Endgame Guide

By the endgame you've cleared the biome chain up to the Sundered Vale, you're breeding and imprinting, and your skills are climbing toward 99. This guide covers the deep systems — most of them added in the Great Rebalance (game v0.36.7–v0.36.10) — and how they fit together. For the earlier stages see the Mid-Game Guide.

The endgame frontier: the Rifts

Defeat the Sundered One (the Sundered Vale Guardian) and the Rifts tear open — three expedition-only zones past the Vale with repeatable boss fights. Rifts are the deepest Expeditions content:

Patrols and bosses pay Rift Shards, an unsellable currency spent only at the Rift Bazaar.
Each zone's boss is gated behind 25 patrol wins, then farmable.
The boss-only Riftforged set bridges the Sundered and Primal sets.
The Bazaar sells a permanent Rift Standard (+10 expedition score), a Riftbound Trinket, and egg crates for thin stables.

Guardian Heat

Farming one Guardian or rift boss over and over now heats its biome (+8% difficulty per stack, up to 10). Heat cools over time, and — more usefully — each patrol win in that biome vents a stack. In practice this turns boss farming into a boss-and-patrol rotation: interleave patrols to keep difficulty (and your losses) down. See Guardian Heat.

Forging with Blueprints

Blueprints are the endgame gear path. Find a blueprint sheet, study it in the Bank, and its recipe appears on Smithing or Crafting permanently. Forged pieces:

roll their stats (a max roll wears a gold ★; an all-max piece earns "Perfect Cast"),
live in your Gear Locker and can be salvaged back into ~half their rare materials,
are bound to you — they never drop where you die.

An average forged piece beats the best craftable gear; max rolls chase the expedition sets. Ten rare materials feed the forge, spread across the whole valley and its rifts.

Perfect tames: kibble and eggs

Idle stabled creatures lay eggs passively (an Oviraptor in the stable speeds every egg timer). Cook eggs into six tiers of kibble — feeding a tame its matching kibble makes the attempt faster and the result better, the food behind perfect-quality tames. Three new species round out the roster: Moschops (25), Basilosaurus (93, the first Delving companion), and Yutyrannus (99, the best taming-worker buff in the game).

Endgame Hunting also adds nemesis hunts — named alphas lured with surplus alpha trophies, paying a second artifact stream — and cull Contracts now reach Hunting 92.

The Tribe: Material Ages

Your Tribe camp advances through six Material Ages (Stone → Bronze → Iron → Silver → Obsidian → Moonstone), each granting permanent, tribe-wide multipliers. Founding an Age costs Age Catalysts (2/4/6/8/10 across the five advances), a building-level floor, and a bill of goods — and retires your workers and buildings for the power. Age Catalysts come from sieging the ten rogue-clan outposts (including the new Skyreach Roost and Sundered Bastion). The Foreman's Ledger auto-banks the camp stockpile so long offline stretches don't idle at the cap.

Mastery: the long tail

Late game, Mastery becomes a major power source:

Every action's 1–99 ladder pays perks at 25/50/75/99; the mastery-99 perk is now +25% output.
Each skill's pool grants checkpoint bonuses as it fills (roughly 9–13 days per skill).
Skill Mastery Milestones at 20/45/75% of a skill's total mastery grant standing bonuses — rewarding broadly levelling every action.
On Expeditions/Arenas, the mastery score perks now scale with difficulty, so they keep growing on the hardest content.

Late-game economy

Exotic Broker — a second Shop tier unlocks at 600 total skill levels or an Alpha arena win. Its Master Vault (+8 Bank slots × 49 ranks) is the reason a maxed bank holds 623 slots — one of every item.
Tool Ladders — per-skill gathering tools from Flint up to Starfall; each rank shaves 4% off that skill's action time (up to 24%).
Ancestral Monument — an Amber-priced Homestead capstone (unlocks at your first skill 99) that raises the Amber value of everything you sell, +1% per level to +10%.
Gathering capstones — eleven new level-80+ actions extend Foraging, Logging, Mining and Fishing all the way to 99.

Chronicles and the Amber Door

Completing all 40 Chronicles notes grants The Sigil — and the Sigil is the key to the Amber Door, an eleventh cave hidden in the Sundered Vale at Delving 95 (it burns a Deeplight Lantern per delve). Its unique relic makes roughly every fifth dig run itself for free. A dry streak on cave artifacts is also capped now, so the last few always come.

Endgame priorities

Beat the Sundered One and open the Rifts — the deepest expedition content and the Riftforged set.
Push forging for best-in-slot rolled gear.
Advance the Material Ages for permanent tribe-wide multipliers.
Grind Mastery — the +25% output capstone and milestones are huge late-game power.
Unlock the Exotic Broker, max the Bank (623), and buy the Tool Ladders.
Finish the Chronicles for the Sigil and the Amber Door.
Chase perfect tames with kibble and imprinting.