in-game event tab and the forum calendar to stay informed and not miss out on any exciting events!
 
Current events:
• LAST DAY - Save Christmas - Until February 2nd
While Christmas is over, our event is not. Complete the 3 Christmas-themed community maps to earn yourself a promo Frost Mage. Be sure to do so before the 2nd of February, or you will have to wait till the holidays of 2025 to have another shot.  
 
 • FINISHED - PvP AI programming contest - Final Showdown
We have a winner! Find out which Bot won in our most recent PVP tournament that featured community-made bots facing off for glory. You can rewatch the stream, which had co-host Toggy make a special guest appearance. More information.
 
• Please fill in our short PvP-bots Feedback survey
We would like to ask you all to answer a short feedback survey about the PvP-bots-contest. Please, also fill it out even if you did not submit a bot for the final showdown. We want to learn what we could have improved! Take the survey here. 
 
• Host your own tournament / event
Want to host a tournament or event? Please reach out to our Event Organizer @Metagross31. We can help you out with various topics and are glad to discuss potential ideas. We can also sponsor the prize pool for your event. If you have a cool idea for a PvE event, or want to host a PvP tournament, please don't hesitate to reach out to us, we will gladly assist you.
 
• In Conclusion

That's all for this Community Update! We appreciate you taking the time to read through it.
As is tradition, we're including a scratch code as a small token of our appreciation for your support.
The code will reward you with a general booster: LOOT-SHIP-GRAB-GOLD
This code is valid until March 1st, when we will bring you another Community Update.
We're always looking for ways to improve and value your feedback. If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, please don't hesitate to share them with us. We'll be back next month with more updates on our ongoing projects and upcoming features.
You can also sign-up to our e-mail newsletter here.

Archive
• Skylords Reborn Documents (Deep Dives, Behind the Scenes, PvP Guide)  
• Overview Community Updates
• Community Update January 2024

Greetings Skylords!
A new month; a new Community Update! It's time to bring you up to speed with everything going on in Skylords Reborn!

• Yearly Feedback Survey

Every year, Skylords Reborn has a Feedback Survey. While it is typically released in the summer, we decided to give players more time to explore our new Campaign Maps before inviting you to share your invaluable feedback.
Because Skylords Reborn is a community project, we want to understand what our players enjoy and what could be improved. Your input is vital to helping us refine the game and expand our player base. 
We hope you’ll take a moment to answer the survey questions, as your responses will directly shape our development priorities. As a thank-you, everyone who completes the survey will receive two boosters. Your feedback will be anonymous.

• Christmas Event & Anniversary

This year, we have something very special planned to close out the holidays. Check back later this month for the official announcement of our Christmas celebration! We are hard at work finalizing the challenge, but the special reward is already prepared. Players who complete the achievement will receive a new Promo Frost Mage card! More information is coming soon, so stay tuned!



The 4th anniversary of Skylords Reborn is also coming up. Traditionally, we celebrate this milestone with an announcement stream and a large content patch. But with a significant patch in September, the Halloween Event in October, and our plans for Christmas in December, it has been an incredibly busy period, and we are not sure if this will be feasible this year.
Rest assured that we are still hard at work on the second batch of new campaign maps, new cards and other features we are sure you will enjoy, but we feel rushing ourselves to release a content patch just to fit the anniversary window this year, is not the right approach. We would still like to celebrate this milestone with you however, so we will explore our options and let you know. 
 
• New Card Spotlight - Molt

We already talked a bit about Molt in our Twilight deep-dive last month, and are now ready to reveal the latest spell coming to the Twilight faction. Lets break down the card and share some of the thoughts behind its design.


Shed
Trigger a unit’s latent capacity for transformation. Target an own Twilight unit and trigger its transformation effect as if it had used Twilight Transformation. Reusable every 40 seconds.

Design notes:
Twilight Transformation has seen a number of improvements, such as reduced transformation time and a built-in cost reduction. At the same time, we have been steadily adding more transformation effects to the Twilight units to give the ability more strategic depth. Still, we are largely restricted by the fact that we cannot lower transformation costs without also lowering bound power costs in units. So as units scale in costs, our only choice is to make transformation effects scale in strength. We do not think this efficiency arms race is rightly achievable, so we are moving in a different direction through the introduction of Molt. For a low fixed cost, Molt will be able to trigger the transformation effect of any Twilight unit, meaning we can now design transformation effects with Molt in mind and not solely based on bound power costs. This also allows for more flexibility as players can now trigger transformation effects quickly and easily without having to make use of the often clunky Transformation process.
Molt will release alongside our next content patch, date to be announced. 
 
• Art Spotlight - Molt

The artwork for Molt (originally called Evolution during development) was created by SpiritAlpha. He envisioned Twilight creatures shedding their old skin, transforming into even greater monstrosities. SpiritAlpha quickly produced two early sketches:
      
 
We liked the early concept, and work continued on the one involved the Mutating Maniac. To ensure the artwork fit well within the card frame and kept the focus on the main design, we removed the extra characters. At one point, we considered depicting old skin transforming into new body parts, but we quickly discarded the idea, as it didn’t enhance the artwork.
 
      

We were pleased with how the artwork was progressing but concerned it wasn’t clear enough that this was a spell rather than a unit. We explored several options but weren’t satisfied with the results. The first attempt made the card feel like a binding spell, while the second clarified it was a spell but faced contrast issues when displayed in the deck bar. Wherever possible, we aim to ensure players can quickly identify cards at a glance.
 
      

We spent some time tweaking the base artwork, experimenting with various intensities of the blue glow to emphasize the spell aspect of the card. We also ensured the toxic Twilight clouds, iconic to the faction, were present to highlight the transformation effect being triggered. Ultimately, we chose a strong blue contrast against the creature and mirrored the artwork to further distinguish the card from its creature counterpart when viewed in the deck bar.


We are happy with how the artwork turned out and would like to once again thank SpiritAlpha for his incredible work and contributions to the game. Our art department is severely understaffed, and it’s almost entirely thanks to him that we’re still able to add new cards to the game.
If you’re an artist or know someone who can create art in a style fitting for BattleForge, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us! You can apply directly here, or contact Majora or Dutchy on the Forum or on Discord. 
 
• "How Does It Work" series - BFP

We recently launched a new video series on our YouTube channel, How Does It Work, where we dive into various topics that often raise questions.
So far, we’ve released a video on Void Power, the Root Network and a guide on how to install the game.
      
Another topic that often comes up is ''How do I earn BFP?", the topic of our latest video! 
    We’d love to hear feedback from the community on this series. These videos take quite some time to create, but we’re more than happy to continue if they’re appreciated. 
Are the videos clear and interesting to watch? Are there any other topics you would like to see covered?
Please let us know your thoughts in the comments below! 
 
• Contribute to Skylords Reborn


Expanding on a game like BattleForge requires a lot of enthusiastic and skilled volunteers. While we are very happy with how the game shaped out to be, over the years we have struggled filling certain roles that are now truly becoming a problem for the health of the project. We would like to highlight a couple of positions that we could really use (more) people for. 
Critical: Artists

Despite multiple calls for help, we have unfortunately not received any applications for the artist role. Due to the remote nature of our team and current global challenges, both of our artists have been heavily impacted, with one now completely inactive. This has significantly slowed the release of new cards and placed immense pressure on our sole remaining artist.
We would like to stress our appeal: if you know any skilled artist who might be willing to contribute to Skylords Reborn, please forward them our way. Your support is vital to keeping the game alive and thriving!
For more information, click here. 
Critical: Marketeer

One of the most common pieces of feedback we receive from players is, “You should market the game more.” While we completely agree, this is easier said than done. Our options are greatly limited—paid marketing is off the table—and more importantly, we currently don’t have a dedicated marketer. Unfortunately, no one with the necessary skills or experience has applied for the role.
If you’re motivated, have a strong network, and believe you can help us spread the word about Skylords Reborn, we’d love to hear from you!
For more information, click here.  
Map Testers

With our increased focus on map-related content, we are looking for more Map Testers to help identify bugs and ensure balance.
As a Map Tester, you’ll gain early access to new maps and game modes, with the responsibility of playtesting and providing valuable feedback to the map development team. This includes evaluating the balance and fun factor of maps, identifying exploits, suggesting areas for visual improvements, and ensuring overall quality.
The availability of dedicated Map Testers not only improves the game’s quality but also significantly speeds up the release of high-quality content.
This is a non-staff contributor position. Tasks for these roles come and go, and they are a great way to help without receiving too much responsibility. 
For more information, click here.  
Other roles

Skylords Reborn is a community-driven project fueled by the passion and dedication of over 50 volunteers. We are always on the lookout for like-minded individuals. If you have a passion for gaming, programming, design, or marketing, we invite you to have a look at our open positions!
Don't have time to formally join the staff, but still would like to help out? Please check out this guide on how to support Skylords Reborn as a community member.

