Torchlight Infinite Currency

The theme for Torchlight Infinite Season 14 is Tartarus, and its official launch is confirmed for October 15 at 7:00 PM PDT. Just yesterday, the developers revealed the season's key content during a preview livestream.

If you are curious about Tartarus season and want to start preparing now, take a look at this guide we've summarized from the livestream!

New seasonal mechanic: Tartarus

As with most Torchlight Infinite seasons, SS14 seasonal mechanic aligns with its theme: Tartarus. If you played Season 11, you'll find that Tartarus feels like an upgraded version of Vorax mechanic.

Currently, Tartarus gameplay resembles a board game: Caged Beasts are scattered across Netherrealm board. You must harness Clockwork Core to capture them, eventually quelling Prison Riot to earn rewards.

More specifically, you will see three zones on the board representing different options. Since Caged Beasts have a predator-prey relationship with one another, you can cultivate a specific beast by manipulating these interactions.

When a beast consumes other resource-type beasts, it levels up. Various events can occur during this process, even triggering chain reactions, which allow you to uncover further secrets.

Once a beast reaches Rainbow rank, it moves aside to free up board space, and you receive a reward for achieving that rank.

Another similarity to Vorax mechanic is the flip system: you will experience several flips, giving you the chance to double the loot when opening chests or even cause a chest to reappear.

After clearing the entire board, many chests await you. Opening them yields abundant Flame Elementium or gear, helping you progress quickly during the early stages of the season.

In addition to the new Tartarus content, Torchlight Infinite Season 14 retains Afterlight gameplay from the previous season as a core system, while introducing further optimizations.

What is Followers System?

Building upon Tartarus mechanic, Torchlight Infinite has introduced a related Followers system. Simply put, you can select specific units from four varieties of Caged Beasts to serve as your followers.

They fight alongside you in combat, functioning much like mercenaries. Followers possess their own unique skills, and you can upgrade them to enhance skill effects or unlock additional abilities.

While Follower skills are fundamentally similar to the skills you use yourself, they come with special effects, distinct bonuses or buffs, and varying skill levels.

Therefore, to make the most of this mechanic in Season 14, finding an excellent Follower and configuring the right skills for them will be crucial, potentially even giving rise to powerful new builds.

Followers typically come with an initial skill, and higher rarity tiers provide more skill slots. Top-tier skills may even feature a crafting slot, allowing you to add extra support effects to them.

New Hero Trait: The Ultimate One

Youga is one of Torchlight Infinite's classic heroes. Having previously featured two exclusive Hero Traits, Tartarus season introduces a third: The Ultimate One.

This Hero Trait allows you to use a Clockwork Core to empower a specific spell, inflicting a Confused effect. Doing so occupies a support skill slot and deploys a turret.

Subsequently, all your Entanglement effects automatically attach to this turret, enabling it to fire a barrage of projectiles or spells.

Beyond this core mechanic, The Ultimate One (Youga 3) possesses various intriguing abilities, such as corrupting spells with elemental forces from other timelines.

Consequently, the spell's visual manifestation, stat bonuses, or elemental attributes may shift depending on the specific skill used.

Youga 3 also gains a movement skill that relocates both himself and Clockwork Core simultaneously. Additionally, he can create an arena-like zone where projectiles ricochet off the walls.

Defensively, Torchlight Infinite has added a protective mechanism for Youga 3: incoming damage is either mitigated over time or distributed elsewhere. Should he fall in battle, he instantly fully recovers and freezes all surrounding enemies (with the exception of Bosses).

In short, Youga 3, The Ultimate One, is a character deeply integrated with Entanglement mechanic, with a playstyle centered primarily around projectiles.

If you want to play Youga 3 in Season 14, in addition to mastering the character's core mechanics, you will need to buy Torchlight Infinite Flame Elementium to fully upgrade your gear and boost the related build's overall power.

Optimizations for existing Hero Traits

Thea 1 had previously drawn criticism from players for being underpowered; in Season 14, Torchlight Infinite has comprehensively reworked her. Perhaps the most compelling change is the ability to modify specific talent pages.

In addition to these gameplay refinements, Torchlight Infinite has completely overhauled the visual effects for three existing Hero Traits: Gemma 2, Carino 2, and Bing 1.

New legendary gear to watch

Torchlight Infinite SS14 will introduce at least five new pieces of Legendary Gear. A standout among them is First Aember gloves. These gloves allow you to continuously apply Corrosion and, with a bit of luck, gain four additional base affixes.

Even when already corroded, these gloves can withstand the effects of deep-level corrosion, meaning you can subject them to the most extreme corrosion treatments.

However, there are also many ways this gear can be ruined; for instance, triggering Chaos Corrosion will remove one of its affixes.

Further optimizations

Beyond the new content mentioned above, the preview livestream showcased additional upgrades coming to Torchlight Infinite in Season 14, such as visual updates to menu interfaces that had previously remained largely untouched.

