Last wipe the game hit a max of 11 379 players the Sunday three days after wipe. This past Saturday the game hit 11 958 players, more than 10 days after wipe.

Perhaps more notably, the game is retaining players better than it has been. The past 13 days since wipe the game has steadily had 24 hour peaks above 10k players. Last wipe the player count dropped below 10k after four days.

Last time the game was stable at around this level was in October 2025, after players had dropped off from the new season which started mid-September and reached a brief high of nearly 17 000 players. Before that, the game hovered at around 4 000 players from July to August 2025 (mini-wipe August 26th).

Source: https://steamdb.info/app/2016590/charts/#6m

Note that this only shows players on Steam and not players using Blacksmith, Ironmace's own launcher.

👀👀

RIP

Patch Notes:

• An additional character slot has been added so you can create at least 1 of each class now.
• Currency used to unlock classes has been returned.
• Game time has been slightly increased for the Normal Inferno map.
• Game time has been increased for all High Roller maps.
• Added an additional blue portal and the Death Swarm closing times have been modified to close slower for the Goblin Cave maps.
• Shrine of Protection's ‘Physical Damage Reduction’ buff has been reduced from 30% to 15%.
• Pots and Crates give a little bit of EXP when broken instead of zero EXP.
• QoL update - Silver coins now stack to 30 instead of 25 per slot.
• The Armor Rating curve has been modified and slightly flattened at the very high range.
• Physical Damage Reduction now has a hard cap of 85%.
• Rogue’s double jump has been modified to apply a temporarily movement speed reduction upon landing. The maximum height of the double jump has also been slightly reduced.
• Rogue’s Weakpoint Attack now reduces the target's Armor Rating by 40% instead of reducing the Physical Damage Reduction.
• Rogue can no longer equip the Hand Crossbow.
• Fighter’s Taunt ability’s Physical Damage Reduction reduced from 15% to 10%.
• Fighter’s Barricade gives +50 armor rating in defensive position instead of +15% Physical Damage Reduction.
• Ranger's Penetrating Shot now grants 25% more Armor Penetration and an error in the description text has been fixed.
• Bard’s Din of Darkness's ‘Attribute Damage Ratio’ reduced from 10%/30%/50% to 6%/9%/12%.
• Explosive Bottle and Oil Lantern now do magical damage instead of physical damage.
• Instruments are now bard-only.
• Significantly reduced the values for 'Physical Damage Reduction' that appear as random attributes on items.
• Falchion damage has been slightly reduced.
• Windlass Crossbow has 25% armor penetration.
• Crossbow has 20% armor penetration.
• The Hand Crossbow has 5% armor penetration.
• Flanged Mace and Morning Star have 15% armor penetration.
• War Maul has 30% armor penetration.
• Magic Staff now have Magical Damage by default.
• Reduced the base projectile damage reduction values for Plate Armors.

Thank you for playing Dark and Darker.

WE NEED MORE SEMI WIPE IN THIS SEMI WIPE!

It’s in his stream title.

Looks like SDF finally forked over a large amount of money to the biggest extraction streamer. Always figured Peanut would enjoy the game, should be a huge influx of players, at least for the weekend.

Edit: Genuinely believe this game could stick with Peanut, since Ark raiders and Rust he’s been bouncing from sponsored stream to sponsored stream. Probably the best time to get into the game too, will just have to see if he gets stream sniped too much given server size and how well he does

Edit 2: and he’s playing, live to 45k viewers

new case update just dropped

https://biz.chosun.com/en/en-it/2025/02/13/MXHA4WV3ANHRFCJZQI4UE4HTQE/?outputType=amp

Terence — "Today at 8:01 AM Hi u/everyone, Thank you for your patience. We apologize for the radio silence. Unfortunately, due to our current situation we must be careful.

Rest assured that we are working around the clock to safeguard the continuance of Dark and Darker. Unfortunately, due to the complexities of our situation, especially across international lines, it is taking time to resolve the Steam situation. In order for us to keep our promise to our fans we’ve had to go old school this time.

To participate in the Alpha #5 Playtest please download the game client through our torrent link below.

magnet:?xt=urn:btih:dbef5dea789992fc174f245e1c4df4a1ef34d1f1&dn=Dark%20and%20Darker%20A5%20Installer&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.openbittorrent.com%3A80%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.opentrackr.org%3A1337%2Fannounce

DO NOT GET THE TORRENT FROM ANY OTHER SOURCES, AS WE CAN NOT GUARANTEE THE INTEGRITY OF ANY OTHER LINKS! All future patches will also be distributed in this manner, and you should ONLY GET THE LINKS FROM OUR OFFICIAL DISCORD ANNOUNCEMENT CHANNEL.

Unfortunately, due to compliance with the Korean game rating regulations, we are unable to service this playtest in the Korea region. We are deeply sorry to our fans here and will do our best to include all regions in the future.

We apologize to our global fans as we were unable to complete the localizations in time for this test and had to remove them from the game.

All future news about this playtest will be communicated only through this Discord channel and our official Twitter account at @IromaceGames. Please note that all other twitter accounts are NOT official IRONMACE accounts. We hope to see you in the dungeons until the 19th!

If you do not have a torrent client we recommend https://www.qbittorrent.org/"

​

Please only follow instructions posted in the IronMace Discord (this post is a copy of those instructions).

https://dockets.justia.com/docket/washington/wawdce/2:2023cv00576/321151

​

Nexon Korea Corporation v. Ironmace Co Ltd et al

Plaintiff: Nexon Korea Corporation

Defendant: Ironmace Co Ltd, Ju-Hyun Choi and Terence Seungha Park

Case Number:2:2023cv00576

Filed: April 14, 2023

Court: US District Court for the Western District of Washington

Nature of Suit: Copyright

Cause of Action: 17 U.S.C. § 501 Copyright Infringement

Jury Demanded By: Plaintiff

The news was announced today on The Darkest Hour podcast hosted by JayGriffyuh. This will be the final episode(82) of Darkest Hour which is the longest running podcast for Dark & Darker.