 
• Events

In between our monthly Community Updates, we host various events and tournaments, so be sure to keep a close eye on the in-game event tab and the forum calendar to stay informed and not miss out on any exciting events!
 
Current events:
• FINISHED - Seven Strategy Showdown 7 - Egg ball
The last SSS-event finished past Friday, and was one of the most unique events we have seen in Skylords Reborn. Find out the winners in the event stream, or play it yourself in a versus mode that is being developed in the future! More information.
 
• COMING SOON - Christmas Challenge
While not technically an event, be sure to check in for our Christmas challenge later this month!
 
 
 • SECOND PHASE - PvP AI programming contest
Get ready for an AI Programming Tournament, where the submitted programs will face off in an epic showdown to find the ultimate AI strategist! Players are still able to join this programming contest. More information.
 
• Host your own tournament / event
Want to host a tournament or event? Please reach out to our Event Organizer @Metagross31. We can help you out with various topics and are glad to discuss potential ideas. We can also sponsor the prize pool for your event. If you have a cool idea for a PvE event, or want to host a PvP tournament, please don't hesitate to reach out to us, we will gladly assist you.
 
• In Conclusion

That's all for this Community Update! We appreciate you taking the time to read through it.
As is tradition, we're including a scratch code as a small token of our appreciation for your support.
The code will reward you with a general booster: GIVE-FEED-BACK-TIME
Please note: Filling out the feedback survey also rewards you with 2 boosters. 
The code is valid until January 1st, when we will bring you another Community Update. 
We're always looking for ways to improve and value your feedback. If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, please don't hesitate to share them with us. We'll be back next month with more updates on our ongoing projects and upcoming features.
You can also sign-up to our e-mail newsletter here.

Archive
• Skylords Reborn Documents (Deep Dives, Behind the Scenes, PvP Guide)  
• Overview Community Updates
• Community Update November 2024

Patch #400049 - Spooky Giants

Welcome to our newest patch. This update contains our fifteenth balance patch for the game, 2 brand-new cards, 1 new promo card, one new achievement, and much more!

Patch Preview
Two new cards are now available! Jump in-game to collect Simulacrum and Twilight Archers! Added one new featured community map! The Lost Souls have reincarnated the fallen Jorne and he is after Rogan in this ghostly redo of King of the Giants! One new Halloween achievement; beat the new Spooky Giants map before November 10th to receive the new promo Jorne! Some minor buffs to underperforming cards.
General Changes & Fixes
Fixed locked maps showing no required maps. Added a "Pause Game" button to the ESC menu. The game will no longer be paused when simply pressing ESC. The setting "allow_pausing_solo_games" in the config file is now deprecated. Add ranking data from before patch #400035, when ranks were reset due Decomposer and Batariel changes. There is a now a new filter option "Since #400035". Add leaderboard refresh rate information when hovering on range filter question mark. Add voicelines to Jorne (and Promo) [English only].
New Halloween Event Map
It is that time of year again, when ghastly ghouls and spooky skeletons arise from their ancient graves to once again haunt the living. As has now become a Skylords Reborn tradition, we are bringing you a major Halloween event with the addition of a reimagining of King of the Giants. Similar to our previous Halloween event map, Spooky Encounters, we have swapped all the existing enemies on the campaign map King of the Giants with Lost Souls equivalents. Re-experience this classic campaign map and earn yourself a new promo Jorne in the process! The event lasts until November 11th and will reoccur yearly. 
Spooky Giants, 4-player map
Happy Halloween! Rogan Kayle is luring the giant king to the human realm, but something is wrong. The giant king has fallen and risen anew - more bloodthirsty than ever before!


New Halloween Achievement
Frankenstein's Monster [Card: Jorne (promo)]
Win the 4-player featured community map Spooky Giants on Expert difficulty during Halloween.

New Cards
Simulacrum - 100p T3 Amii Unit 
You will find the upgrades for this card on the maps "Nightmare's End" (U1) and "Unexpected Visitors" (U2 and U3).
Simulacrum, the missing unit from the Amii wallpaper, and our first T3 Amii unit, has finally arrived. The idea behind Simulacrum is to create a tempest-style unit, but with real mobility. Therefore, we added a teleport ability to the unit while rooted, so that it can be moved around similar to a unit-version of Phase Tower in T3. In addition to the teleportation ability, it has an on-hit slow, allowing it to engage in hit-and-run tactics, slowing an enemy's approach and dodging away when they finally get into range. 
 
Twilight Archers - 60p T2 Twilight Unit 
You will find the upgrades for this card on the maps "Nightmare Shard" (U1) and "Into the Jungle" (U2 and U3).
We wanted to add a ground-based T2 archer to Twilight, but we ran into the issue that Fire/Nature in PvP would become oppressive with a cheap T2 archer unit due to being able to mass the unit into an archer army. To combat this issue, Twilight Archers deal more damage at the beginning, and less damage once they run out of ammo, similar to an unchargable Deathray would work. As part of our goal of adding more transformation effects, Twilight Archers create a small healing aura when transformed.
 
Jorne (Promo) - 300p T4 Legendary Unit 
Obtainable via the new achievement Frankenstein's Monster. Can only be completed during Halloween!
 
 

Game Balance Changes
[ Global Balance Changes ]
 Twilight Transformation speed: All transformation are now as fast as Twilight Crawlers (0.6 seconds).
[ Card Changes ]
 Amii Monument:
1. Removed Slow Construction. 
  Eliminator:
1. Damage: 780 dp20 ➜ 840 dp20
 Envenom (p):
1. Tainted Intoxication (p) duration: 15 seconds ➜ 25 seconds
 Fire Force(b):
1. Blessed Morale damage reduction: 25% initial, 50% at full strength ➜ 20% initial, 40% at full strength
Slight nerf to the frost affinity of Fire Force which provided too much durability with Unity in the higher tiers.
 Frost Sorceress:
1. Ice Shield cost: 20p ➜ 10p
 Makeshift Tower:
1. Power cost: 60p ➜ 50p
 Twilight Crawlers:
1. Add "Adept Mutation" passive ability: Cost to transform unit is reduced by 13p. 
2. Remove "Rapid Transformation" which is now standard across as Twilight units. 
 Twilight Hag:
1. Gifted Enrapture (g) regeneration: 30 life points per second ➜ 60 life points per second
2. Infused Enrapture (r) buff: 20% more damage ➜ 60% more damage
Twilight's Hag's crowd control effect has become an important part of Twilight's T3 since the changes to Amii Monument. While Enrapture's crowd control effect is powerful, especially in combination with Nature's other crowd control effects, the allied buff effects are relatively weak. We are buffing both allied effects to give Hag more slot efficiency as a support unit.
[ NPC & Map Changes ]
 Bandit Skyrake Alpha Male:
1. Damage: 58, up to 86 in total (470 dp20) ➜ 84, up to 126 (700 dp20)
2. Life points: 1430 ➜ 1200
3. Size: M-size ➜ L-size
4. Texture has been slightly changed to make the difference between normal Skyrakes and Alpha Skyrakes more obvious.
5. Added new ability descriptions and noted that the unit deals 100% more damage to flying units. 
New NPC Entities: Available for use by official and community mapmakers.
 Lost Watchtower:
1. Added a new building (NPC entity): Lost Watchtower is a powerful T3 Lost Souls tower.
Into the Jungle:
Terra now spawns after either all three objective spawners have been destroyed, or if the final objective wave has been spawned. Unexpected Visitors:
Destroying the Banestone objectives before the end of the second night now reduces the remaining portal charge time by 1% for each Banestone. This is in addition to the existing fall reduction in portal charge time.  Several Lost Launchers near the Lost Souls portal have been swapped with Lost Watchtowers. [ Bugfixes & Miscellaneous Changes ]
Fixed Into the Jungle teleported buildings not taking damage. Reduced the noise volume of portals in campaign maps, mostly notable on Ascension and Empire. Fixed some English descriptive issues on Forest Elder, such as the claim at Magic Link worked on itself.

