Weltall

That's not really a contradiction though: (SC/Zero)

They are, but it works differently. Since nobody has provided the details from the big update yet, I might as well do so. - Risette Twinings works as a concierge for the Marduk Total Security Company, a PMC based in Ored (rather than Calvard) which is involved with the development of the XIPHA. Her job is to help clients test technology that the company provides. Basically, they're sort of like if the Epstein Foundation and a jaeger group had a baby. Risette is described as mainly businesslike but she has a playful sense of humor that occasionally peeks through. She's said to be extremely strong and fast, exceeding the abilities of top-class jaegers. She's using Van as an (unpaid) outside tester for the XIPHA and his Stun Calibur was also made by MTSC, Risette checks in with him on occasion to get reports. She fights with a pistol and a 'Blade Gear'. - Quatre Salision is a student at the University of Sciences in Basel, pursuing a master-level course despite his age. He has feminine features, doesn't like it when people mistake him for a girl and generally has an air of aloofness. His specialty is the research and development of advanced drones which can interface with the XIPHA and he works as an assistant in the physical sciences and bionics laboratory. Due to circumstances when he was young, he was taken in by Latoya Hamilton, sees her as a grandmother and chose to become a researcher to follow in her footsteps..He fights with a 'Pulse Gun' and a pair of orbal drones named FIO and XEROS. - While Hajimari already revealed (by implication) that Epstein's final disciple 'L. Hamilton' was female we now have that definitely confirmed and have a name to go with the initial. - Basel is known as the 'Engineering City' and is located in southwest Calvard. Similarly to its Liberlian equivalent of Zeiss, there was a pre-Orbal Revolution artisans guild and a university which both became the seed that the Republic's own revolution sprouted from. This guild and the University jointly founded the Verne Industrial Company with Hamilton acting in an advisory capacity. The University is noted to have an astronomical observatory and Quatre seems to have an attachment to the place. - Langport is a city on Calvard's southern coast with a heavy Eastern influence and which prospers through trade. The western and eastern halves of the city are very different from each other as a result of this and the city is said to have a red glow at night from its distinctive lighting. Aaron lives in the Eastern Quarter. - XIPHA is like the ARCUS before it an acronym, standing for eXternal Interface (for) Post Human Activation. No, we don't know what that means. It's a 6th-generation orbment, as compared to the ARCUS and RAMDA models which were 5th-gen. It makes use of something called Shards (no, not that kind) which can be dispersed into the space around the user for various effects. They're also described as 'ether fragments'. As with the last few generations, it doubles as a flip-open communication device and it has a slider that opens up to access the internals. - As a combat orbment, the XIPHA consists of three main parts: The Hollow Core that controls basic functions, the Arts Driver which determines which spells you can use and the Quartz slots which are arrayed into four Lines. Basically it seems like the Master Quartz of previous games have had their functions split between the Hollow Core (status boosting/special effects) and the Arts Driver (available magic) instead of having both functions integrated. - We've seen two Cores so far which affect your ATS and EP and have different abilities upon activating S-Boost. Aim has an A ranking for ATS and a B ranking for EP, increases the effectiveness of healing Arts and Crafts and its S-Boost power is Remedy Breath which increases healing even further and raises Arts damage and range. Mare has a B ranking for ATS and an A for EP,, does not have any listed special effects and its S-Boost power is Multiple Works which raises all the user's stats. Mare is noted to be provided by the Marduk Company and is only usable by Van. Hollow Cores also have an onboard AI which help the user (ie the player) know the optimal times to switch between Action and Command Battle. Hollow Cores gain experience like Master Quartz and can level up. - We've seen one Arts Driver named Nebulous, which is noted to grant 'mid-level Fire and Time Arts'. Arts granted are unlocked progressively based on the level of the Hollow Core. Arts Drivers also come with Custom Slots that can be equipped with whatever Arts the player wants; presumably they have to be acquired in some way first. Known Arts include the return of Chrono Drive/Break, Shadow Spear from the Sky games and some new offensive Arts named Abyss Flame (B rating, fan targeting) and Obsidia(n) Ray (B+ rating, line targeting). One of the Custom Slots is seen with an Earth-based offensive Art called Stone Crack (D rating, fan targeting) along with the single-targeting Tear. - Quartz can be set on four different Lines, each of which affects different parameters. These are Weapon, Shield, Drive and Extra. Quartz don't grant Arts but they do have elemental points similar to the Sky/Crossbell games. The points in each Line get added up to unlock Shard Skills. We've seen examples of several Shard Skills so far; the Weapon Line grants skills that alter attacks (Earth/Flare Impact add additional elemental damage to your attacks with a 40% chance of triggering, Shield Breaker has a 20% chance to trigger and break an enemy's guard), the Shield Line grants defensive abilities (Flare Resist has a 50% chance to activate a shield that prevents the Burning ailment, Rise Guard has a 50% chance to activate a CP-restoring field while blocking), the Drive Line's skills affect Arts (Chrono Boost has a 50% chance to trigger and increase the casting speed of Time Arts) and we don't have any examples of the Extra Line's skills yet but we're told they can activate outside of combat. We've seen some Quartz, enough to know that they function pretty much the same as before aside from being divorced from the direct granting of Arts. The Slots they're equipped to need to be unlocked as in previous games. EP has gone from Mirage to Earth of all elements, Strike is now Wind-based and Fortune/Luck has gone back to Time after being Space for the duration of Cold Steel. We also see a few new names in the screenshots but we have no idea what they do yet. The following stuff is spoil-tagged because it involves Hajimari material and speculation involving other games as well.

