What the first season actually contains
Season 1 is called Soul Hunt, and in the client it appears as a task track — S1: Soul Hunt — split into four stages, with six named challenge chapters running alongside it: Flames of War, Hunt the Corroded, Judgment in the Mist, Feast of Flesh, Everlasting Bloodflame and Path of Destiny. That structure is the part of the season you can engage with today. The stages gate the season's progression; the chapters are the harder, optional objectives sitting on top of it.
The season also carried a batch of permanent additions that arrived with launch rather than as a later drop: the Polearm and Shield weapon family for the Withered Knight, Holy weapons dropping from map bosses, Cataclysm difficulty on Brandrgarde, the Collection Pedestal in camp, and the ladder and tier rewards attached to Path of Glory. Those are not seasonal content that expires — they are the version the game shipped at.
What sits above all of it is the narrative frame the developers call the Fate Chart. It is the story wrapper for Soul Hunt rather than a system with rules, so treat it as flavour and read the task list for the actual requirements.
The pass is free, and unlocking it takes seven days
The Season 1 battle pass is the Slumbering Contract, and the developers confirmed before launch that it is completely free. There is no paid track to buy alongside it and no premium tier gating the good rewards. Instead of a purchase, it has an activity requirement: the pass unlocks after seven cumulative login days. Cumulative, not consecutive — you are not restarting a streak if you skip a Tuesday.
The renewal rule is the part worth planning around. Staying active carries the free pass forward, so a player who keeps logging in gets the next season's pass without paying for it either. That makes seven scattered logins over the opening weeks of a season the single cheapest thing you can do for your account, and it costs nothing but the launcher.
Real money in this game buys cosmetics, not the pass. Fate Coin is the cosmetic currency — the Deluxe edition includes a block of it — and Soul Coins are earned rather than sold, arriving through login rewards and event distributions. If you are trying to work out what a purchase actually gets you, the split is that clean: cosmetics are bought, progression is played. The camp's Stardust Altar sits on the same cosmetic side of the line.
Working the stages and the challenge chapters
The four stages are the spine, and they are the part most players will finish without effort simply by playing. The six challenge chapters are where the season asks something specific of you, and they are worth reading before you queue rather than after, because several of them push you towards content you would not otherwise pick — a particular enemy type, a particular map, a particular kind of objective.
The efficient approach is to stack them rather than chase them. Look at which chapters overlap on the same map and region, then plan one route that satisfies two or three of them, instead of running a raid per objective. The interactive map is the tool for that: filter to the region you are entering and check where the relevant enemies, treasure and task markers cluster before you commit to a loop. Bear in mind that nearly every marker is a possible position rather than a guaranteed one, so plan a route, not a checklist.
Take the pre-run brew on any raid that is carrying season progress. Even the free tier of Victory Wine is worth the tavern trip, because the affixes it adds can push one of your existing affixes over a breakpoint you were already close to. It costs nothing at the first tier and lasts the run.
Soul Harvest and the Soulgnawer are announced, not live
Soul Harvest is the season's themed gameplay mechanic, and the Soulgnawer is the elite tied to it. Both were announced before launch with an explicit note that they would roll out progressively after release, and no date has ever been given for either. As of 5 August 2026 they have not appeared, and no post has narrowed the window.
There is a visible trace of the plan already in the client: the map's filter set includes a Soul Hunt context alongside the ordinary ones like standard matches, loose loot, task objectives and extraction events. That tells you the season content is intended to appear as a distinct raid context rather than as a separate mode, which is useful for setting expectations — but it says nothing about when, and nothing about what the Soulgnawer does.
The same caution applies to a promised client update. A post on 1 August said an update was coming the following week that would enable Dried Flower Knot drops and open the Mist Lord in Einherjar Mode, with a stated higher chance of Holy weapons or Holy forging materials. That update had not shipped as of 5 August. Anyone telling you how to farm Einherjar Mode today is describing something that is not switched on.
The Ancestor Tree, and what has not been said about it
The Ancestor Tree was announced as a Hallowgrove-exclusive addition arriving in the Season 1 mid-season update. That is close to the entirety of the public information. No date has been given, no mechanics have been described, and no rewards have been named.
An Ancestor Tree marker type does exist in the map legend, which is consistent with the announcement, but a legend entry is not a mechanic. Descriptions of how the Ancestor Tree works, what it costs to use or what it drops are circulating, and none of them trace back to a source.
If you are budgeting your season around a mid-season spike in activity, plan for it to land somewhere in the middle of the season and no more precisely than that.
What else Season 1 promised outside the pass
Several quality-of-life commitments were attached to the season rather than to the pass. A dedicated gem warehouse with stacking and filtering was promised in time for Season 1, which matters more than it sounds — gem clutter is the most common cause of a full warehouse. Expanding the personal warehouse further is only described as under consideration, and the developers stated directly that material stack limits will not be raised. Plan your storage around that answer rather than waiting for it to change.
On the Auction House, the season's focus is One-Click Buy and a Quick Purchase option at the Loadout Station, with a proper search function explicitly pushed to later. Automatic restocking was removed. If your workflow depends on browsing the auction like a database, that is not what Season 1 is building.
Two things people keep expecting are not coming this season. There is no salvage or disenchant system, and the developers said none is planned at this time — so gear you do not want goes to a vendor or to the auction, never to a scrapper. A Duo queue has also been ruled out for the near term, and a pure PvE mode was described as in the works but far off.
How long a season runs, and what to do with that
Season length has been described as currently considered to be three to four months. The wording matters: that is a stated intention, not a published schedule, and no end date for Season 1 exists anywhere. The developers also said roadmaps publish toward the end of each season, which means the concrete picture of what comes next tends to arrive late rather than early.
For planning, treat the season as a three-month floor. Camp levels, gear you actually raid in and the seven login days all pay out inside that window with certainty. Anything whose payoff you are imagining after the season boundary is a bet on rules nobody has published, and what a seasonal reset changes is still an open question with a developer statement but no detail behind it.
What to do next
Get the seven login days banked first — it is the highest-value, lowest-effort thing in the season, and it carries your next pass too. Then look at your camp buildings and decide which two you are pushing this season, because those pay every run for the whole three to four months regardless of what the chapters ask of you.
After that, read what a seasonal reset changes before you start hoarding anything, and the difficulty ladder if the challenge chapters are pushing you into content that is beating you.