Weltall

Welcome to the Shard, morphee and Brian_a_mul! Odium messed with Hoid's Breath stores by removing a little bit of what he had, which affects his memory because he's using them in some way to help deal with accumulating far more memory than a human would normally ever have to deal with and it affects his pitch because that's just what Breaths do and alterations to them could mess with that depending on how many he's currently holding onto. We've known Breath can affect memory in some way since Warbreaker. There's no reason to assume Hoid will experience any other long-term effects (and we see no evidence of them in his chronologically later appearances in MB2) and anything like that would probably violate the terms of the agreement to not harm Hoid that Taravangian had to loophole his way around.

Just in case you haven't found out yet since this was a month ago... this has already been confirmed. xD

We've known for years that Hoid did not switch the blades and isn't holding on to Taln's. So no, Hoid doesn't have four Surges; we still don't know for certain who actually took the honorblade.

While interesting and there are some possible hints that there could be more involved in Scadrial's backstory than we currently know, it should be pointed out that Nalthian Cognitive Shadows are bound just like Kelsier and the Heralds; there are ways to get around that binding and what separates Vasher from the others is simply that he knows how to do it. Hoid also apparently learns the trick because we see him on Scadrial during Era 2 and that means that (unless something happens to Design in Book 5) he's figured out how to get a Splinter offworld. They're bound to Physical/Cognitive regions exactly like Cognitive Shadows are, so for Hoid to leave the system while still bonded to her means learning the trick involved.

No, what Brandon says is that some linguistic similarities are non-coincidences. You'll note that he doesn't specifically say that that particular assumption on the part of the speaker is one of them. Here's another WoB where Brandon cautions that not everything we think looks similar means anything.

It has. Specific questions about people traveling to Nalthis and having children there have been met with RAFO's on whether the children would be born with Breath but based on how Brandon answered the reverse question, it seems safe to assume that it would take a couple generations before the immigrants would start being born with Breath.

Whoops, for some reason I got my wires crossed there...

Yeah, I know that. I was reacting to the suggestion the Iriali might be part-cremling, then talked about the Sho Del afterwards. As for them, they may be fainlife but they're at least humanoid, which makes them rather more likely to be compatible with humans than cremlings.

This should also really go in one of the RoW boards since it's not really a Coppermind topic... Anyhow, WoB time: We know that the existing godmetal supply does not change properties when the Vessel changes and we have an indirect WoB which states that the new Vessel's associated godmetal would have the same properties at first but they might change over time. From the example of Harmony we know that a new Vessel can reproduce the 'original' godmetals but that they'll naturally produce their own. Harmony's kind of a special case though so it's not clear if, in the event that 'Taravangium' did develop different properties from Raysium over time, the new Vessel could choose to create the metal with the properties of the former Vessel.

Brandon has said that we're never seeing travel into the past, so it's kind of a moot point. Because of all the monkey wrenches it can throw into storytelling he decided it just wasn't happening. Whether this is something literally impossible due to Realmatics or whether it's simply so astoundingly difficult to do that we're never going to see it happen, we don't know. Given that the Spiritual Realm is simultaneously everywhere, nowhere, everywhen and nowhen, it's not hard to assume that even if you could transition into the past through it, then in 99.9999999999% of attempts you end up with every atom in your body taking a separate vacation at a different point in the space-time continuum. EDIT: Related to this, we've already seen what we think is Spiritual travel in Elantris with Aon Tia. It appears to be instantaneous teleportation (and could be used to travel offworld) and works by designating a direction and a distance. So between that and Oathgates (which either go from Gate to Gate or from Gate to corresponding Cognitive location) we have at least two methods of getting around via the Spiritual.

By the time you finish Cold Steel 4, the Geofront patch for Azure will definitely be done so you'll be able to go back to all the previous games if you have an interest in doing them. I suspect those would more than tide you over until Hajimari gets localized (probably) late next year.

