Enshrouded — the 1.0 guide

Enshrouded left Early Access on 15 October 2026. This is the guide to the 1.0 game: how the opening actually plays now, how building works, what the world looks like with the map finally finished, and the mistakes that cost people their first weekend.

The rule this page follows: no number is published unless it was read off the 1.0 build or an official Keen Games announcement. 1.0 1.0.0.3 is the current build at the time of writing (build 1273043, 21 October 2026). Where Keen has not stated a value, this page says so instead of guessing — and there is a section at the bottom listing exactly what is still unverified.

What this page is, and what it links to

The main guide is deliberately split. The chapters below are written. The chapters that need values only the running game can give you live as their own pages, built against the 1.0 build:

1.0 at a glance

Getting started: your first hours at 1.0

Start over — Keen says so themselves

You can load an Early Access save; it will be backed up and converted. But the Launch FAQ is unusually direct about it: the world and the first hours were reworked, and they strongly encourage starting over. If you have not played since Update 8, a fresh character is the intended experience, and it is also the only way this guide's opening chapter applies to you.

The opening, in order

1. Create the character and the world. Body type is now switchable later at the Barber

(classic or realistic proportions), so the creator is not a permanent decision. World settings can be edited later — since 1.0, difficulty presets and the Shroud push-back requirement are configurable per world.

1. Wake up in the Cinder Vessel and take the first Altar seriously. The first level-up now

triggers when you place your first Flame Altar — not when you walk into Longkeep. That one change tells you what the game wants you to do first: find a spot you would be happy to call home, place the Altar, and get the level.

1. Watch the Shroud timer, not the map. The Shroud kills on exposure, and 1.0 changed the

economy of that timer in your favour: hourglass capsules are far more common, each gives about 70% more Shroud time, and they now also drop from large Fell — so a long fight hands some of your Shroud time back instead of eating it.

1. Free the Blacksmith. Following the quest line, the second level-up is now designed to

fire when you free the Blacksmith. Every survivor you free unlocks crafting; the Blacksmith is the first one that changes what you can build and repair, which is why the game pays you for it.

1. Then start the station chain. Crafting stations are gated behind survivors and behind the

resources their recipes need. The 1.0 recipe pass deliberately shortens the early grind — recipes were reworked especially in the early game, so expect fewer intermediate steps than an Update 8 memory suggests.

1. Loot more chests than you think you need to. 1.0 added more chests to the early regions

of Springlands and Revelwood, specifically so you have gear to try and runes to upgrade with. Wooden chests can now roll silver-tier gear, legendary chance is +5% on all chests, and gold coins start dropping from chests as a Survivor trade good — which matters later, when Mei-Yin Chen sells vanity items for them.

What changed in the first hours

Building: voxels, stations and Sparkworks

The base is the game

Enshrouded builds on a voxel grid, and 1.0 finishes the job of getting restrictions out of your way: most former no-build zones are now buildable, and a new skill lets you build while flying. Your Flame Altar defines the base — its radius, your spawn, and what you can extend — so where the Altar goes decides what the next hundred hours look like.

Altars are the one genuinely scarce resource. The next Flame Level raises the maximum to 15, and Flame Level 11 takes it to 16. That is the whole map's worth of bases: plan them as outposts you will actually use, not as decoration.

Sparkworks: the headline feature

The big new system is Sparkworks, and it is not a building block — it is a logic system. You craft a set of tools and interactive props, connect them, and define the behaviour rules between them in a new 2D graph editor where inputs, outputs, connections and rules are laid out visually.

Keen's own examples, from the changelog: light switches, traps, puzzles, enemy encounters, parkour courses, battle arenas, escape rooms. Anything you can wire as an input feeding an output with a rule in between is now your call. This is the feature to look at if you bounced off the game after finishing the quest line.

What else changed about building

The world: regions and where to base

1.0 completes the map. Every biome's edge opened, previously locked dungeons unlocked, and the whole northern region filled in.

Cinder's Cradle

The new biome sits north, past the now-open gates beyond the Veilwater Basin, and it is roughly between Blackmire and Veilwater Basin in size. It has two halves: below, lava flowing through a wasteland of ruins, some Shroud-lost, some simply decayed; above, a realm of floating islands lifted by the Ancients, with their own fauna and guardians. The Shroud connects the two, and the quest line goes up.

It brings 12 new Shroud Roots, a new faction with 14 enemy types, and the game's final story content. Bring upgraded gear, cooked food and a plan — this is not a level-30 zone.