Hello I am a big battlearena enjoyer since original release actually back in the EA era of this game.
I think the mode is great main problem being some cards and some spells that needs to be looked into...
For example gravity surge is very situational most of the time and kinda forces you to use whatever 2nd ability you have which happened to me a couple of time with the nasty surprise as a 2nd ability when i have good t1 t2 or t3 units like frost sorceress or mountaineer avatar(most hp comes from shields) which can stay alive for a while and you dont really want to nasty.
I dont think nasty or gravity surge should be removed but maybe a recycle button for your spells that will put the tower on cooldowns would be a good addition because sometimes the spells can do more harm than good.
I think lost warlord atm needs nerf specificly in battlearena(kind of like Ravenheart is nerf specifically for this mode) he gurantees 4 units on the field(himself,his ability,his resurrected self and his resurrected self ability) way too much power for 1 unit.
Spore launcher is the opposite for example if the enemy team is in the lead and they happen to get spore launcher me and my teammate usually dont attack it and let him sit there while we 2v1 the other guy until the other user catches on and self kill his own unit.(idk if that is something you want to happen in the mode where it is better to kill own unit then to fight and die with it but just to let you guys know)
Those are all my personal issues with the mode atm I do think units like Avatar and Grigori are very powerful but they are on the line of healthy powerful for me since Avatar you kinda need to work as a team with spells and units to take down and focus fire...
And Grigori is a power house if he uses tainted attraction on someones spawn point but again manageable to take down
The Snapjaws ability in the spell towers is bugged but im pretty sure devs are aware and working on fix...
Overall I think the mode is very fun been getting way more matches faster on battlearena this patch than ever before I hope this feedback helps thank you guys for taking the time to polish this mode up to the state it is in today ❤️
 

Greetings Skylords!
A new month; a new Community Update! It's time to bring you up to speed with everything going on in Skylords Reborn!

• Continue the Story

Our new patch has released! With it comes two brand-new campaign maps, 15 years after the original story concluded. We are thrilled to continue the legacy of BattleForge, and we created a special video to celebrate to occasion. 

• Patch Overview Video

Our latest patch has a lot to offer, so we also have a Patch Overview Video for you. 
  Because we are extremely limited in what we can do on the marketing side of things, we would highly appreciate it if you can give it a like and share it with your friends!
    You can read the full patch notes here. 
We are very happy that the response from the community to these maps has been very positive, and we want to thank everyone who dropped in to share some kind words. We have spend a lot of hours on balance, map art, voice-overs and playtesting, but nothing can quite prepare you for the whole community exploring them.
We are collecting all the feedback and will make sure to take it into account for our next maps as well. We have more maps in the works, but we will talk about them in another community update! 
 
• New Card Reveal - Simulacrum

We hope you are all enjoying the new Amii units released in our last patch. Many of you are wondering where the character in the middle of the key-art is. Today we are ready to reveal Simulacrum. Let's break down the card.
Please note: We are still working on the card. While we are generally happy with it, numbers and effects might still change before release. 


Elemental Wrath
Every second unit unleashes a hail of primal energy that deal 70 damage to enemies in a 5m radius its target, up to 105 in total. Attack slows enemy units who may only move at walk speed. Lasts for 10 seconds.
 

Relocation
Unit relocates to another spot within a 50m range. Requires the target location to be within a 15m range of at least one other own ground entity. Reusable every 20 seconds.
 
Elusive
The duration of the immobilizing effects of Freeze and Paralyze are reduced by 20%.
 

Design notes:
When we decided upon adding some golem-like units to the Amii faction, we thought that the Tempest model was perfect alongside the models used in Amii Sentinel and Energy Core. The issue is that we did not want the Tempest playstyle where the player would need to walk Simulacrum forward, root, attack, unroot, move, then re-root, ad infinitum. This playstyle already exists with Stone Tempest and Tempest and neither see much play because of how tedious it is. So we decided to move in a different direction and give Simulacrum a teleport ability which is usable while it is rooted. This will make Simulacrum play similarly to a T3 Phase Tower, but easier to micro because units can be grouped unlike buildings and Simulacrum can benefit from spells affecting units. Alongside this teleport ability, we gave its auto-attack a slow effect, allowing both PvE and PvP players to use the slow and teleport in combination to kite their enemies with Simulacrum's long range of 40m. 
Simulacrum will release alongside our next content patch, date to be announced. 
 
• Interview Regarding New Campaign Maps

We hope everyone has had a chance to try out the new campaign maps already. Now that they are finally released to the public, we thought it would be a nice moment to sit with WindHunter and R4bitfoot, two team members who were heavily involved in their creation, and ask them what the design process was like to create Into the Jungle (ItJ) and Unexpected Visitors (UV). 
 
Lets start with introductions, for those who do not know you, what is your role on the Skylords Reborn team?

Hello! I am R4bitF00t and my official designation is Lead Map Artist, but in the end I do pretty much anything on new maps, starting from initial layout, scripting functionality, balance changes and ending with map art.
 

Hello, I am WindHunter. I am Skylord Reborn’s lead designer, a role I have had since January 2022. Generally speaking, anything that affects how a person plays or experiences the game comes under my purview and needs my stamp of approval before it gets added to the game. That includes things like new card design, balancing, the economy, achievements, and map design.
 
What is your favorite original campaign map?

My favorite is absolutely Encounters with Twilight, the map just feels so alive and is split into several very clean, and well-thought out chunks, it is by far my most played map.
 

Behind Enemy Lines. I enjoy the slow build out from the center that makes you feel like you are conquering the map, compared to many maps where you feel more like a saboteur than a conqueror. 
 
And what was your involvement with the new campaign maps specifically?

I started work on Into the Jungle - the original concept and layout came from the community map made by Emmaerzeh, Lebovim and other contributors. When we turned it into a campaign map, we wanted to keep the original idea and improve upon it. To achieve that, we made changes to the map's layout and introduced some new mechanics. So my job was to implement all the layout and script changes, and make the map pretty. After that, I designed the map concept for Unexpected Visitors with Emmaerzeh and WindHunter, made the functional prototype of the map, and then came in later to do some finalizations and balance changes with WindHunter.

Besides balancing the maps, I did a lot of writing. I am in charge of the lore, so I wrote the storybook entries and the map outcries, and I also wrote two design documents which have become the basis, or template, for how we design new campaign maps.
 
When did work first start on a new campaign map?

The idea for new campaign maps was here long before I joined the team. There were some attempts at official maps at that time, but since we didn't have proper guidelines, we ended up scrapping or repurposing them into community maps, like the Restoring Lyr map. Work on ItJ started shortly after I joined the team, so around two years ago.
 
What were some of the challenges to overcome?

As I mentioned before, we didn't have proper guidelines when we started work on ItJ, we fought with the most basic things, like designing enemy camps properly.
We made some changes based on tester feedback, but once implemented, they were not happy with them, so we had to go back to the drawing board. We just had to try and try again to capture that old-school BattleForge feel, and there is a lot that goes into that. For anybody interested, I recommend WindHunter's design documents, which were a massive help: Spawn Design and Camp Design.

These are not the first two PvE projects we have undertaken. Previously we had another “official” map called Restoring Lyr from a former team member RookieN which we have recently polished and released as a featured community map. We also were deep into developing a defensive random PvE mode, but we ran into major design issues we did not think we could easily fix, causing us to postpone further work on the project. The fact is that we really did not know what we were doing and we had significantly underestimated how much went into making something worthy to be called an official campaign map. These issues and the early work on ITJ, which we did not want to fail, forced us to step back and really examine what went into making a campaign map. 
I came into the map design department at around this point and the first thing I did was pause further map development. We were changing things so rapidly and reactively it was wearing out the map testers and designers alike. At that point, I went back through all 26 existing campaign maps and I started documenting what made BattleForge maps distinctive and what made the good maps good. This is similar to what we did with faction design when we started making new cards. Eventually, this study culminated in two large design documents, one on camp design and one on spawn design. With these in hand, we restarted map development in-line with our new design principles and made rapid progress. We also took this time to outline everything a new map needed and to develop the kind of workflow we needed to make continual map development possible. So, I would say the biggest challenges were systematic ones and with these under control it was amazing how fast new maps could develop.
 
Both maps are two-player maps, was there a specific reason for this? Can we expect other player sizes in the future?

Into the Jungle was originally a speedrun challenge map from one of our map designers Emmaerzeh that required two players. So we started with ITJ as a two player map. The issue is that ITJ is the second map in the story, so when we decided on UV’s design, we thought it was only right that it was also a two-player map. Players can definitely expect new 1p and 4p maps in the future, though probably not any new 12p maps.
 
Campaign Maps always have some kind of twist, did you have hard time coming up with one for these two?

The original ItJ design was a simple map - go from point A to B and destroy things along the way. While every map in BF does some variation of this, I felt it needed that "hook" or "twist" as you call it, and I thought that adding secret passages through the jungle would be nice, make the map more exploratory and open it up from the original linear design. Luckily, I was not the only one who liked the idea so we got to see it on the map.
For UV, we knew we wanted to have a defensive portion on the map, but BattleForge's mechanics really struggle with having one static defensive location - there is no resource, worker or base management, so we decided we need to break up the defense by giving players an incentive to sally out and conquer extra parts of the map. 
But pushing through enemy attack waves is in most cases too annoying, so we added the day/night cycle to make it clear for players when to attack and when to defend. So this map "twist" came organically from the map's design.

I would say no. In the case of both maps, the twist developed organically as we designed them. In ITJ, you have the secret passages and the Amii well-building mechanic. The first came from experimentation and the second flowed from the lore. In UV you have the portal and Amii Monument charging mechanics. These were part of the map’s original design, and then we ended up creating the day/night cycle as a response to the design issues caused by the player turtling around the portal shrine. We were conscious of the need to differentiate these maps from existing maps, and the story we wanted to tell with both maps led naturally to the different mechanics each map has that sets it apart.
 