We know you can use some form of Awakening on living beings since Vasher teaches the priest's daughter a trick to alter her memories (and later tells Denth that he can teach him the Commands) so it's not completely impossible that you might be able to Awaken something that's still living, but the only example we know of it involves essentially Awakening yourself. Well, the Breath-transferring Command is also a form of Awakening and that only requires the transferror's consent, not the transferee's (see Lemex and Vivenna) so that's another example, but again it's two sapient beings involved. I can't find any WoBs directly on-point but my instinct is that if it were possible to Awaken, say, a living vine like you can Awaken a rope, that Vasher would have mentioned it in his classification of BioChromatic entities. As for why it seems to work that way, I dunno, Endowment Did It. xD

I'm pretty sure that cremlings (non-sapient and generally very small) are not biologically compatible with humans. Maybe you're thinking of the Sleepless, but I don't think they're compatible with other species either, seeing how they reproduce and the realmatics of a Sleepless/Human hybrid would be storming weird. Sho Del would be more possible, but I'm inclined to suspect something else is up. Brandon did say that 'most' people would say the Iriali have non-human ancestry somewhere in their genetic tree which leads me to suspect that the non-human ancestry must be at least possible to mistake for human if there are some people who would think of their ancestry as entirely human. Since Brandon has said that Hoid and Steel Inquisitors wouldn't be considered entirely human anymore, it could be as simple as there being a few individuals with similar sDNA alteration in the genetic tree. Or if you want to go full crack theorizing, the Iriali ancestry includes one or more dragons, who can assume human form and who are known to have some metallic features to their appearance even when shapeshifted. Okay, Frost's eyes are described as silver rather than gold but throw in some genetic shenanigans and it could explain the Iriali's metallic gold hair.

All we know for sure is that Braize was definitely not one of the worlds and neither was Ashyn. We know that Odium manipulated the Ashynites into experimenting with the Surges and Ishar was the first person tricked into doing so, per RoW. Questions about whether the Iriali spent time on Taldain, Scadrial or Nalthis have all been met with RAFOs. We know that most people would say they have some nonhuman ancestry which gives us at least some information that one world they spent time on must have had a non-human but biologically compatible species. Of course, that's most species so it doesn't tell us that much. About all else that we know is that their belief in the One has echoes of the Shattering but there are more recent events (that they don't really remember the details of either) which are more relevant. Brandon has said that it's a story we should expect to see more of as we get more space travel.

Firstborn predates Defending Elysium, makes no mention of cytonics and has a means of FTL communication and travel called klage which is not instantaneous for travel unlike cytonics. So no.

Humanity first arose on Yolen. Scadrians were created based on the Yolish humans and the planet itself was modeled after the non-fain bits of Yolen, which is why it's the Cosmere's Earth-analogue. Khriss mentions all of this in Arcanum Unbounded and we've had WoBs saying the same things before then. Most other groups of humans predate the Shattering though it's not clear whether Adonalsium settled groups of humans from Yolen or if they were created in-place based on the Yolish template (or a mix of both) but we know for sure that almost all worlds in the Cosmere were inhabited before the Shattering. The majority of Rosharan humans originally came from Ashyn, though some like the Iriali were later arrivals from... somewhere else.

As mentioned, Hoid held a Dawnshard at one point, it was doing weird things to his aging in Dragonsteel Prime and even though he's no longer holding it, it seems to have left permanent aftereffects not unlike a Sliver. It's definitely more than something like atium compounding because that actually has limitations while Hoid's immortality (so far as we know) does not. The greater portion of a body regrows the remainder. If by some method you end up in exactly equal parts your soul randomly picks one and you regenerate from that half. We have other WoBs that make it clear this applies to beheaddng as well. Regarding the limits of healing, as long as you're in the process of healing before something kills you what happens to your body is pretty much irrelevant, which we see with Miles surviving things like a shotgun to the face or dynamite at zero paces.

