Hello, delicious friends. It is once again time to talk about the upcoming attractions in Fallen London.

My heating is on; my coffee is hot; the weather is miserable. I'm ready to look ahead.

Christmas

Christmas is obviously the next big event; at time of posting, December is only a few short days away. I'll get into detail about Christmas and its seasonal delights in another post very soon – but rest assured that there's a couple of new, free surprises coming your way alongside the usual treats. Until then, here's a look back at 2025, and a sneak peek at our plans for the rapidly approaching 2026.

Performance Improvements

We've devoted a lot of tech time over the past year to new features – both Agents and the new Journal tagging system were labours of love that took a lot of elbow grease to get working. We have more features and experiments that we'd like to get off the ground, but in the short term our technological focus is switching towards performance.

We're careful these days, around big events, to make sure that we have enough servers running to withstand the demand (although you do occasionally surprise us!). Some of you have told us, though, that Fallen London has been getting slower and less responsive, and some of our latency metrics confirm this. So for now, we’re going to be focusing our technical efforts on improving this. Initial investigations have turned up several leads. We expect to work on these incrementally, which will hopefully mean a gradual reduction in latency over the coming months.

As part of this work, we also hope to improve our processes and tooling for monitoring performance and isolating the causes of issues. That should in turn make it easier for us to keep latency at reasonable levels when we get back to feature work in the future.

Firmament

Firmament continues! This year we've released three chapters, taking you through the grand, orphaned Duchy of Burgundy, and to the silent bones of the Sous, settling matters of great personal and political import. In 2026 we're looking to land this dirigible and guide the storyline to its final conclusion. Chapter Seven will be the next instalment to launch, expected to release in January. Follow dreams of fire and thunder to Queeneater's Castle, a red redoubt buried in the wilds of the Antipelago.

Firmament is Fallen London’s currently ongoing major story, free to all players. It can be started after reaching Ealing Gardens through the Railway storyline, and begins from an opportunity card in London.

The Feast of the Exceptional Rose

The annual festival of masks and masked trysts returns in February! As usual, this edition of the Feast brings new companions, as well as access to past Feast of the Rose stories – such as the ever-popular Nuptial Phantasies. Keep an eye open, too, for new spouse options – what does it mean to be committed, in the Neath? Plenty of zailors will tell you that they are married to the zee…

A Crime Spree!

Candlefinder stories continue to be a hit, offering a way to keep your feet firmly on London's cobbles in an age of rail and dirigible. We appreciate all the feedback and love for the format, and we're excited to write more of them! In 2026 we're also looking at getting a wider range of voices to write these stories, and to play with format a bit more, now that it's firmly established.

Deepening Plots

We're delighted with the reception the Agents feature has had within the community. We've expanded things quickly, releasing two new Concerns – 'Honey-Dens and Dreaming', focused on Glasswork, and 'Intelligence and Intrigue', centred on spycraft – in addition to the initial release of the feature with 'Shipping and Salvage'.

Going forward, we're going to focus on deepening and developing these existing Concerns. New Plots! New Agents! Greater interaction with the game at large! It is all to play for; we're still experimenting with this feature. Expect new Little Guys to command – and more things to command them to do – early next year.

Yet! More! Survey Feedback!

The 2024/2025 Fallen London player survey was filled out by almost nine thousand of you, and has, in a very real way, shaped our ongoing efforts to improve the day-to-day experience of playing Fallen London. Thank you again to everybody who filled it out, especially if you're not in our usual community spaces; you’ve given us so much good intel to work with (enough that we’re not planning another survey for a good long while yet).

As a result of this feedback, so far in 2025 we have (deep breath):

Overhauled the Journal page to let you tag and sort entries;
Added more customisation options with new Cameos and Lodging-specific Profile Page Headers;
Offered all non-subscribers a taste of Exceptional Friendship by making the story 'Reunion' available to everybody, for free;
And undertaken a programme of small tweaks to reduce the amount of unnecessary 'clickiness' in the game, including:
- Increasing the maximum number of things that can be bought/sold at once at the Bazaar, for all the moneybags out there;
- Making storylets in Marigold Station, Jericho, and the Magistracy of the Evenlode easier to use and access;
- Adding new map labels for the Bone Market and the Laboratory, for easy access to economic engines;
- Reworking Surprise Packages to make opening them feel like a gift and not a chore;
- Adding the 'Equip Highest' button to automagically equip the best equipment for a given stat.
Released technical quality of life changes, like the ability to log in with Apple.

It's been wonderful to see the reactions to some of these changes, and we hope that they have made the game easier to engage with and enjoy. But a sinner's work is never done; although big new technical feature work is on hold while we focus on performance, there's still a lot we can do in the meantime. Foremost among these is a review of Port Carnelian, which has long been the nexus of a number of content and progression frustrations. We expect to do a handful of tweaks to this location to bring it more in line with our current writing and design philosophies in 2026.

We'd also like to make reorienting yourself in Fallen London easier. There's a lot going on, and it's possible to leave major storylines fallow for months while pursuing other goals. To this end, the story recaps for Firmament have been a handy tool to make sure everybody is up to speed, even when it's been a little while since the last chapter. We'd like to try something similar for the game's other big storylines. We'll start working on these in the new year, and will release them when they're ready.

Whitsun

The festival of eggs and curious creatures returns this May. London will be once again beset by strange eggs – hatch them, raise the curious things that come out of them. Make some of them into hats, others into pets. Ride on some of their backs, if you think that is wise.

Estival

We're taking a break from Estival in 2026.

You'll be able to get Estival tokens and to spend them, and we may include a few other things as well. But there'll be no big overarching storyline. And given the nature of Estival, it seems right to emphasise – we're not being coy, and this isn't a fake out. There will be no falling stalactite. No broken law engines. The citizens of London will not need to come together to fend off some surprising threat to their fair city. For we have looked upon our spreadsheets, and reluctantly accepted that next year we cannot do everything we might wish in Fallen London while making adequate progress on Mandrake, which we're working to bring to Early Access.

This year, we actually borrowed a lot of writer time from Mandrake to make the amount of progress we wanted in Fallen London. But games, like reckonings, cannot be postponed indefinitely. In years long past, when our resources were more limited, Fallen London often had to be neglected when we were bringing another game (Sunless Skies, Sunless Sea) towards release. Now we can do a good amount of work on both at the same time – but it does sometimes still require compromises.

We're very excited to share Mandrake with you. We hope you'll enjoy it; please bear with this small reduction to our plans for Fallen London in the meantime.

Things You Don't Expect

In a post around this time last year, we professed two goals – to be less predictable, and more mysterious. We've been keeping you on your toes; we can strike at any time, adding something weird or delightful even on (gasp) a Monday afternoon. And I challenge you to find anybody who predicted the form and substance of this year's Estival!

But I don't think we've been very mysterious. Ah well. There's always room to improve.

See you next year.