What is your favorite part about each map?

After all this time working on the maps, I am pretty numb 😀 so I’ll leave this one to WindHunter.
 

I enjoy the secret passages on ITJ a lot, especially because of how much they change how you approach the map’s early game. 
For UV, I like that we get to fight Frost units for the first time. I am very happy with their design, and I think they provide an interesting contrast to the factions the player usually encounters in campaign maps.
 
What about the story? How did you decide on that?

One of the major problems of making campaign maps is obviously the campaign aspect. While we could just release good maps disconnected from the existing lore, having a cohesive narrative adds to the enjoyment of the map by letting the player enter into the game’s universe. So we wanted to make sure the narrative fit the Skylords universe. In this case, we really wanted to fill in the Empire storyline. 
Skylords Reborn tells stories through action more than exposition. The exception to this is Empire, which skips over a ton of in-game events which would otherwise be standalone maps in an attempt to give the story a conclusion. This happened because the original devs knew they would not be able to add anymore maps. What we are doing with ITJ and UV is filling back in the Empire storyline in a way the original devs were unable to do, so that the players can be part of that story, and not just read about it.
 
How long did you spend on each of the maps?

Oh, that’s a tough one, I am pretty sure I spent well over a hundred hours on ItJ.
It will be a bit less for UV, since Damo and Kayrie took over at some point and made most of the map art.


Several dozen hours per map.
 

Can you tell us something about balancing the maps?

Well, it is not easy. It is easy to get feedback and then make a change and think you fixed the problem and move on. But it rarely works. It is harder to sit down, gather a lot of feedback and then try to figure out the root causes behind the issue before making a decision. I mean sometimes the camp is just too strong and you tone it down, but other times the solution is less obvious. As an example, on ITJ we did not have any patrolling units or attack waves beyond the event spawners at the beginning. Testers told us the map felt lifeless, so we added attack waves. Then next iteration they told us that the waves felt designed just to destroy them and that they felt unfair. We toned them down but the same feedback kept recurring, so we eventually removed them, only to return back to the first problem. 
The answer I think is that good balance comes from good design. While we want the maps to respond to the tools the players might bring, for example, we cannot add too many ground units at T1 because they just become Mine fodder, we also want the camps to feel like more than a video game. The goal then is that the map feels organic, like the enemies really live in the map, but while also tailoring each map to the player’s expected strength. We might add certain challenges to the camp, like a Mark of the Keeper or a Lost Dragon, but they should feel like they are meant to be there. On Into the Jungle in particular, you can look at a replay without fog of war enabled and just scroll over the camps. Each one is unique. One is a bug infested temple, another is a Ghostspear village, and yet another is a beast taming ground for Amazons. We came up with these ideas first, and then we asked ourselves how these units would position themselves and how they would respond to hostile threats nearby. Then we tuned from there.
 
What about the visuals?

Luckily, I got to practice map art on other maps before ItJ - namely the yet unreleased drPvE and both of the Battle Arenas that dropped with this patch. I learn a bit more with every map I create, but in the end I am happy with ItJ visuals, I feel they are unique in the game and I had fun coming up with different points of interest in the jungle and enemy camps. My favorite place on ItJ is the top-left camp, it features a giant stone statue, a nearby volcano and an Amazon temple. I just wish we could have added a waterfall coming out of the mouth of the statue.
Damo and Kayrie worked on the art for UV so I cannot comment on that, but my favorite place from that map is definitely the Ami city. Damo did a great job with the layout and making it feel like a real city, but still fitting BattleForge. I also really like the Lost Souls siege camp in front of it.
 
What took the longest time in the whole process?

When talking about pure hours spent working on the map - that would be map art (I’d say ItJ art took me about 80 hours).
But while map art can take a couple of weeks to finish, actually testing the map - balancing and improving upon mechanics is what drags on the most.
Both maps have spent months in testing periods, where we took feedback from testers, discussed it and implemented it. Going back and forth and trying different versions of mechanics. Having so many people involved, it takes quite a while to chisel out the final vision for the map.

In terms of total time, probably the testing phase. There is a lot of waiting for feedback, playing the maps yourself, and then watching replays. Then you need to figure out how to turn all that data into something which can change the map, and that is very difficult to do correctly when you want to change a lot of things at once. So instead we usually change 1-2 big things, and then we need to wait all over again to see if it worked. It is a draining process.
 
What can players expect in the future?

We want to keep expanding the story and making new maps. The team has several other map projects currently in-progress, not just of new campaign maps, and a few of them are nearing the point where we can almost start showing them off.
 
Is there anything else you'd like to share with our players?

Just to enjoy the game and the new campaign maps we have created.
Shameless plug incoming: If you’re interested in creating maps of your own, check out our official map editor tutorial!


We worked hard to make sure that each map had more than one way to complete it, and that different decks would have different strengths at different points. So, I would encourage players to view the maps as a kind of sandbox where they can try different strategies and different decks, instead of just viewing the map as a once and done experience.
 
• We Want Your Feedback

We want to hear what you think about the new maps Unexpected Visitors, Into the Jungle, and Battle Arena!
Do you like them or not? What would you like you see more of in the future and what less?
What would you leave the same and what would you improve? Let us know here:
Unexpected Visitors - Discussion Thread
Into the Jungle - Discussion Thread
Battle Arena - Discussion Thread
 
or on our Balance Discord
September Patch Feedback
New Maps Feedback
 
• Get Ready For Halloween

By now it has become tradition for Skylords Reborn to have a Halloween-themed event, and this year will be no different!
Be sure to check in on the 31st of October for a spooky event with a very special reward! 

 
• Events

In between our monthly Community Updates, we host various events and tournaments, so be sure to keep a close eye on the in-game event tab and the forum calendar to stay informed and not miss out on any exciting events!
 
Current events:
• NEW - Release Event
To celebrate the release of the new campaign maps we have a special event. All you have to do is upload your replay of completing Unexpected Visitors and/or Into the Jungle for a chance to win some prizes! More information.
 
• NEW - Seven Strategy Showdown 4 - Guardian Skylord
Rogan is on the run again, and will need your help. Again.. Help Rogan to finish a round as fast as possible. Support him exclusively with spells and each spell can only be cast once. More information. 
 
• FINISHED - Seven Strategy Showdown 3 - Wrecking Time
The 3rd event in the series has concluded! This time Skylords were the ones destroying buildings. Players had to destroy as many buildings as possible within the time limit for a chance to win some great prizes. More information. 
 
• IN PROGRESS - Seven Strategy Showdown
Every two weeks there will be a new event in this series of seven events, each bringing a fun handcrafted challenge or mechanic! Be sure to check them out, as there are some great prizes to be won! More information.
 
 • SECOND PHASE - PvP AI programming contest
Get ready for an AI Programming Tournament, where the submitted programs will face off in an epic showdown to find the ultimate AI strategist! Players are still able to join this programming contest. More information.
 
• Host your own tournament / event
Want to host a tournament or event? Please reach out to our Event Organizer @Metagross31. We can help you out with various topics and are glad to discuss potential ideas. We can also sponsor the prize pool for your event. If you have a cool idea for a PvE event, or want to host a PvP tournament, please don't hesitate to reach out to us, we will gladly assist you.
 
• Contribute to Skylords Reborn

Skylords Reborn is a community-driven project fueled by the passion and dedication of over 50 volunteers. We are always on the lookout for like-minded individuals. If you have a passion for gaming, programming, design, or marketing, we invite you to have a look at our open positions!
 

 
Don't have time to formally join the staff, but still would like to help out? Please check out this guide on how to support Skylords Reborn as a community member.
 
• In Conclusion

That's all for this Community Update! We appreciate you taking the time to read through it.
As is tradition, we're including a scratch code as a small token of our appreciation for your support.
The code will reward you with a General booster: AMII-AMII-AMII-AMII
The code is valid until November 1st, when we will bring you another Community Update. 
We're always looking for ways to improve and value your feedback. If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, please don't hesitate to share them with us. We'll be back next month with more updates on our ongoing projects and upcoming features.
You can also sign-up to our e-mail newsletter here.

Archive
• Skylords Reborn Documents (Deep Dives, Behind the Scenes, PvP Guide)  
• Overview Community Updates
• Community Update September 2024
 

HYPE!