Vax has an associated system of Investiture and a way to be Initiated into it. The Spiritual Realm basically is Investiture. The two are not going to be one and the same.

Brandon has said that all instances of Savantism should have consequences but we don't know what they are yet, which is why he's been backpedaling on Wax being one. If you poke around you can find some topics where people have guessed at what the side-effects might be for other allomantic powers. We also know of one other type of Savant, thanks largely to Oathbringer. Using a Soulcaster fabrial over a long enough period results in the user's body starting to transform into whatever substance that fabrial specializes in producing. We see one person whose body is transforming into smoke (from their perspective) and other people observe ardents whose bodies are starting to transform into stone/crystal or have vines growing under their skin. So yeah, there are reasons why you might not want to become one...

Some relevant WoBs: This worries me somewhat because of the following observation. Nightblood consumes Breath (and other Investiture, but let's limit ourselves to Breath for a second). Every person on Nalthis is born with one Breath. Populations tend to grow. Which means that under normal rules of demographics, population of Nalthis should keep increasing. This in turn means that under normal circumstances the number of people with Breath on Nalthis should be growing. I can see the following possible explanations to this: Endowment can give Breath to many more people than are currently living on Nalthis. So, the exponential population growth has not yet reached the level at which Endowment's ability to award a Breath to each Nalthis-born human is seriously challenged. When it happens though, things will not go well. There is some built-in mechanism controlling population growth on Nalthis, making certain that the population stays within the limits. Nightblood's consumption of Breath makes these limits smaller, and overall may lead to Endowment's inability to grant Breath to Nalthis-born, but not for a while (essentially, Endowment controls population trends at she sees fit). Thoughts? Brandon Sanderson Just as a point you should understand, the amount of MATTER in the cosmere is finite too. As is the amount of energy. Worrying that Endowment will run out of Breaths to give is a little like worrying that the amount of carbon on Earth will run out because people keep being born. uchoo786 So just for clarification, once Nightblood consumes investiture, that investiture gets recycled? That's what I've always assumed. That it enters the cognitive/spiritual realm? Brandon Sanderson The investiture he consumes is not gone forever--it's not leaving the system, so to speak. General Reddit 2015 (Dec. 14, 2015) What this basically means for the original question is that while there is an upper limit on how much Investiture can be used at any given time, it's high enough to be essentially a non-issue and Investiture in the Physical Realm recycles back into the Spiritual Realm by design, more or less perfectly if given enough time. Nightblood seems to act sort of like an Investiture Black Hole, where the consumed Investiture gets converted into a form different from what it was when it went in but eventually gets released, similarly to Hawking radiation. Provided you could find a way to do so, you could break Physical Realm thermodynamics by drawing power from the Spiritual realm but there are limitations on the various methods we either know of or can hypothesize about. For example, compounding breaks the rules of feruchemy by allowing your output to exceed your input, but the energy that makes it possible is coming from the Spiritual Realm and you're ultimately limited by how much of that power you can shove into a piece of metal or how much of the metal you have available. It might be possible to make perpetual motion machines with Awakening (Brandon didn't confirm the specific application, just that you can make BioChromatic machines) but you'd still have to deal with friction and the amount of work done would be limited by how much Breath is required for a given device. Stormlight can provide an effectively infinite source of light but only if you have a perfect gemstone and all applications that use Stormlight to perform work also consume it or can damage the gemstones.

