Darkest greetings Underlord,

It’s been a little while since our reveal of the new Titan mechanics in patch 1.4, and we’re sure you must be salivating at the prospect of getting your hands on that and the Heart of Gold expansion.

Today we’re going to look at one of the new Aspects being introduced in Heart of Gold – the Aureate Monolith, we also have a new short story for you. But first we have an unfortunate announcement regarding the release date.

The Bad News

In the Heart of Gold announcement post we stated that Heart of Gold would be releasing this month. However, based on the current state of Heart of Gold we don’t believe it will be ready for the original target. As such we are pushing the release back to May.

We know that this news will be disappointing to the many of you who are excited to see Heart of Gold grace your Steam libraries – we’ve seen regular calls from you for a clear and set release date.

So far we have tried to avoid being specific with our release dates on all content since release, as we feel that announcing specific dates will lead to greater disappointment if we decide that upcoming content requires more work. As a general principle we try to stick to the “done when it’s done” philosophy of development, and when circumstances have forced us away from this it has proven extremely damaging.

The good news is that this delay will give us time to further develop and polish all the content coming in Heart of Gold. It will give us another session with Richard Ridings to record more voice-over for the mentor, and give us more time with other third parties to deliver on areas such as cinematics, translation and more. It’ll also give us the chance to integrate, test and polish more features internally and make sure the campaign stands out as the best WFTO experience yet!

New Construct: Aureate Monolith

A glimmering totem of awesome power, the Aureate Monolith is a powerful construct that will certainly help you keep your coffers well stocked. Friends and foes foolish enough to fall unconscious within it’s influence will never awaken again, trapped forever as golden statues.

The Aureate Monolith is a new construct that will be slotting neatly into the Veins at the end of the neutral tree. It occupies a unique role of enhancing the result of combat by instantly turning fallen friends and foes into golden statues to be mined. It’s also capable of stealing gold directly from the earth, statues, or even your rivals.

Unassuming and Deadly!

Once placed an Aureate Monolith will project a small field around itself; any unit that is rendered unconscious in this field is instantly turned into a gold statue. Setting up killzones with Aureate Monoliths and Bombards, or other defences, will certainly provide a useful source of income.

When clicked the Aureate Monolith will draw in all gold within its radius and deposit it within your Vaults. This includes gold from wall tiles, statues, piles and even gold from enemy Vaults! Stick one of these next to your enemy’s Vaults and watch all their shiny treasures disappear from their possession. However, once the Monolith has drawn in all the surrounding gold, it will explode.

The Aureate Monolith is positioned to be used as both a defensive and offensive tool if you want to turn over a frightful profit when facing down an enemy.

Short Story: The Aureate Artisan

We know how much you loved our previous short story that released alongside the Sentinel Preview, so we thought we’d once again dive into the world of Kairos and explore the adventures of Gidro, a particularly unfortunate dwarf who is currently making his way to the southern Phaestian border.

To save space we’re going to preview the story here, but if you want to read the full version then head on over to it’s thread on the forum!

The gold dust swirled in front of him. He wobbled, his eyes watering in the heat, and squinted through the blinding orange glow. Steadying himself, he focused hard and watched the golden dust whoosh away down the tunnel and out of sight.

Gidro put one foot gingerly in front of the other, and tried not to look over the edge of the road … at the bottomless pit of lava-coloured doom. Dwarves were never meant to scale such heights. How could anyone live in this god-forsaken land? No wonder he’d never heard of Phaestus – it was nothing but a volcanic ruin!

Read the full story on our forums!

Decorate your Dungeon

Given the subject of this week’s teaser we felt that we should remind you of a little known feature in WFTO: decorative statues! We originally introduced this upon fan request when we implemented the Blood Money spell, but we feel it will have special relevance within the Heart of Gold expansion.

Nothing says evil lord like some golden statues!

To turn your golden statues into permanent fixtures with which to showcase your domination, simply cast Lightning on any golden statue within your dungeon. As part of patch 1.4 we’re adding bases to these statues to better differentiate them from the ones you want melted down for scrap!

That covers our teaser for this week. We’ll be back in the near future for more previews, so keep your eyes peeled and don’t forget to sign up to our newsletter to make sure you never miss an update!

Until next time Underlord,

– WFTO Team

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