Shroud Roots and edges

The expanded Springlands, Blackmire and Kindlewastes edges add 6 more Shroud Roots between them. Roots are skill points, and at a 50 cap with a tree that resets, they are worth the detour. POI density out there is deliberately lower than on the critical path — expect long rides between points of interest, and go when you want to explore rather than when you need loot.

Higher-tier locks

Locked chests and doors on the higher tiers now need Archaic lockpicks, which start appearing in Cinder's Cradle. If a lock refuses a normal pick, that is not a bug and not a missed button — you are simply in gear that predates the zone.

Where to put the altars

• One main base, the rest outposts. Fifteen is the practical working maximum for most of the

game; 16 only arrives with Flame Level 11.

• Build on POI clusters, not on empty pretty ground. The edge regions are sparse on purpose.
• Use the new freedom. Most no-build zones are gone; the old "you cannot build here" habit is

costing you good sites.

• Do not wait for the Shroud push-back. It needs Flame Level 11, or a lower requirement set

in world settings. If you want to build in the Shroud early, that setting is the honest way.

Progression: Flame levels, altars and the unlock order

What 1.0 confirms:

• Flame Level cap is 11. The level before Cinder's Cradle raises the Altar maximum to 15;

beating the final threat unlocks 11, which raises it to 16 and lets altars push the Shroud back.

• Armour sets unlock automatically with each Flame upgrade, so the Flame is now the single

gate on your gear tier.

• Flame Level 6–9 recipes got cheaper — Electric Organs and Poison Stings were swapped out for

common resources. That was the biggest grind in the mid-game.

• Alchemical Base and the glider need less Shroud Adhesive, and **legendary items need their

runes one step later**.

What 1.0 does not give you: the actual Flame Level requirements, the recipe costs, or the per-level numbers. The changelog says things moved; it does not say to what. This page will carry a Flame cost table when it can be read off the build rather than copied from somewhere.

Skills and builds

The tree resets the first time you load a pre-1.0 save. Re-spend your points before you leave your base, because nothing you remember about your old build survives.

The shape at 1.0: one tree, three branches, twelve classes — Warrior, Barbarian, Tank and Athlete in red; Ranger, Assassin, Beastmaster and Survivor in green; Wizard, Battlemage, Healer and Trickster in blue. Classes are regions of the wheel, not locked paths, so points spread freely. Six attributes drive it: Strength, Dexterity, Intelligence, Constitution, Spirit and Endurance.

Three things moved that people notice immediately:

• Dagger skills moved from Warrior to Assassin, where they always belonged.
• Airborne Architect sits at the centre of the tree and unlocks free-flying building.
• New active and passive nodes arrived for the mage playstyles: Aerial Wand Attack, Wand

Evasion Attack, Advanced Necromancy, Totem Mastery, Blast and Cast, Puncture, Barrage and Survival Instinct. Many existing skills were cheaper and stronger.

Per-class node lists, the tier order to spend in, and the detour costs are on the dedicated pages: all 12 class builds and the Battlemage build with node-by-node verified costs.

Combat, gear and equipment upgrades

1.0 is, by Keen's own framing, the mage patch. What is confirmed:

• 9 new spell types — crowd control, more area damage, summons and utility — plus new tiers of

existing spells at every stage.

• Every spell now has an eternal version, and eternal spells and arrows can be upgraded

like gear. Running out of charges mid-fight stops being a thing.

• Skeleton summons are in, with Necromancy weapon gems and support skills. Summoned

creatures are capped, and gem-raised companions start losing health when out of combat.

• Wands get an immediately available heavy attack, unlockable evasive and aerial attacks,

and a free-aim mode in the gameplay settings.

• Melee quality of life: heavy attacks hit several close enemies, blocking now rewards the

camera direction you are facing, and stamina recovers while blocking.

• Aim assist is now configurable for ranged weapons, separately for controller snap and stick

aim.

• Enemies regenerate health when you disengage instead of instantly resetting. A boss retry

now starts with the boss still damaged — the single most useful change for anyone who has wiped on a boss at 5% health.

• Weapons had a broad stats and perks pass, Hollow Hall weapons were reworked to be strong

against the Hollow, and the Gem of Toxic Reaction went from +21% dps at level 10 to +65% at level 50.

What is not confirmed: the new numbers behind gear, perks and recipes. Every pre-1.0 build calculator is suspect until it is re-derived from the build.

Bosses

The honest state of this chapter: the campaign now ends high in the sky, against the strongest champion the Shroud has, and the fight expects level-50 gear and food. There is a new tier of enemies in Cinder's Cradle (14 types) and 37 new enemies across the factions overall.