The confirmation that El and Nahel have the same root is pretty handy, since we know that the latter means 'the bond to divinity'. It's probably a safe assumption that the article and particle there are implicit rather than explicit, and since El is a Semitic word meaning 'God' or 'Deity' that it's also the part of Elithanathile that translates to 'He' in the capitalized sense used in religious texts. Hence, El's name basically means 'God'. I'm guessing that's something he was assigned after... whatever it was that got him stripped of the Rhythms and his old title, since I have a hard time imagining anyone making their child, literally, God. Side note, Brandon also used 'Ihel' as a word in WoK Prime, though per the quoted WoB he doesn't remember what meaning he assigned to Nahel so he probably doesn't remember Ihel either. Still, it's clearly derived from the same root and probably had some meaning related to divinity as well.

Brandon getting confused about what someone is actually asking versus what he (or the questioner) thinks they're asking has happened on occasion. This is extremely unlikely to be one of them, since he offered the very direct statement that El used to be He Who Quiets entirely on his own. If you read the WoB again you'll see that it wasn't in response to a question, it was literally just Chaos and FeatherWriter saying 'so, weird stuff going on there, huh?' and Brandon volunteering that information. There's no reason to think that he somehow confused Moash and Navani in his head when he's the one who brought it up in the first place.

Something was happening to the Sibling before the Recreance, two of the gemstone recordings (by the same Elsecaller) explicitly mention this. One implies that there was debate among the Radiants about whether they were withdrawing from humanity by intent but the speaker thinks they have evidence to the contrary. This same person mentions that some of the tower's systems are failing, again, before the Recreance. Another Radiant (a Skybreaker) thinks that Honor himself is changing in some way and this is affecting the Radiants as well. This tracks quite well with the timeline of Tanavast's death and the fact that Odium's 'tone' has become a part of Roshar. And yeah, the Sibling basically went quiet because there was nobody left who could communicate with them for thousands of years and the entities who could presumably have told us otherwise (Cultivation and the Stormfather) weren't interested in correcting the misconception.

I'm going to guess the answer ends up being 'it's not a particularly optimized port'. If you're looking at it because it's on Steam, there's not too much benefit to playing it versus the Geofront-patched release (which looks better, also has the option to turn on the full plot voicework, and has all sorts of extras) while Azure Kai at the very least has Towa and the Crawfords added in as a selling point the Geofront patch isn't able to do anything about. Though everything else about Zero Kai would apply to Azure Kai too.

I guess this means that either Kevin or the collective third protagonist group of Hajimari are going to be the true heroes that stop the conspiracy, since they haven't joined the Cult of Cthulhu fishing guild. We'll have to wait and see on the Kuro cast but I have little reason to doubt that they'll fall victim to this sinister plot.

@Val the Moofia Boss Yo, postgame Hajimari stuff, spoil-tag that. Wait, you mean there isn't a secret society for anglers already? Erebonia even has members with silly titles for themselves. It's a conspiracy, I tell you!

No, what's really odd is when someone decides to start with CS4 for whatever reason...