We could also add Teststrike (The test server-only card, that oneshots everything at T1 without groundpresence) to the main game. It would allow for everyone to cheese every map and skip T1-T4. But people could just not use it and the group leader could say "No teststrike please" and check everyones deck and we could say at each event "Teststrike is banned". It would even allow for much faster speedrun strats on almost all maps. But would that be a good idea? I highly doubt it. But if we then would remove it again, that woyld kill all the new strats and decks with Teststrike in them. Would you then protest against Teststrike being removed?
With Amii Monument it is similar but less drastic. It doesn't remove T1-T4, but it can be used to effectively remove T3 mostly from the game. While its presence may enable some (by the map makers unintended) strategies, it removes a lot of theorycrafting and potentially much more colourful startegies and options from the game.
And regarding the "just don't use it" argument; that completely negclegts the impact of human psyche, that SunWu mentioned. By that logic you also say "What's the problem with gambling or drugs? Just don't do it lol"

Once everyone used curse well, now nobody does - and it's a good thing. It's really obvious amii monument was only added as a desperate OP cashgrab by a studio having to milk a dying game for it's last drops,

It's fair to say the Amii monument nerf was expected to happen sooner or later.
However I have a few objections about this patch :
1) As explained by Chronopie, deckslots are at a premiums in decks. Considering this, if we want to see the new amii monument being played in some rainbow decks, is it ideal to keep an energy cost for the buiding's orb ability (100 is still a lot) as well as the slow building construction speed, since the card is unlikely to cause anymore issues with map design ? I feel paying a fix 125 energy + 1 card slot is already significative cost.
 
2) With the new restriction on unique building (1 per player), have you consider the fact that Incredible Mo ability might create some issues (if multiple Mo are activated). I know it was fixed with wheel of gifts, but I understood that non-heroes & heroes cards are different in term of hard coding in BF. Might be good to have a look at it, they might be some unintended bug created there.

Hype! Cannot wait for all the new stuff. Especially, when finally a new campaign maps are added. As a map maker, this greatly pleases me. 

Amazing news! Love the look of Energy Core! I do think it could be given some knockback or some sort of small CC, but otherwise a very neat idea!
I'm definitely going to play those new campaigns when they come out!!   🙂   🙂 
As for the Amii Monument rework, I am 100% on board with it. I had suggested a similar card before in Amii Shrine (I wonder if that had inspired any of the change 😄), and I think it works so much better in allowing interesting color combos instead of making t3 entirely obsolete! Now we'll have to think harder on decks since we don't get to just skip a t3 strategy and actually get to use a lot of the cool tier 3 cards!
 
Super happy to see where everything is going, and I'm constantly astounded by the progress you've all made as wholly volunteers! Cheers!

Patch #400048 - Echoes of the Amii
Welcome to our newest patch. This update contains our fourteenth balance patch for the game, 4 brand-new cards, 2 new campaign maps, a new PvP mode, four new achievements, and much more!

Patch Preview
Four new cards are now available! Jump in-game to collect Amii Sentinel, Skydancer, Energy Core, and Umbabwe! Added two new campaign maps! Continue the story of Skylords Reborn in the first two maps of our new campaign. BattleArena has arrived! Play against your friends in 2v2 or 3v3 battles in this casual PvP mode. Four new achievements and cosmetics to go along with the new maps and game mode. A few balance changes and major card reworks mostly to previously unviable cards.
General Changes
The Shadow enemies found on the summoning menu in the Forge have been swapped with their NPC versions. Amii enemies have also been added to the Forge's summoning menu. A new section has been added to PvE leaderboard to account for potential speedrun changes arising from changes to Amii Monument without wiping the rankings.  Upgrades have been redistributed, you can find more information in-game by using the "Show Upgrades" option on each map. All Rebirth edition cards have had their U2 and U3 upgrades moved to the new maps. The Lost Souls Forge skin is now available. Complete the new achievement "After All These Years" on expert difficulty to unlock it.  Deleted players are now displayed as <deleted> rather than empty. New setting "Force create unit group when holding SHIFT key" added to options. Reverted previously undocumented changes to attack-move command (shortcut Q), that were causing issues with unit responsiveness. Added Map of the Day info to the "Daily Rewards" section. When a player completes the Map of the Day in a given day, the flame on the world map will be grayed out. This change is to help players remember if they have already completed a particular Map of the Day for achievement progress. Players can continue to play the Map of the Day for extra upgrade rewards as normal.  Re-enabled the chat command export collection. Re-enabled the explore replay button.
New Campaign Maps
At long last the Skylords Reborn story continues with the addition of two brand-new fully-voiced (in English) campaign maps. These maps continue the story after Dwarven Riddle and are the product of hundreds of hours of our team's artists, designers, community map testers, translators, and voice actors. Both come with new achievements and rewards to encourage you to dive-in and explore. 
Unexpected Visitors, 2-player campaign map
Journey into the northern wastes to find the secrets hidden within the Riddle of Gnaur. Discover the last enclave of the elusive Amii and save them from certain destruction.

Into the Jungle, 2-player campaign map
Brave the jungles of Viridya's island to find a new home for your Amii allies. 


New Cards
Amii Sentinel - 260p T4 Amii Unit 
You will find the upgrades for this card on the map "Into the Jungle."
Our goal for Amii's T4 is to create a micro-intensive deck where most of the damage is unit-based. With Amii Sentinel in particular, our goal is to create a frontline tank that functions as a perfect conduit for Shadow's single-target buff cards. Volatile Body's 120% reflect turns Sentinel's health into a damage resource, which synergizes perfectly with cards like Regrowth, Transcendence, and Skydancer. 
 
Energy Core - 140p T4 Amii Unit 
You will find the upgrades for this card on the map "Unexpected Visitors."
Energy Core's original design came from the Community Card Contest we held over a year ago. The idea behind Energy Core is to create a unit which is more of a mobile spell than it is a traditional unit. It has no auto-attack, but it has two active abilities. Both abilities damage Energy Core, one more significantly than the other, requiring the player to pay close attention to unit health and weigh their options over what is possible for them and whether or not risking losing the unit is worthwhile. 
 
Skydancer - 120p T4 Amii Unit 
You will find the upgrades for this card on the map "Unexpected Visitors."
While Sentinel and Energy Core fit the roles of tank and damage dealer respectively, Skydancer functions as the supporter. Skydancer has two different mode-changes, one debuffing enemies and one buffing allies. The debuff functions as a kind of anti-rage effect, while the buff increases allied life points by a set amount. The health buff effect directly synergizes with Sentinel and Energy Core who both has health-based damage mechanics. 
 
Umbabwe - 200p T4 Legendary Unit 
You will find the upgrades for this card on the map "Into the Jungle."
Blight's infamous witch doctor is finally making his player card appearance. As a standalone legendary unit, he is intended to function as a spellcaster type unit. To accomplish this, the card has a lot of built-in flexibility via its spells. Umbabwe has an auto-attack which is a meteor from Inferno, the ability to cast his signature spell Oink, and an active ability to summon a fiery tornado which applies a painful burn effect. 
 

BattleArena - New PvP Mode
For a long time, we have been developing an alternative PvP mode called BattleArena which we feel is finally ready to release. In this game mode, players do not use cards from their deck. Instead, they are given spell devices and progressively stronger creatures which they must use to overcome their enemies. The mode can be played 2v2 or 3v3 and comes with a new achievement to reward players for trying it out. Go to Sparring Grounds in-game to play BattleArena.


Voice Actors
Many of the above new features would not be nearly as enjoyable without the help of our volunteer voice actors. In this patch, the following players have lent their voices to liven up the Skylords Reborn universe. We thank them greatly for their help!
Vox - Gaeron (new Frost Skylord) Ultralord - Burning Spears Edgelord - Skydancer Edgelord - Amii Phantom (includes the card's voice lines and the unit's appearance in the new maps) Elijah - Amii Sentinel Dreamlord - New map loading screen narration
Achievements
As part of the release of the two new campaign maps and BattleArena, we have released four accompanying achievements. There is a normal achievement just for beating the new maps, which rewards the player with the new Amii Sentinel on advanced and the Lost Souls forge on expert, as well as two achievements for mastering the maps. BattleArena has a new progressive achievement for playing the mode. We are also adding new Amii borders to the existing endless achievements for playing Amii decks in PvE and PvP.
[ New Achievements ]
After All These Years [Card: Amii Sentinel; Forge: Lost Souls]
Win the 2-player scenarios Unexpected Visitors and Into the Jungle on Advanced / Expert difficulty or higher.
Evacuation Expert [Progressive Banner: Bronze rank ➜ Ember rank]
Win the 2-player scenario Unexpected Visitors on Expert difficulty in under 35 / 33 / 31 / 29 / 27 minutes.
Earth, Wind, Fire [Avatar: Tribal] 
Win the 2-player scenario Into the Jungle on Expert difficulty after defeating all 3 bosses in a single match.
Honor Bound [Booster: 1 General; Avatar: Mo Ocean] 
Play BattleArena [3 matches & 10 matches]
[ Existing Achievement Changes ]
Giver and Taker of Life (PvE) & Path of Insight (PvP)
Both achievements now grant progressive Amii borders in line with the requirements of other faction borders. Borders will be added to the player's account retroactively based on achievement progress.
 

