Stonewards Rings and Tomes: Every Upgrade, Every Change
What rings and tomes are
They are the roguelite layer. Between waves you spend mined resources at the forge on randomised upgrades: rings modify stats and behaviour, tomes attach an element to your attacks. Both are per-run, both come in rarities, and both are drawn from a pool rather than bought from a fixed list.
Two structural facts from the patch record:
- Rarity does real work. Hotfix 0.1.3 “reworked Ring rarity scaling so higher-rarity Rings provide stronger effects.” Before that patch, a legendary ring was not reliably better than a common one.
- The shop tells you more than it used to. Hotfix 0.1.4 added “more detailed descriptions for Rings and Tomes in the shop, making their effects clearer before purchasing them.” If you are following an older guide that says you have to buy blind, that guide predates August 13.
Every ring named in official sources
The studio has never published a full ring list. What follows is every ring named in the Steam patch notes and the achievement list — which is a complete record of the ones the studio has talked about, not necessarily of the ones in the game.
| Ring | Where it is documented | Latest known change |
|---|---|---|
| Dodge Chance | Achievement, 87.0% unlock — the most common in the game | None recorded |
| Bouncing Arrow | Achievement, 22.2% unlock | 0.1.8 added a minimum speed for bounced projectiles after repeated rebounds |
| Companion Damage | Achievement, 21.2% unlock | Buffed in 0.1.7 — increased amount gained per upgrade |
| Explosion Speed | Achievement, 12.7% unlock — the rarest ring achievement | None recorded |
| Jump Height | 0.1.7 balance list | Nerfed — reduced amount gained per upgrade |
| Knockback Chance | 0.1.7 balance list | Nerfed — reduced amount gained per upgrade |
| Life Steal | 0.1.7 balance list | Nerfed — reduced amount gained per upgrade |
| Enemy Item Drop Chance | 0.1.7 balance list | Nerfed — reduced amount gained per upgrade |
| Movement Speed | 0.1.7 balance list | Buffed — increased amount gained per upgrade |
| Sprint Speed | 0.1.7 balance list | Nerfed — reduced amount gained per upgrade |
What the 0.1.7 pass tells you
Read that balance list as a single decision rather than seven. The studio cut Jump Height, Knockback Chance, Life Steal, Enemy Item Drop Chance and Sprint Speed, and raised Movement Speed and Companion Damage.
Four of the five nerfs are what you would take if you wanted to survive without engaging: sustain (Life Steal), crowd control (Knockback), and two forms of getting away (Jump Height, Sprint Speed). The one movement stat that went up — base Movement Speed — is the one that helps you get to the mine and back inside the timer. Whether or not that was the intent, the tuning pushes toward committing to fights and to the dig, not skating around both.
The Companion Damage buff belongs to the same patch that gave the Hunter’s Companion more speed, range, health and damage. That is a coordinated push on one class, not an isolated ring tweak.
Tomes
Only two tomes appear in official sources, both as achievements, and both are elemental:
| Tome | Global unlock rate | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Melee Frozen Tome | 85.3% | Second most-unlocked achievement in the game — nearly every player gets it |
| Ranged Burn Tome | 27.8% | Roughly one player in four |
The gap between them is the useful part. The melee freeze tome is something almost everyone picks up early; the ranged burn tome sits with the mid-progression unlocks. Hotfix 0.1.7 also confirmed that Poison and Fire damage now scale with the player’s attack damage (stated for the Hunter’s Companion), which means elemental damage is not a flat add-on in this game.
Two more elemental effects are named in the record without being tied to a tome: Frozen and Poison were shown as power-ups in the April 10 devblog, and Slow and Fireball are Mage spells fixed in 0.1.3.
Staffs, and a bug that hid a whole system
If you played a Mage or a Healer before August 26 and rare staffs felt like they did nothing, you were right. Hotfix 0.1.8 fixed “an issue where Staff rarity did not correctly affect Healer healing and Mage damage.” Rarity on staffs was broken for the first fifteen days of Early Access. Any build advice for those two classes written before that date was tested under different rules.
Two more upgrade layers worth knowing
- Status Effect upgrades. Hotfix 0.1.7 fixed them failing to appear for some classes — so if a class never offered you status upgrades before August 21, that was a bug and not a class restriction.
- Additional slots. Hotfix 0.1.3 adjusted “the cost of additional slots”, and 0.1.8 fixed items being moved into dedicated special slots so those slots could be used incorrectly. There is a slot economy here, and the studio is still tuning it. A forum thread titled “Toggle additional ring slots” is one of the most-read on the hub.
What is deliberately missing here
Numbers. Stonewards does not publish ring values, tome damage or scaling coefficients anywhere — not on the store page, not in the patch notes, not in the achievement descriptions, which shipped blank. This page tracks direction of change, which is verifiable, instead of inventing magnitudes that are not.
The Late Summer roadmap phase promises “new weapons, rings & upgrade tomes” — see the roadmap.
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