There is no boss table on this page yet, and it will not get one invented. What is usable now: the health regeneration on disengage rule applies to bosses too, so a quick re-entry is now a real strategy rather than a fresh attempt; and the Automatic enemy-spawn setting scales spawns to party size, which matters if you are playing with two people instead of four.

Running a dedicated server

Enshrouded's server is a Windows binary with no console and no remote API — administration is a JSON file plus a restart. We run one on Linux under Proton, and the whole build is written up with the real compose file, the real enshrouded_server.json, the one port that matters (15637/udp, queryPort) and the gotchas that cost us time: Enshrouded dedicated server on Linux.

Two things worth knowing before you start: promoting and demoting players is not possible on a dedicated server in-game (the password groups work as before), and updates are a restart, not a chat command.

Common mistakes

1. Loading an old save and wondering where your build went. The skill tree resets on first load

of a pre-1.0 save. Spend the points before you leave the base.

1. Not checking which save tab you are on. Both the character and world menus have a local

and a Steam cloud tab. A "missing" character is almost always the wrong tab.

1. Leaving master volume below 100%. Hotfix 1.0.0.1 shipped a reverb bug that appears when the

in-game master volume is under 100%. Keep the slider at 100% and adjust volume in Windows.

1. External backup scripts pointed at the old save layout. 1.0 uses a new, smaller save format.

The game backs up and migrates your old saves — your script will not know where they went.

1. Re-rolling a character that "vanished" after migration. Corrupted characters were skipped

rather than migrated; 1.0.0.3 improves the migration (invalid backpack entries, a Flame Altar that was not in the voxel grid). Keen asks for patience — a skipped character is not a deleted one.

1. Expecting the old world-edit workaround. The broken world-edit button was a 1.0.0.1 bug,

fixed in 1.0.0.2. If you are still doing the "subscribe to an Adventure, then edit" dance, update the game.

1. Waiting for crossplay. Not at launch, no date. PC and PS5 cannot play together yet.
2. Trusting a pre-1.0 build guide or calculator. The caps moved (50/55), the tree reset, and

perks, gems and recipes were rebalanced. A build quoting a 45 cap is Update-8 content.

1. Spending altars like they are free. Fifteen is the working maximum until Flame Level 11,

and only then 16. Plan them as a set.

1. Assuming a dedicated server gives you admin tools. No console, no remote API, no in-game

promotion. It is a config file and a restart.

What this page does not know yet

Stated plainly, because the alternative is guessing:

• The skill-point total at level 50. The cap is confirmed; the total is not.
• The real numbers behind the rebalance — recipe costs, the new Flame Level requirements, gear

stats. These have to be read off the build.

• Which dedicated-server config properties were added, renamed or removed at 1.0.
• Whether existing damage and skill calculators are still accurate.
• Boss-by-boss tactics at the new tier.

When those are read off the game, they land here with a date. Until then, any page that quotes them is quoting something else.

How this page was made

Everything here is drawn from Keen Games' own official 1.0 changelog (14 October 2026), the Launch FAQ (13 October), the 1.0 combat announcement (23 September), the Sparkworks announcement (8 October) and the Hotfix 1.0.0.1–1.0.0.3 notes. The build and server pages linked above are first-hand: node costs verified against the 1.0 tree, and a real server running on a home Linux box.

This page is a sourced compilation, not a played-through walkthrough — the opening, building and world chapters are written from official facts and will be corrected against the live build as it is played. Say so in a comment if something here contradicts your game; that is the fastest way to get it fixed.

Sources

• Official 1.0 changelog, 14 Oct 2026 (v1.0.0.0) — enshrouded.com/en-US/news/release-trailer-changelog-everything-you-need-to-wait-for-tomorrow
• Official Launch FAQ, 13 Oct 2026 — enshrouded.com/en-US/news/enshrouded-launch-faq-early-access-reward-world
• Official 1.0 combat changes and additions, 23 Sep 2026 — enshrouded.com/en-US/news/10-combat-changes-and-additions
• Official Sparkworks announcement, 8 Oct 2026 — enshrouded.com/en-US/news/turn-your-build-into-an-adventure-with-sparkworks
• Hotfix 1.0.0.1 (15 Oct), 1.0.0.2 (16 Oct), 1.0.0.3 (21 Oct) — enshrouded.com/en-US/news
• enshrouded_server_readme.txt shipped with the dedicated server, version 1.0.0.0