Specifically, starting in SS14, you will be able to view exact numerical values and their precise locations within the talent tree.

The development team has also optimized various options and drop-down menus, allowing you to save search presets or share and copy search criteria from other players.

Other changes include faster loot drop displays achieved through optimized rendering, updates to the game progression system to make certain rewards available earlier, and more.

That covers the core highlights of Torchlight Infinite SS14; as for the subtler details, you can discover them for yourself once the season officially begins!

Torchlight Infinite Season 14, The Trapped Beast of Talos, will begin in October. The official team will gradually reveal more information about the new season before its launch.

So far, the official team has only revealed a new Hero Trait and the new season mechanic, along with a few short teasers. Let's take a preview of this content and make some predictions.

Release Date

Torchlight Infinite Season 14 is scheduled for 7:00 PM (UTC+2) on October 9. The official preview livestream is set for October 9 at 19:00, when the new season's gameplay, progression systems, builds, and major optimizations will be revealed.

Official announcements have confirmed a global launch for October 2026, with the specific start date to be announced during the preview livestream. Historically, new seasons begin about a week after the preview, placing the likely start date around October 16.

Last Epoch Season 5 will launch on October 1, so a mid-October release for Torchlight Infinite would avoid direct competition with it. However, the official team has not confirmed the date yet, so the season could also launch slightly earlier. A delay beyond October 16 seems unlikely.

Season Mechanic

On September 24, 2026, the official team released Tartarus Season Teaser, which has been hinting at the season mechanic.

The actual season theme revolves around a high-walled prison called Tartarus. Players will take on the role of prison wardens, oversee the prisoners, and manipulate them as they fight against each other.

Tartarus comes from Hesiod's Theogony, where it represents the abyss beneath the underworld. It later gradually evolved into a concept associated with an eternal hell.

The official team may simply be borrowing Tartarus as the setting for the prison, or it could introduce an entirely new power system based on the concept rather than merely updating existing systems, such as Divinity Slates or Prisms.

Gameplay Predictions

As for the gameplay of Season 14, it may not have much to do with Tartarus itself. Based on the teaser, it may draw inspiration from the gameplay of Jungle Chess, also known as Jungle Chess.

The PV directly shows the prison as a giant chessboard, with the prisoners represented by different chess pieces. The pieces shown include a lion, wolf, elephant, and rat.

In Jungle Chess, the pieces follow a counter system in which stronger animals can capture weaker ones. However, the most powerful elephant can be countered by the weakest rat.

In the teaser, the rat not only defeats the elephant but also receives an enhancement afterward, suggesting that the relationship between different pieces may involve more than simple counters. Players may be able to develop a particular piece and continuously control it as it grows into a Boss-level unit.

Torchlight Infinite has previously introduced out-of-map gameplay such as SS8's Sandlord, where players obtained rewards through resource management, worker assignments, and other activities.

SS14 mechanic could be a complete map-based system similar to Mistville. It could also resemble Vorax, with players continuing to clear maps and obtain currency before entering an instance for a short battle.

However, the official team probably will not directly copy the rules of Jungle Chess and will instead simplify them. Although Jungle Chess can be quite interesting, playing a full match would take a considerable amount of time, while the ultimate goal for players is still to obtain Torchlight Infinite Flame Elementium and gear.

The Ultimate One Youga

On September 29, the official team also released a teaser for Youga's new Hero Trait, which is Youga 3. At the moment, all that is known is that Youga 3 appears as a white-haired man, with many corpses of Youga 1 surrounding his throne.

Youga 1's Trait focuses on summoning additional copies of himself to cast spells, while Youga 2 revolves around Damage over Time. Given the purple elements shown in the footage, along with Thea 3 also appearing in the scene, Youga 3 may be connected to Erosion mechanic.

However, anything discussed at this point is still speculation, and we will have to wait for the official Season 14 presentation on October 9.

Problems Season 14 Needs to Address

The problem facing Torchlight Infinite is not a lack of content, but rather poor reward efficiency, which has already contributed to significant player losses across the past two seasons.

Many players have complained that out-of-map activities represented by Aeterna, Frozen Canvas, and Mistville offer far greater rewards than normal map farming. The issue is not that these mechanics have become too strong, but that the rewards from the endgame maps have been reduced too heavily, making map farmers feel that the effort required is completely out of proportion to the rewards.

Another issue concerns the weakening of loot pets and combat pets. Even when players have invested in top-tier Level 6 loot pets or combat pets, a single nerf from the official team can cause them to lose much of their value. This has made the experience less satisfying even for whale players.

Given the dissatisfaction with Torchlight Infinite SS13 and the uncertainty surrounding future changes, many players, especially returning players, have said that they will wait and see rather than commit themselves immediately. If the official team improves ground loot on October 9, it could potentially encourage players to return.

If Torchlight Infinite SS14 launches in mid-October, it will happen during a period with relatively little competition from other games. If you have already completed the various challenges in Path of Exile or Diablo 4, The Trapped Beast of Talos could be worth trying.