Given that one of the novellas is named ReDawn I'm pretty sure it will heavily involve Alanik even if she's not its focus character (but maybe she'd get a chapter or two from her perspective like we've seen Brandon do in other novellas), maybe with someone in Skyward Flight spending a lot of time around her and trying to learn about her and her people. Heck, that could work for Sadie as the newcomer of the group. Or possibly Jorgen since he's got cytonic talents and it would make sense for him to want to talk to someone who can tell him more, plus we know he wants to figure out how to follow Spensa and that means asking Alanik. Last possibility, we're overthinking the WoB and by virtue of being on Detritus, Alanik counts as part of 'the team back on Detritus'. Perhaps not likely given the stated intent of the novellas but come on, it's literally named after her planet. And for our mystery novella, if it's got to be someone in Skyward Flight, come on, it's gotta be Kimmalyn. Consider how she looks to other people and what her thought process must be like. Now consider how much fun Brandon has had writing characters like that in the past...

We saw something similar with Jasnah in OB and found out in RoW that yes, she has Plate. I'd be positive that we're seeing proto-Plate in that vision except for the fact that the Stormfather tells Dalinar that he will be a Radiant with no Shards, which to me sounds like he meant that not only would the Stormfather not become a Blade for him but that he wouldn't get Plate either. On the other hand, since we know that Plate is made up of different spren there doesn't seem to be any mechanical reason why Dalinar couldn't get Plate just because his spren won't become a Blade and Brandon kinda-sorta implies that a Bondsmith will get it at the Fourth Ideal here though he doesn't outright confirm it and RAFO'd it when someone later asked him directly. So... I do think Dalinar can get Plate and we saw a sort of early echo of that in the vision (call it Spiritual shenanigans, like Syl briefly taking on Shallan's appearance before she and Kaladin even met her) and Brandon has been vague on purpose, but it's not a sure thing.

Well, you've already decided to do so but I'd suggest to anyone else thinking about it that they wait until reading Oathbringer before picking up WoKP, because while the latter doesn't go into details it does mention things that are obviously equivalent to big reveals in the canon works up to that book, even if the names have changed. Also, while the individual characters' arcs will differ from their canon versions there are some things that Prime can spoil you on, even if the hows and whys are different. And I'll add my voice for 'it's worth reading', especially if you like seeing how Brandon's writing has developed over time. It's not as polished as WoK obviously and it has some rough bits, but I didn't regret the time reading it and would read it again.

Taravangian is still bound as the new Odium by the agreement that Rayse made with Dalinar, which is why he's looking for loopholes rather than simply declaring the whole thing moot. That said, the deal that Rayse and Taravangian made is likely moot, not because Rayse is dead (contract law has provisions for successors and we know that this is true for Shard oaths because T straight-up tells us he's bound by his predecessor's agreements) but either because Taravangian broke the deal first or because Taravangian can now unilaterally alter or void it since he represents both sides of the agreement.

Since this doesn't seem to have been answered already, Brandon says that if you were to classify atium as if it were a real metal it would be in the platinum group, that being the metal that was the inspiration for atium. Presumably it would be similarly lousy for making weapons or armor out of.

Technically it's not entirely wrong though... RoW:

F-Cadmium and F-Bendalloy could be used to reduce the amount of oxygen, food and water needed, though I suspect that the former would be more suited for emergency use than a constant thing. The amount of breath you'd need to store for even a journey of a few hours would be a lot and compounding is really the only way to get anything close to the kind of oxygen supplies needed for even (relatively) short interplanetary travel. A potentially easier way to stretch resources would be A-Cadmium, which is confirmed to be a practical method of quasi-relativistic travel, so you could use it to cut down on life support needs by having people who aren't currently needed to perform functions speed time up for themselves, assuming of course that we're talking ships that can afford to have a percentage of the crew or passengers effectively incapacitated. Though I imagine that some sort of emergency 'wakeup call' could be created with an allomantic grenade charged with A-Chromium or A-Bendalloy.

