Grinding Gear Games has a habit of breaking their own game just to see if they can fix it. Usually, they do. When they announced the Path of Exile Settlers of Kalguur expansion, the community expected the usual: some new monsters, a few power-crept items, and maybe a crafting bench that required a PhD to use. What we actually got was a city-builder simulator dropped right into the middle of a dark fantasy ARPG. It was weird. It worked.
Honestly, the 3.25 update felt like a pivot point for the entire franchise. It wasn't just about the new league mechanic; it was about fixing fundamental issues that had been rotting in the background for years. Melee was "dead" for a decade, then suddenly, it wasn't. Gold—actual, spendable gold—was added to a game that famously prided itself on a barter-only economy. If you told a veteran player in 2021 that they’d be managing a shipping port in Wraeclast, they’d have laughed you out of the Lioneye’s Watch.
Building Kingsmarch and Why It Stuck
The core of the Path of Exile Settlers of Kalguur experience is Kingsmarch. You aren't just a murder-hobo anymore; you're a municipal manager. You hire workers, pay them wages in gold, and tell them to go mine Orichalcum or Bismuth. It sounds tedious on paper. In practice, it provides a passive progression loop that solves the "burnout" problem many players face during the mid-game grind.
Most players spend their time worrying about "efficiency per hour." It’s a stressful way to play. Kingsmarch changed that by letting the game play for you while you were offline. You set up a shipping route to Riben Fell, you go to sleep, and you wake up to a pile of Divine Orbs. Or, more likely, a pile of rare boots with life and resists. But the potential is there. That’s the hook.
The recruitment system is where the nuance lies. You aren't just clicking a button. You’re looking for specialists. A rank 10 mapper is worth their weight in gold—literally—because they won't die the moment they step into a Tier 16 map. If you hire a bunch of low-level scrubs to save on wages, your shipments get intercepted by pirates. Yes, there are actual pirates. The Boss fight with Admiral Valerius isn't just a gear check; it’s a consequence of your management style.
The Melee Revolution was Real
We have to talk about the numbers. For years, playing melee in Path of Exile felt like bringing a knife to a nuclear meltdown. You had to use "totems"—those annoying wooden sticks that buffed your damage—just to feel viable. If your totems weren't up, your DPS was garbage.
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In Path of Exile Settlers of Kalguur, GGG finally deleted the mandatory nature of those totems and baked the power directly into the gems. Slam skills got massive buffs. Boneshatter remained a king, but suddenly, things like Ground Slam of Earthshaking were deleting screens. They increased the base damage of almost every melee weapon in the game. It wasn't a subtle shift; it was a sledgehammer.
It made the game feel visceral again. There is a specific kind of dopamine hit you get from a Leap Slam that actually feels heavy, rather than just being a movement tool to get to the next pack of monsters.
The Currency Exchange: A Lesson in Modern Design
Perhaps the most controversial and successful addition was the Faustus’s Currency Exchange. For the uninitiated, trading in PoE used to be a nightmare of alt-tabbing to a website, whispering twenty people who were "AFK," and finally traveling to someone’s hideout to swap 100 Chaos for 1 Divine.
The Settlers of Kalguur league introduced an asynchronous trade market. You want to swap your stack of Alteration Orbs for some Alchemy Orbs? You just list it. Faustus takes a small gold cut, and the trade happens instantly.
- It killed the "price fixing" bots.
- It made small-scale crafting accessible for casuals.
- It proved that PoE can have "quality of life" without losing its hardcore identity.
Some purists argued this would ruin the "weight" of items. They were wrong. All it did was remove the friction that stopped people from actually playing the game. If I have thirty minutes to play after work, I want to kill monsters, not spend twenty of those minutes whispering bots for Chrome Orbs.
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Navigating the End-Game Map Devices
The mapping system in Path of Exile Settlers of Kalguur also saw a massive shift with the introduction of the Kalguuran mappers. This is different from the Atlas tree. These are NPCs you hire to run maps for you.
You find a map you don't want to run—maybe it has "Reflect Physical Damage" and your build can't handle it. Instead of vendoring it, you give it to your team in Kingsmarch. They run it. They might die. They might bring back a Mirror of Kalandra (though they won't, let's be real). It adds a layer of strategy to your map pool management. You start thinking about your maps as resources for your employees rather than just tilesets for your own character.
What People Get Wrong About Gold
There was a lot of fear that gold would replace the barter economy. It didn't. Gold in Settlers of Kalguur is a non-tradable resource used specifically for town management and the currency exchange. It acts as a "play time" tax. You can't just buy your way to a maxed-out city with real money or traded Orbs; you have to actually go out and kill things to pay your workers.
This creates a healthy gameplay loop. You need gold to keep your shippers moving, so you run maps. Running maps gives you loot and gold. The loot goes to the shippers to be traded for better loot. It’s a circle of greed that fits perfectly into the PoE ecosystem.
Real Strategies for Maximum Returns
If you’re still messing around with Kingsmarch and wondering why you aren't getting rich, you’re probably ignoring the shipment quotas. The Kalguurans want specific things. Maybe they want 4,000 Verisium this week. If you hit that quota, the rewards are multiplied.
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Don't just send "full" ships of one resource. Diversify. Throw in some dust (from disenchanting items) to multiply the value. It’s basically a math problem masquerading as a pirate voyage.
Also, respect the disenchanting station. In previous leagues, 99% of rare items stayed on the ground. In Path of Exile Settlers of Kalguur, you pick them up, dump them into the disenchanter, and turn them into Thaumaturgic Dust. This dust is the "fuel" for your shipments. It’s a genius way to make "trash" loot relevant again.
Is This the Future of PoE?
As we look toward Path of Exile 2, the Settlers of Kalguur league feels like a testing ground. We’re seeing how players react to gold. We’re seeing if the engine can handle complex town-management UI. We're seeing if Melee can ever truly be balanced against Ranged (the jury is still out, but it's closer than it's ever been).
The league proved that the developers aren't afraid to touch the "sacred cows" of their design philosophy. They touched trade. They touched gold. They touched melee. And the player count numbers showed that the community loved it.
Actionable Steps for Late-League Success
- Max out your Tavern first. High-tier workers have lower relative wages for the amount of work they do. A rank 10 worker is more efficient than three rank 5 workers.
- Focus on Verisium. It’s the rarest ore and yields the best high-end currency rewards from shipments.
- Don't ignore the Black Market. Faustus isn't just for currency trading; his "gambling" shop for equipment is one of the best ways to get high-level bases early in your progression.
- Respec into Melee. If you haven't tried a Slayer or Juggernaut this league, you are missing out on the strongest version of those archetypes that has ever existed. Use the "Slam" buffs to your advantage.
- Manage your gold reserves. Never let your town treasury hit zero while you're offline. It stops all progress. Always do one "final run" of the night to top off the coffers.
The Path of Exile Settlers of Kalguur expansion isn't just another checkbox in the game's history. It’s the blueprint for how a decade-old game stays fresh. It’s complex, it’s rewarding, and it finally lets you be the boss of your own little slice of a very miserable world. Keep your workers fed, keep your ships sailing, and maybe, just maybe, the Kalguurans will make you rich.
Next Steps for Players:
Check your shipment quotas in Kingsmarch immediately. If you haven't been using Thaumaturgic Dust to multiply your shipment value, you are leaving Divine Orbs on the table. Start disenchanting every high-level rare item you find to build a steady supply of dust for your long-distance trade routes to Kalguur.