Hail and well met, Elyrians!

As I'm sure you're all aware by now, it has been our custom of late to offer a glance into the fruits of our development efforts every week. Well, I happened to look around today, and I realized no on had yet posted something shiny. So I grinned wickedly and raced to the forums, knowing that I could share something with you.

Last week's look at the Neran Tournament Armor was pretty great; it was a literal "shiny!" It's going to be hard to follow up on something so well crafted, so majestic...

...but you know what's also majestic?

The mountains.

Is there anything more majestic than a towering mountain? Its craggy peaks, its steep slopes melding into fertile foothills, perfect for Hrothi vineyards. Is there anything not to like about a good mountain? Elyria has many mountains - of many different types as well - but today I thought I'd share with you a glimpse at a biome we haven't discussed much yet: the rocky mountain steppe. It's a biome you will find abutting the proud, majestic mountains that act as homes to the Hrothi.

Even though we're pretty early in the process of preparing this biome, it is already taking shape in some great ways! (We do multiple passes when developing biomes, where we work on the terrain formation algorithms, then the terrain detail materials and textures, then low ground cover, then medium ground cover, then trees and other large cover objects unique to the biome - this biome is very early in that multi-pass process.)

Stay shiny, friends!

Update: There was a request for another screenshot that showed off some of the detail at a distance. Our content team was happy to take a couple shots for me and so here's a great shot of the mountains in the distance:

And here's another shot from actually up the steppe into the mountains proper.