I'm hesitant to read too much into early gameplay footage that's been created for demo purposes since it's usually missing important elements or has had the difficulty cranked down to better show off whatever the devs are trying to, rather than to give an idea what a typical segment of gameplay will look like in the final product. Like in this footage you can see all the Crafts have a CP cost of zero, which means it's pretty clearly test content. Actually I'm inherently suspicious of almost all images Falcom releases and not just early video, since they have a tendency to alter details to show things that never happen in the actual games by taking characters from one part of the game and a location from another and mashing them together. Case in point, CS3 pre-release art showing Sara apparently tailing Lechter through the streets of a city. The Sara art is taken from the right part of the game (broadly speaking) but she's actually following somebody else, and in a somewhat different location. Above comments aside, since there is a realtime system where we can run about and position ourselves freely before attacking, it makes some sense for the Command Battle system to allow more freedom of movement as well. It's equally likely that the enemy will be able to take advantage of this as well, maneuvering so that self-centered or line-targeting Crafts will be more effective. We'll just have to wait and see how it all plays out in the end. Meanwhile now I want to see Feri and Aaron footage so we get some idea what Crafts they're going to be working with. Aside from some tidbits on their Crafts we also get a hint of positioning mechanics, since both of Van's moves have a 'Flanking' property listed along with Impede. I suspect that means they'll do more damage when targeting an enemy from the side.

Per Brandon, Hoid is so unkillable that he'd be one of the last two people standing in an all-out melee between all his characters if you allowed him to participate, even though he couldn't actually fight back. As Brandon puts it, there are very very few things in the Cosmere that have a chance of actually killing him and Nightblood is one.

Grimdark is about a tone that pervades a work, usually reinforced by (or created by) the setting. Brandon's works are almost uniformly hopeful in tone (Threnody excepted for now) so they're nowhere near grimdark. A lot of characters dying in backstory events doesn't make the setting grimdark. Okay, Stormlight Archive is an edge case right now since it does have a background of near-constant warfare and eldritch abominations making people bloodthirsty, hedonistic, say strange things when they die... but the very fact that it's got Honor as one of its resident Shards and characters are still trying to be honorable even when so many other people aren't (and they don't inevitably come to horrible ends) pretty much pushes it out of serious grimdark-ness. Brandon has called Stormlight (along with most of his works) high fantasy, which is on the opposite end of the tonal spectrum from grimdark, even if he writes considerably more shades of grey than, say, Tolkien or Jordan.

Welcome to the Shard! Hoid specifically wanted to bond a Cryptic because he wanted fully-empowered Lightweaving again, what he was doing before was limited in its potency (presumably having something to do with the Shattering). He does seem to be gathering access to magic systems or objects related to them but we know that there are some he deliberately avoids. We also know that Hoid's depth of knowledge on Investiture is limited next to Khriss', because he'll learn just enough to sound smart or otherwise accomplish some goal while she'll study the magic until she understands as best as possible how and why it works. In other words, Khriss might not have access to lots of magic but she knows far more about most of them than Hoid does. Relatedly Brandon has said that the idea of gaining lots of magic as a means of Ascension is fallacious because it assumes that you can Ascend in that manner. This isn't the same thing as Brandon directly stating it can't happen (any question about Hoid's goals is guaranteed to get a RAFO or a non-answer of some description, after all) but it does track with what we know about Ascension, which is rather more complicated than just 'get access to magic'. So I'm guessing that 'master Investiture and become the closest thing to Adonalsium' is probably not what Hoid is trying to accomplish, though gaining access to various forms of magic is part of whatever goal he is working towards.

The humans on Roshar (originally from Ashyn mainly) and the singers do not have a common ancestor (as we'd normally understand it) and predate the Shattering of Adonalsium. We know that most of what we see on Roshar came about through evolutionary processes and that Investiture speeds these processes up. Since Adonalsium created the entire Rosharan System for some specific purpose, there's a very good chance that he either set things up so that something like the singers would emerge based on the starting conditions or he might have actively encouraged that result. This is based on a comment by Brandon that singer gemhearts are very similar to something seen with the Sho Del, from Yolen.

Sigzil: Kaladin, how do you explain the curvature of the earth? I know you've seen it from up there. Kaladin: Altitude sickness, a well documented phenomenon. That's why all the rest of you see it too. Sigzil: I've never heard anything so ridiculous in my life, and remember just who I used to be an apprentice to. Kaldin: Who's the former surgeon here? Sigzil: You are. Kaladin: And who's carrying the highmarshal's baton? Sigzil: You are. Kaladin: So storm off!

It sounds like it's going to be either this month or maybe the next (March was the original plan) so it's not like you should have to wait too long.

Oh yeah, I'd love to see Jasnah as a worldhopper if the circumstances permit it. She and Khriss would get along famously, I suspect. Brandon has already confirmed this is the plan. xD