Legacy Server
While we are happy with the game's development since its revival, we understand that there are some parts of old BattleForge that players might miss. In response to this feeling, we have created a legacy server. This legacy server is equivalent to BattleForge the day it was shut down, with none of the balance changes, new cards, or new maps that have occurred as part of Skylords Reborn's continued development being included. The legacy server functions similarly to the public test server in that the player already has all cards and upgrades. To access the legacy server navigate to the game folder, in standard installations the game folder is be found at C:\Games\Skylords Reborn, and start StartBattleForgeLegacy.bat. From there, you login with your normal account information. 

Game Balance Changes
[ Global Balance Changes ]
 Amii faction passive scaling: Amii's faction passive Elusive now scales based on the unit's tier.
Tier 2: 10% less Freeze and Paralyze duration.  Tier 3: 20% less Freeze and Paralyze duration.  Tier 4: 30% less Freeze and Paralyze duration.  Legendary building restrictions: Legendary buildings are now one-per-player, not one-per-team.
Random PvE 1p starting void power: Starting void power has been changed to account for the Amii Monument changes.
Standard / Standard+ (Difficulties 1-2): 600 starting void power Standard++ to Expert+ (Difficulties 3-8): 700 starting void power [ Card Changes ]
 Amii Monument:
1. Power Cost: 250p ➜ 125p
2. Ability Cost: 140p ➜ 100p
3. Orbs granted by Amii Monument no longer increase a player’s tier. Players still gain access to cards within their current tier that require the orb granted by Amii Monument. For example, if a player has 3 Fire orbs via normal Monuments, and builds a Nature orb via Amii Monument, they will still be T3, but will be able to summon Juggernauts and heal them via Equilbrium.
   A. Description - “Switch into this mode to gain one tierless Shadow Orb. This orb will not increase a player's tier, but will allow the player to play cards within their current tier that would require this Orb. The Orb will be ready and functional after 10 seconds. It cannot be switched back for 30 seconds.”
Amii Monument in its existing state is a cheat card. It breaks a map's design, allowing players unfettered access to T4 cards when the map is balanced around the player only having access to T3 cards and creating a persistent toxic effect on the normal game experience.
Amii Monument removes an entire tier from the game. This has a disruption impact on the game experience by changing deckbuilding at its core. In decks without Amii Monument, the player needs to consider how many cards they can budget for each tier and choose accordingly. With Amii Monument in a deck, the player can simply remove all T3 cards from their deck besides Amii Monument itself (spells like Infect which scale well into T4 are the exception), opening up more deck slots for T1, T2, and T4 cards. Consider also that nearly all PvE maps are functionally finished before the player ever reaches T4. Combined with the fact that T4 cards are significantly stronger than T3 cards (the power difference between T4 and T3 cards is the single largest increase in card strength between tiers) means that the player requires fewer T3 and T4 cards in their deck, allowing the use of more card slots for T1 and T2. This heavily warps the game experience by making the player stronger than the map is designed to account for at all tiers, not just once the player reaches T3. 
There is also the psychological effect Amii Monument has upon players. Since we first started balancing cards in Skylords Reborn, players have asked us to nerf Amii Monument, not just because of the balance issues, but because they felt compelled to always include it in their deck regardless of the situation. This is unsurprising as many game studios have recognized that players in general will choose the most efficient option, even to the detriment of their own enjoyment. And who of us have not experienced this? How many of us have not used mind-numbingly boring methods to grind in games just because it is the fastest way to procure loot, even if it ends up making us hate the game? Who has not included Amii Monument as a default deck option at some point in their time playing Skylords Reborn?
To briefly summarize, Amii Monument undermines map design, deckbuilding, and possesses a factor that makes players feel compelled to include it in their decks, even when they know it undermines their own enjoyment. While designing our new maps, including not just the two maps releasing with this patch but the multiple additional maps currently in development, we found ourselves face to face with these issues in a way that made the card's problems no longer ignorable. For all these reasons and more, we felt that the time had finally come to nerf Amii Monument. Yet we do not want to destroy the card. The new design is tailored towards enabling unique, previously impossible, deckbuilding possibilities, in direct opposition to its previous design. We also realized that many T3 cards were not generally strong enough to be satisfying to use, so we dedicated almost the entire last patch to adding new T3 options through buffs, reworks, and new cards, and we are dedicated to continuing this project next patch. 
Lastly, we understand that this change will upset many people, but we hope you will see that we did not make this choice lightly. We do not enjoy nerfing cards players like, but we do it because we think it is the best choice for the game. At the same time, we think that the time of major nerfs is now at an end with these changes to Amii Monument, and we as a team commit to no further nerfs on the scale of Amii Monument or the previous Batariel nerf from 2 years ago to existing cards going forward.
 Dying Breed:
1. Power cost: 100p ➜ 90p
2. Orb cost: 1 Fire, 2 Neutral (T3) ➜ 2 Fire, 1 Neutral (T3)
2. Tainted Plunder (p):
   A. Description - Target enemy unit is filled with plunder. If the target enemy dies within the next 30 seconds, all friendly fire units in a 25m radius gain Looter for 25 seconds. Units with Looter harvest the bound power of enemies. Up to 10% of an enemy's original power costs can be harvested relative to the amount of its maximum life points received as damage. Reusable every 30 seconds.
3. Gifted Plunder (g): 
   A. Description - Target enemy unit is filled with plunder and takes 30 damage per second. If the target enemy dies within the next 30 seconds, all friendly fire units in a 25m radius gain Looter for 25 seconds. Units with Looter harvest the bound power of enemies. Up to 7% of an enemy's original power costs can be harvested relative to the amount of its maximum life points received as damage. Reusable every 30 seconds.
4. New FX to go with the new card effect.
One of our long-term design projects is trying to give other factions besides Pure Shadow, with its Resource Booster, the ability to accelerate their power in higher tiers. We started this with changes to Nature's power flow via Forest Elder and Promise of Life, and now we are turning our eyes to Fire. Most Fire players are responsible for building 2 Shrines of War as soon as they get T3, immediately putting them behind by 300 power. Combined with high power cost units in T4, this gives Fire a painfully slow start with a frequent reliance on hoping your allies brought a Breeding Grounds for you to use. After carefully considering our options to accelerate Fire's power gain, we decided to bring back the Looter mechanic, but have it applied only temporarily with moderate percentages. We choose Dying Breed as the rework target because its previous effect was unsalvageable. The changes should allow Fire to use Dying Breed in early T3 to accelerate the transition into T4, or to payoff the bound power invested into Shrine of War, without being so strong as to cause Fire's power gain to grow out of control. 
 Fire Force (Formerly Girl Power):
1. Change name: Girl Power ➜ Fire Force
2. Power cost: 50p ➜ 80p
3. Blessed Morale (b): 
   A. Description - Target own melee unit will be designated the champion of Fire. All friendly melee units in a 30m radius will take 20% less damage. If at least 2 enemies die within a 30m radius of the champion within a 10 second period, the damage reduction increases to 50% for 15 seconds. Lasts until the champion dies, or until a different champion is chosen. There may only be one champion of Fire per player at a time. Reusable every 60 seconds.
4. Infused Morale (r):
   A. Description - Target own melee unit will be designated the champion of Fire. All friendly melee units in a 30m radius will deal 25% more damage. If at least 2 enemies die within a 30m radius of the champion within a 10 second period, the damage buff increases to 50% for 15 seconds. Lasts until the champion dies, or until a different champion is chosen. There may only be one champion of Fire per player at a time. Reusable every 60 seconds.
5. New FX to go with the new card effect.
Girl Power was an odd card that did not fit within the game. It was never clear to the player what cards were men, which were women, and which were neither. We did not see a way to salvage the card as it was, so we reworked it into a tool to enable new melee based strategies in Fire decks. The newly minted Fire Force is a permanent spell effect that you apply to a single unit which transforms that unit into a leader type unit. Allies around the leader are buffed, either with increasing damage reduction or increasing damage dealt, when enemies around the leader unit die. Our hope is that this card enables previously niche T2 and T3 melee units to become viable options in PvE.
 Grove Spirit:
1. Movement speed: 4.8 m/s ➜ 6.4 m/s (normal L/XL-speed)
2. Life points: 1100 ➜ 1600
3. Healing Song cost: 90p ➜ 60p
Grove Spirit has found itself a niche in a deck which uses it alongside Offering to cycle Mind Control. The idea of this deck is to use Grove Spirit as ground presence while you build yourself an army out of your enemy's units. The issue is that Grove Spirit itself is slow and dies in one-shot to artillery buildings. We have given the unit a booster shot of life points and made her undulate her tentacles faster, alongside a discount to the Healing Song ability. Pending any further rework to the unit, we hope in the meantime that this helps the unit in the one niche it has found for itself.
 Lost Dancer:
1. Tainted Blast affinity effect: 50% more damage against humans ➜ 30% more damage against humans
Lost Dancer has proven too strong in PvP and we are toning down the extra damage against humans to bring her back in-line. 
 Lost Manabeast:
1. Immortalize requirement: 7 enemy life essences ➜ 3 enemy life essences
Immortalize's enemy requirement is too strict, making it overly difficult to make good use of the ability. We are substantially reducing the requirements to hopefully give Lost Manabeast a better synergy with Revenant strategies. 
[ NPC & Map Changes ]
 Spearmen (NPC):
1. Toggle ability Defensive Formation: 25% damage reduction now applies properly
 Fire Emitter (Slavemaster version):
1. Power cost: 2000p ➜ 200p
New NPC Entities: Available for use by official and community mapmakers.
Added Frost NPC entities: Units: War Eagle, Tremor, Mountain Rowdy, Northland Drake, Icespike, Avatar of Frost, Construct, Dreadnought, Core Dredge, Dredgling, Mountaineer, Tempest, Winter Witch Buildings: Ice Launcher, Frost Crystal, Frontier Keep (large spawner), Kobold Inc. (small spawner) Added Amii NPC entities: Amii Crossbowmen, Amii Paladins, Amii Phantom, Amii Sentinel, Amii Keep Bad Harvest: Both orbs near the Treasure Wagon now spawn when a player in position 3 is playing solo.
The Soultree: The map now requires all 5 normal orbs to be built or under construction to fulfill the map's victory requirement. Amii Monument no longer counts towards this goal. 
[ Bugfixes & Miscellaneous Changes ]
Fixed card descriptions in various languages. The longstanding issue which caused players' games to slowdown substantially when they destroyed multiple frozen air units at once, has now been fixed. The most well known occurrence of this bug was connected to Shatter Ice.  Dropdowns for rankings are no longer scrollable.

