No Rest for the Wicked's biggest hotfix yet brings major performance boosts, adds quality of life updates, and 8 new shields

It's the one week anniversary of No Rest for the Wicked, and Moon Studios is celebrating with a beefy hotfix.

No Rest for the Wicked, the - initially divisive - new Early Access game from Moon Studios, has been available to play for one week. The developer has been diligently, and quite remarkably, releasing hotfixes almost every day since the game’s release.

Just a few hours ago, the game received its fifth hotfix, and it’s the largest one by far.

Hotfix 5 continues to address the many performance issues of No Rest for the Wicked, but it also brings meaningful updates to the game’s quality of life, and even adds new content and features.

The big quality of life feature in this one is the ability to deposit all, which will help greatly with inventory management. Now, you can deposit matching item types with one click. Default sorting has been set to sort by type, and cooking/crafting materials can now stack up to 25. As an added bonus, food can now be stored in cupboards.

Hotfix 5 brings a gift to players with super ultrawide monitors, too, because the game now supports 32:9 resolutions, though you’re going to see some visual glitches - which will be fixed in a future update.

For game balance, durability for tools and armour have been enhanced, which means the values you see will now accurately reflect the state the item is in. Whereas the last hotfix added a stamina cost to weapon parries, this one adds the same to shield parrying. The game now also has eight new shields for you to find.

Item management is going to feel less tedious. | Image credit: Moon Studios, Private Division

In terms of performance fixes, the patch notes include several CPU and GPU-specific tweaks. The gist is that the game will look and perform better at higher visual settings, but lower-end systems should also should have a better time thanks to optimisations to volumetric fog and shadow rendering.

There are also a couple of fixes to prevent performance degradation over time, which Moon Studios was able to do by improving asset handling and cutting down on unnecessary memory allocation. In general, these sort of asset unloading updates will help with CPU stuttering, such as when entering a new area where the game has to stream new content.

As Moon Studios continues to work on No Rest for the Wicked, some of the changes around stamina costs and such are bound to be controversial. That said, we’ve already seen the game evolve a fair bit in such a short span of time, so expect these areas to remain in flux for some time.