I have a feeling that the original deal between Rayse and Taravangian is null and void since the latter broke it by attacking (and killing) the former. Even if it's somehow still in effect, since Taravangian now is Odium it means he's basically made a promise to himself. I'm fairly certain he can willingly negate the agreement or alter its terms since he's now literally playing both sides, and while citing real-world law in matters Cosmere is probably not terribly useful (especially with how Intent works) it's generally understood that contracts can be amended if both parties agree. So even if Dalinar knew of the deal and tried using it against T-Odium (and doing so actually was an exploitable loophole) the new Odium could just declare an exception, agree with himself as the Vessel Formerly Known As Taravangian and close the loophole.

I've seen theorizing that Hoid may have deliberately engineered things so that he would be able to tell after the fact if something strange happened during his meeting with Odium, based on the fact that he apparently had exactly enough Breath that Taravangian excising a small bit of it was enough to drop him below the Second Heightening Hoid might not know why his memories were tampered with but he could at least have a warning sign afterwards that something important happened that he's unable to remember. Given that he practiced that speech, it's possible he even has some mnemonic trick where he intended to say things exactly one way and if he goes over his recollection afterwards and sees that he didn't, he might have some idea where in the conversation things didn't go according to plan. That's just a thought. As for why he'd still be so worried during that scene if he'd planned for the possibility of something funny happening, well, the fact that Odium is no longer held by the person Hoid knows so well and whose actions he can comfortably predict would be reason enough to freak out even if he's certain he can't be seriously harmed regardless.

Per Brandon, he'd argue that all of his names are 'true' but yes, he does have an original name. Given that all of the Shards seem to have known him as Cephandrius Maxtori, that's the name he would have used. Rayse even uses that name several times when negotiating with Dalinar making it pretty clear that's how the contract named him.

Given that Brandon doesn't like slatrification (to the point that it got removed from the ending of the graphic novels and he's stated he wished he could have cut it from ever being mentioned) the odds that we're ever getting a Realmatic explanation for how it's supposed to work are slim indeed. At one point he was asked if you could use it to transform sand into other liquids and apparently quipped that he can't answer that because he's not even sure you can transform it into water. It's likely however that if you assume the existence of slatrification for purposes of argument, the underlying mechanics would be similar to Soulcasting, probably using the Investiture in the sand as a catalyst to change the physical mass into an equal amount of liquid water.

Honor was most definitely splintered. Odium even says as much to Dalinar in their conversation in Oathbringer when he mentions that he's going to have to do a more thorough job of splintering Honor's remnants before he can finally leave the system. There's a very long but relevant WoB here where Brandon was asked about the battle between Honor and Odium. We know that Odium getting stuck on Braize was part of Honor's plan but Odium was still able to attack Honor and the latter 'went out swinging' but Brandon wouldn't call it a deliberate sacrifice. Spren can't leave because they're Splinters which means they're bound to the system where they were created. This also applies to Cognitive Shadows (who are heavily Invested) with the Returned managing to be both at once since they're a kind of CS and their existence is sustained by the Divine Breath, which is a Splinter of Endowment. In all cases however, this is something that can be worked around if you know how. Vasher worldhops, meaning he already knows how to do what the Heralds and Kelsier would so love to learn. Meanwhile we know that Odium getting stuck was intended by Tanavast, but even if he wasn't directly bound in some way he's still de-facto bound by all the Investiture he's used to create the Unmade, the Fused and raysium. He'd want to reclaim all that power before leaving (otherwise he's handicapping himself in fights with other Shards) and the process of reclaiming it has been described as 'difficult'

If they don't have steel or iron they can't 'see' but if they also have spikes granting powers like A/F-Tin they could do what Spook does in most of Hero of Ages and get around without needing sight. We also know that A-Atium doesn't require eyesight to function so it's possible you could use that or A-Electrum as an additional means of navigation in the absence of steel/iron, possibly F-Chromium too but we don't know enough about that one. But in general I expect that Inquisitors get very good at regulating their metal use so they don't risk going 'blind' in critical situations.