Afraid of joining Expert lobbies because you have never played them before?
Want to try a new deck but don't know how it'll work out?
Would you like to train maps without the pressure of potentially failing your teammates?
Really want to see for yourself if a certain card is worth the purchase and performs well?
The Testserver got you covered! Introducing:

This unit is exclusive to the Testserver and as you can see has insanely high stats. Not only that, it costs no power and can be played on T1 with any color. Additionally, it can be spawned anywhere on the map, regardless of ground presence.
This means that using Teststrike, you can more or less remove certain parts of maps and only focus on training the ones you want to. Build your deck as you would normally but swap out one card for Teststrike.
Want to train defending on position 1 or 2 of Guns of Lyr but are unsure which cards can hold for long enough and how quickly you have to progress? Spam a couple of Teststrikes around the fortress and they will kill anything that comes close. So you can focus on your own game.
Unsure how to approach the difficult camps on Nightmare Shard? Lock one side of the shard down with Teststrike so you don't have to worry about fending off witches from that direction. Now you can experiment on how to free your T2.
No idea how to either be quick enough or defend against the attack waves on Blight? Teststrike can nuke the other camps so you can put your own strategy to the test.
Can you save the civilians in time on Titans or clear a path for Rogan before Jorne stomps him? Just let Teststrike do the tasks in the other sections of the map and get your position down.
 
The only thing to keep in mind is that, as you start a map solo, certain wells and monuments that would be dedicated to other players on that map won't spawn. Maps that unfortunately cannot be trained solo are: Empire, Ascension, Passage to Darkness.
So when you find yourself really struggling with a map, want to try a new deck or just get a closer look at certain aspects you can log onto the Testserver and give everything a go in a pressure free environment. Everything will get a lot less scary once you have a couple of reps under your belt and can confidently join an Expert lobby on Live, knowing that you can handle your position.
You will learn a lot!
 
How to access the Testserver
Open your install directory of Skylords Reborn where SkylordsRebornUpdater.exe is located. Now, instead launch the game with LauncherTest.exe and you will connect to the Testserver. You will have to make a new account specifically for this server.
This is a separate account and doesn't interact with your regular Live-server account. As such, progression with Achievements or anything won't carry over to the Live server. Speaking of which, on the Testserver you get 100m gold and BFP as well as all cards fully upgraded (may need to relog once to receive everything). Every now and then you might even catch a glimpse of a yet-to-be-released card!
 
Happy testing!

And then they took it away.  I remember driving to Best Buy to get copies of the game for $4 a piece on sale and bought like 40 of them over a few months, cleared out multiple Best Buys.  Had that baller Shadow, Shadow, Ice Nature build though with that one shadow dragon and some heals mixed in and Overlord and Harvester.  I was so mad when they stopped the servers.  Glad you guys brought it back, just found out about it, downloading it rn, going to give it a shot.
 
Cheers!

Greetings people of the sky
I hope you all read the last community update.
There is a section about an awesome community map, which was substantially enhanced and nearly made it into the official story.
While it did not make it in to the official lore – Why not make an event for the map like we did for other awesome community maps!

Results / winner
https://forum.skylords.eu/index.php?/topic/11734-2p-pve-event-save-energy-to-restore-lyr-until-21072024/&do=findComment&comment=108059
 

Map Trailer


The challenge & ranking:
The map is called "Restoring Lyr V2", so lets save Lyr by "saving up".
The Team which spends the least amount of energy on cards receives the highest ranking.
(abilities, repair, orb and well costs are ignored in the final score)
For the event use Advanced difficulty.

How to check the score & how to join:
 A new tab has been made on my website named "EVENT". -->  https://t1421.de/
You can upload your replay there and it will tell you current score, as well as your current ranking in comparison of those who joined already.
(Every team will get an alias)
You can upload as many replays as you want. The website will always keep your best run for the rankings.

In conclusion:
Map:                      Community map: “Restoring Lyr”
Difficulty:               Advanced
Goal:                     Use the least amount of power to play out cards
Replay:                  Upload replay here
End date:              21.07.2024 23:59 CET
Winner Stream:    26.07.2024 19:00 CET at https://www.twitch.tv/ultralord_t1421
How to play the map:

Prizes:
(per player)
1st Place: 5 Boosters + Both new cards + Harvester

2nd Place: 4 Boosters + Both new cards + Amii Monument
            
3rd Place: 3 Boosters + Both new cards + Cluster Explosion [R]
                        
4th Place: 2 Boosters + Both new cards + Thunder Wagon [R]
                                    
5th Place: 1 Boosters + Both new cards + Raven Archwalker
                                                
Places 6 to 10: 1 Booster + One of these cards Oracle Mask [R], Moloch, Ashbone Pyro, Church of Negation, Nox Carrier [P]
 
You can join with as many teams as you want, but you will only receive the price of your highest ranking.
The prices from your other placement will enter a random draw for all players. (Added 18.07.2024)

Big thank-you to:
SLR-Team                 For 40xBoosters, 10xSwarms and 10xIcespiks
@Kayrie               For helping with Trailer and Test runs
Anonymous             For the cards 2xHarvester, 2xAmii Monument, 2xCluster Explosion [R], 2xThunder Wagon [R], 2xRaven Archwalker,
                                                      2xOracle Mask [R], 2xMoloch, 2xAshbone Pyro, 2xChurch of Negation, 2xNox Carrier [P]
@Maze                As always, my page would not work without the SMJ-API
@Potato_Hoarder For Proofreading

Some information about the map:
If you want to host an event yourself, contact our Event Organizer @Metagross31
I hope you all in join the "small scale" event 🙂
See you in the forge fellow Skylords
Ultralord

New featured community map is already half-step to new campaigns wooo!

Greetings Skylords!
A new month; a new Community Update! It's time to bring you up to speed with everything going on in Skylords Reborn!

• Update regarding antivirus programs flagging Skylords Reborn as unsafe

Last month we informed our players of issues regarding Anti-Virus programs flagging Skylords Reborn files as unsafe, preventing the launcher and installer from working correctly. Because the issues are still ongoing, we'd like to take another moment to talk about the situation. 
Many players have been confused why the issues are now popping up, 3 years after release. While we can not confirm our theory due to AV-programs being vague about their reasons for flagging files, one theory we have is that experimental features regarding replays and SMJ export collection we rolled out a while ago triggered the AV response. This feature would allow players to directly go into their folder to find their replays. This might have triggered the AV response but, sadly, reverting the changes does not suddenly remove the unsafe flag. AV-programs also tend to share their databases, so even though we reverted the changes, the damage was already done and multiple AV-programs now continue to flag SR-files as unsafe. 
It is worth noting this situation is not unique to Skylords Reborn, as we have also seen reports of the popular game "Palworld" undergoing similar issues. While unrelated to our current issues, it goes to show Anti-Virus programs are very complicated and time consuming to deal with, even for bigger companies.
We are currently trying to get our files marked as safe again by getting the right certification, but these steps take time. While we are still hard at work to fix the issues, the rest of our team continues their work on new content, like the new patch we have released this weekend. We had hoped to fix the AV issues before its release, but also don't want to hold back our content due to the uncertainty of the situation.
This currently leaves players with two options to play Skylords Reborn; wait for the situation to resolve, or manually exclude the files from your AV-program. 
We have seen some confusion regarding the issue also happening to players without a dedicated Anti Virus program like Norton or McAfee. Please note that Windows automatically comes with the AV-program Microsoft Defender, which also blocks the installer/updater. 
While we continue to search for solutions for the current situation, here is a explanation on how to add an exception to Microsoft Defender. Excluding the Skylords Reborn folder (not just the file) should also prevent players from constantly having to manually exclude the file every time we patch the game.  
We have also updated the Forum-post to include this explanation on how to add an exception to Microsoft Defender, the default Anti-Virus program that comes with Windows. 
We know asking players to add an exception to their Anti Virus is a big ask, and we are still trying to solve the problem in a way that does not require this. We hope for your understanding and patience, this situation is affecting us all. 
 
