It has been ages since I've played Path of Exile. Every time I think about jumping in they are Ussury in the late middle of a league or it’s in the final month. Turns out there is a fresh league starting on July 26 called Settlers Of Kalguur.

My first thought when hearing about this league was “a city builder in Path of Exile?” “I have to check this thing out.” It looks like we will be hiring NPCs to do activities from mining to farming. Resources and nodes are going to be something you have to unlock.

I do rather love the idea that unlike any normal city builder game your NPCs doing the work could be at risk. There are hints of needing to keep them safe from being captured or even ransomed back to you.

It seems like not just the NPCs are at risk either. Another part of this league is setting up trade routes with ships. Those ships can also end up getting attacked. There is quite a heavy pirate theme overall in this league.

As far as being able to build the city itself. It seems while we are out and about there will be special sites that spawn with resources that need to be gathered. From mining ores to getting amber from these events. It seems like they have a bit of variety in the type of event you can get.

I hope these kinds of events will be easy to skip around if you don’t feel like doing them or are on the hunt for a certain type of resource. From what was shown it looked like some of them had to be started. While others were based within an area of where they spawned. Which I hope will make them easy enough to skip. While the former might not be as easy to skip around if they end up spawning on a choke point. I’m hoping the creatures don’t go cashing you halfway through a zone.

NPCs also look like an important part. As after certain events are defeated. NPCs need to come out and gather. It will be interesting to see how they get kidnaped or ransomed if anything plays a role when they go out to gather any resources you cleared of enemies.

It seems a big backbone of paying for things will be done in non-tradable gold. I like the idea of it not being tradable. That seems like a great way to cut down on any bots and forces the player to do more than just trade the entire league but have everything. They will have to leave their hideouts if they want to partake in league mechanics.

I just hope I don’t get some amazing NPC that I could have hired early on when I lack the gold to be able to afford them. Since the NPCs, you can hire have a cost to hire and an upkeep cost.

This seems like one of those things you could end up overdoing quickly and find yourself in a bind of not having enough gold to cover your costs. It seems there will be some requirements on your part to remain active from leveling up your town to keeping the people you hire on the payroll.

It is also interesting to see them starting to put a focus on things occurring even if you are offline. From your NPCS mining resources, you have freed to the currency exchange which is discussed further down below. This seems to be quite a diverting point from how the old Path of Exile thought about doing things.

That is perhaps for the best as I'd hate to have to micromanage a farm to produce food for my villages. Along with all the other things that will end up coming with the city-building aspects of this league.

Perhaps the biggest disrupter of this entire league will be the shipping lanes. Where you get to send out resources and if they make it you get shipped back some phat rewards. My eyes started to light up seeing exalts and scrubs as possible rewards.

This also makes me wonder the kind of impact this will end up having on quite a few things. Even more so if you end up getting some rather powerful items and an insane amount of lower-tier currencies. It’s perhaps a good thing they are going to have an in-game currency exchange.

Currency Exchange

Along with a league, they usually introduce some changes to the game as well. This one ends up being quite a huge quality of life change. It is however tied in with the league itself and the NPCs in it. As a result, it’s not being rolled out to the standard league. Path of Exile has always been one of those games where they refused to have any in-game auction house of any sort.

While sure they had an online marketplace you could list items on from a website. You would have to manually go and trade the other player. One of the more annoying things to trade was converting currency.

Towards the start of any league, trading currency is not that bad. Maybe you trade twenty-thirty of some lower-tier currency for a single chaos orb. Later in the league, it would start turning into hundreds of lower-tier currencies if not more for a single higher-tier currency.

It would even get worse than that. You could spend say half an hour spamming people with open trade orders for say trading chaos orbs for a single exalted orb. It was a nightmare you could contact dozens of people and they no longer had that currency for trade any longer since they instantly had someone contact them.

If that sounds a bit annoying you don’t know half of it. As currencies would need to be moved out of your stash tab into your inventory. Then traded with another player by going into their hideout. You then had to put that currency you exchanged for into your stash again. Assuming you even got a trade in the first place.

You many times already have your inventory filled and ready to trade and then spend the time not finding a buyer. Having to readjust how much you are trading for and attempting to find a trade again.

It was just lots of annoying and repetitive clicking. While they have stated the new currency exchange won’t be in a standard league and only in Settlers Of Kalguur. I more than welcome a change in how player-to-player currency exchanges go down.

I also really love they added a bulk move all key. So, you can quickly move large stacks from the inventory to a trade or stash. I’m a little disappointed you can’t just click to move exchanges once they are finished to your bank. That you still leave to move it to your inventory to the stash. This new key binding however is yet another big quality-of-life change that is more than welcome.

The one thing I do hate about the system they are testing out is they are requiring a gold cost to make these exchanges. Gold itself will be dropped from the league. Seems kind of silly to add such a cost unless they just don’t want a bunch of bots spamming the currency market with trades.

I can only hope that even if Settlers Of Kalguur is not brought into the core game the currency exchange is such a populator thing that they ended up doing so anyway. I can’t express enough how much I hate the current way to exchange currencies between players. I just hope the gold cost they have as a fee makes this feature not worth it with everyone going back to the old way of trading currencies.

Final Thoughts

Part of the fun of taking a long break from Path of Exile is getting to return and discover I'm quite rusty on the game and a whole lot of things went on while I was away. For now, it looks like I'm off to try and make the hard choice of which class to play as my starter in what looks like quite a unique and interesting upcoming league on Friday.

Information

The content was written by @Enjar about Path Of Exile . Unless otherwise stated screenshots are from the official Path of Exile press kit for Settlers Of Kalguur.