Running Breach — Progress Bars, Strongholds, and Sky Fortresses
Breach still looks the same on the surface — touch a purple hand, the zone spreads, monsters pour out. But 0.5 stacked several layers on top of that, and the route to the pinnacle boss was replaced outright.
The currency side is covered in Raising Quality with Catalysts and The Genesis Tree.
The progress bar and Vruun
The core loop is unchanged: touch the purple hands, the Breach spreads, monsters pour out. 0.5 layered several systems on top.
- Breaches now have a progress bar. Fill it to 100% and it becomes a Stabilised Breach, spawning Vruun, Marshal of Xesht.
- The maps around The Monastery of the Keepers all contain Breach encounters, and completing them awards Breach Atlas Tree points.
- The Breach Atlas Passive Tree was completely revamped. If you remember old node names, assume most of them changed.
- Breach Strongholds contain new encounters: Breach Hives (burn walls; more walls means more monsters), Sky Hives (multi-wave, defend Ailith), and Sky Fortresses.
The actual route to Xesht
300 Breach Splinters combine into a Revelatory Wombgift, which goes into the Genesis Tree to produce a Breachstone.
But the Breachstone’s purpose is different now. It is no longer a boss key. It reveals Breach Strongholds on the Atlas — using one opens up the maps inside that domain for you to enter.
Reaching Xesht is a separate path. The Sky Fortress bosses It That Was Tul and It That Was Esh drop the Breachlord Sac. Take that to the Dreamer in The Monastery of the Keepers to open the Twisted Domain (area level 79), where Xesht waits.
The widely repeated claim that you pick a difficulty with 50/100/150 splinters at a Realmgate is wrong for 0.5 — that was the 0.3 system and it has been removed. Whether 0.5 has difficulty tiers for Xesht at all isn’t confirmed by any reliable source, so it isn’t claimed here.