• New Patch Release

On to a brighter note! Our latest content patch released this weekend, bringing with it two new cards and a ton of balance changes. The majority of these changes are to tier 3 units, making sure the game is in a great place to explore our new campaign maps scheduled for later this year.
Balance changes include long awaited ones like the Colossus rework. Other notable changes are found on Lost Dancer and Banditos, but with so many changes, we highly suggest you check out the patchnotes for the full list of adjustments. 

This patch also brings two exciting new cards for the Frost and Nature factions. 
The first new card is Icespike. 
Icespike can apply a weak 800-strength Ice Shield to up to 5 allied units. This shield can be strengthened up to 2000 total strength by Ice Age. This gives Frost T3 a new sustain option in addition to Ward of the North. Icespike will also freeze any unit it attacks on contact. This kind of auto-attack CC is common among NPC enemies, but as of yet it is not a feature of any player card. We thought this was thematically fitting, turn enemies to ice while using ice to protect allies, and it makes the unit a bit more interesting than being just a walking Ice Shield generator.  
We also have a short Card Spotlight video showcasing the card:

Our second new card is Swarm. 
While Nature decks have a lot of flexibility, one of Nature's persistent weaknesses is buildings. None of Nature's damage spells affect buildings and the faction lacks long-range siege abilities that would allow players to target important buildings in the backline. While we have tried multiple solutions to this problem that were not just adding a Nature version of Earthshaker, we also recognized that Nature does need a specific anti-building spell. Still, we wanted to give this spell a unique twist that fits the Nature faction and so we settled on a spell which spawns burrowers unconditionally, allowing you to directly target buildings with siege bugs.
We also have a short Card Spotlight video showcasing the card:
 
There are also some nice quality of life changes in this patch. For example, you can now use the text search in the achievements window to look for missing maps and cards. For example, if you search ''Crusade'', it will return all achievements related to the PvE map Crusade that are still incomplete. 
We have also added more information to logs when getting errors or crashes, which should help us better diagnose the cause of game instabilities. If you run into any issues, the best way to reach us is through our discord. 
We hope you will enjoy the changes this patch brings, be sure to share your feedback! 
 
• PvP Maps

While the majority of our map department is finalizing new campaign maps, we did not forget about the PvP players. The latest patch brings a long requested change to the map Uro: the removal of the fortification walls that led to many heated arguments. 

The Skylords Reborn team has been tweaking the official PvP maps since release, and doing so resulted in a good understanding of what makes a good PvP map. We are therefore excited to announce we have started work on our first brand-new PvP map!
While terrain and minimaps are still subjected to change, we asked RadicalX to share design thoughts about the map:
Hey everyone, I am very excited to share a few thoughts on our upcoming PvP map project.
We want to create a unique theme, that isn't already covered by the existing map pool. Therefore, our new map will feature a teleporter, providing lots of unexplored possibilities to play out the game. It will cover a large diagonal and unlocks new possibilities to outmaneuver the enemy. That said, its importance is also affected by player choices. You can always choose to expand towards safer areas in the early game and avoid the fast paced teleporting area.
Our main goal for map balancing is to create different viable approaches for each playstyle and faction, while providing a fun experience with room for a lot player interaction. Terrain and resource locations are supposed to be meaningful (balancing spell efficiency with choke points, map control relevance, late game economy) while preventing disruptive strategies, which proved to be troublesome on existing maps (T1 exploits, long range cliffing, aggressive walls).

We will share more details once the core design is finished.
 
• New Featured Community Map

Some of you might be familiar with the map "Restoring Lyr". This map dates back all the way to 2021, and has seen numerous changes and tweaks by multiple map designers since then. We even set out to turn it into the first official new Campaign Map, going as far as sketching ideas for the loading screen, and do a test recording for the loading screen introduction. After a ton of hiccups in the design process, we ended up scrapping the map as an official campaign map candidate, and instead moved onto Unexpected Visitors and Into the Jungle as our new candidates, but many of us found it a waste to discard all the progress that went into designing and balancing the map. 
We are therefore happy to announce Restoring Lyr saw another batch of changes, including a visual rework and some balance tweaks, and can now be played as a new Featured Community Map. 

This map tasks two Skylords with a mix between Defense and Offense, and will be a fun and challenging experience for Skylords eager for new PvE content. A big thank you to everyone who worked on the map over the years. We hope players will give it a try, while we finalize our official campaign maps. 
We would like to remind you that you can also complete quests and earn gold + BFP by playing community maps. 
 
• Events

We are currently understaffed in the Event Department, which has become clear by the lack of events the last few months. If you are interested in helping out, please consider applying for the Event Manager position. In the past, many non-staff players have also come up with fun events, so please note that you are not required to join the staff to host an event. 
• Host your own tournament / event
Want to host a tournament or event? Please reach out to our Event Organizer @Metagross31. We can help you out with various topics and are glad to discuss potential ideas. We can also sponsor the prize pool for your event. If you have a cool idea for a PvE event, or want to host a PvP tournament, please don't hesitate to reach out to us, we will gladly assist you.
 
Current events
 • SECOND PHASE IN PROGRESS - PvP AI programming contest
We are gathering players for a new type of event. Get ready for an AI Programming Tournament, where the submitted programs will face off in an epic showdown to find the ultimate AI strategist! More information.
 
 
• Contribute to Skylords Reborn

Skylords Reborn is a community-driven project fueled by the passion and dedication of over 50 volunteers. We are always on the lookout for like-minded individuals. If you have a passion for gaming, programming, design, or marketing, we invite you to have a look at our open positions!
Sadly, both of our artists are located in countries that are effected by war, so our art output is currently heavily impacted. If you are a talented artist able to draw in the BattleForge art style, please contact us. 

Don't have time to formally join the staff, but still would like to help out? Please check out this guide on how to support Skylords Reborn as a community member.
 
• In Conclusion

That's all for this Community Update! We appreciate you taking the time to read through it.
As is tradition, we're including a scratch code as a small token of our appreciation for your support.
The code will reward you with a General booster: ICES-PIKE-ANDS-WARM
The code is valid until August 1st, when we will bring you another Community Update. 
We're always looking for ways to improve and value your feedback. If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, please don't hesitate to share them with us. We'll be back next month with more updates on our ongoing projects and upcoming features.
You can also sign-up to our e-mail newsletter here.

Archive
• Skylords Reborn Documents (Deep Dives, Behind the Scenes, PvP Guide)  
• Overview Community Updates
• Community Update June 2024

Responsible members of the Skylords Reborn team recently met to discuss possible changes to campaign maps. What is outlined here are the proposed changes to the map King of the Giants. These changes are not final and are only proposed. As a warning, other map projects such as more RPvE presets and Defensive RPvE have a much higher priority for our team. As such, these, or any campaign map changes, may not happen for a very long time. 
Some changes here are firmer than others, all italicized proposals have accompanying explanations for why we are considering them, but they are the most tentative of all the proposals.
Proposed Changes:
1.    Add a timer when Rogan arrives, indicating that destroying all the walls will speed up his arrival.
2.    Fix the broken artifacts and make them more worthwhile to use.
3.    Make it worth it to free the Midwinter, such as potentially moving the Amii Screaming Stone to the top left camp before the Amii gates, so the Midwinter isn’t perpetually behind both Rogan and Jorne. We could also make the Midwinter substantially more powerful.
Right now, many of the “powerful artifacts” scattered about the map meant to assist the player in guiding Rogan safely to the Rage Gate Tunnel do not work and others, like the teleport artifact, hinder the player by teleporting Rogan backwards. The idea would be to improve the current artifacts by potentially changing their effects while making interacting with them worthwhile to the player.
Additionally, there is a Screaming Stone to call the Midwinter in the top left part of the map whose only purpose is to give the player more PvE experience. We would like to consider ways to make the Midwinter more worthwhile to take the effort to summon.

King of the Giants 1: Screaming Stone north of the Amii gates.

Finally I got one too 🤣

Here is the legendary Forumpost of MrX-Link. Only for memory purposes.
Also shout out goes to InsaneHawk at this point to revive BF and start Skylords Reborn.