VAIL Patch Notes — May 23, 2026
Aggregated from Steam, cross-tracked with Battle.net coverage on GamePatchNote.
EXTRACTION
EXTRACTION IS DISABLE UNTIL WIPES ARE FINISHED
With this update, we ran our very first major wipe. This means that everything in your stash and your EXA balance has been reset. With this wipe, we’re introducing two new major features: an Extraction based Skill Tree and physical stash with a limit.
The Extraction skill tree can be found in your Armory. You can unlock skill points by completing weekly Extraction missions, and you can spend your skill points to unlock the ability to purchase all of the gear in Extraction.
The physical stash is your entire Armory. Feel free to place Extraction loot and gear anywhere in your armory, and it will be there the next time you load the level. If you want to sell items, there’s a new machine where you can drop multiple items to sell at once. If you exceed your stash limit, you won’t be able to matchmake for Extraction. In the future, we’ll add the ability to expand your stash limit and unlock new rooms to store your items.
MINING
In addition to the Extraction Skill Tree, we’ve added a new Mining Skill Tree with a variety of upgrades to make mining and smelting more efficient. You can unlock skill points by completing weekly mining missions, and use them to increase how much ORE you get per shard, increase the smelting speed, and much more.
RANKED ARTIFACT
This update adds the long awaited Ranked Artifact queue and the start of Season 0. This replaces the dedicated Artifact playlist.
Ranked matchmaking times may be much longer than other playlists since each match needs to start with 10 new players and there won’t be any backfilling into existing matches. If a player leaves a match early, they’ll be penalized.
There are 6 ranks available: Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, Diamond, and Aeon. You can see these ranks and your current rank in the newly added Ranked tab in the Progression section of the Tablet, which also shows a recent match history. For this initial testing season, there are no rewards for achieving a specific rank yet.
NEA DLC
The ELITE Nea character and weapon skin pack includes 4,500 GEL and 6 skins: Colonist character head, hands, body, AK-303N primary weapon, NXS Hammer secondary weapon, and Kanto melee weapon.
GENERAL CHANGES
NOTE: Some of these changes were already introduced in previous updates where we had not written patch notes yet.
Added Prestige 9: Independency
Reworked the Social Hub tutorial into a selectable mission system with more detailed steps
Armory marketplace character now mirrors your movements
Tuned a variety of values related to mining to make it more balanced with the new upgrades
Added Artifact to the Quickplay playlist
Modified spawns on Reyn
Optimization pass on Citadel
Adjusted the layout of the ORE shop in Citadel
Improved the grip for the AK-12
Added validation for game files to prevent exploits from deleting certain files
Fixed an exploit that allowed players to impersonate other accounts
Fixed various exploits used for cheating
Possible fix for smoke grenades getting half stuck in terrain
AEXLAB