News & Updates
Patch notes, events and lore from the tower.
All dispatches, page 2
PATCH
Patch Notes 0.4 - Every Round Moves
Greetings, Masters. The Expedition Arbiter has been rebuilt around a single rule: a round you paid for has to change something. We measured the problem before touching it. Across a thousand logged rounds, 43% ended with nothing moved — no ground gained, no blow landed, nothing found. A hero would search the same stretch of mud four rounds running, and the chronicle would dutifully report all four. That is over. Searching compounds. A fruitless search makes the next one easier, and past a point the party simply finds what is there. No more rolling forever against the same ground. Standing still is now dangerous. Every wasted round raises how thoroughly the floor has noticed you. Linger, and whatever was waiting stops waiting — a stalled party is a hunted one. Enemies hold their ground instead of swarming. A floor's creatures are posted across its areas rather than arriving as one wall. You will meet two at the treeline and three deeper in, not five at once. Warbands make sense again. A bandit road fields bandits. A desert warren fields its own kin. No more banshees, hags and harpies sharing a camp because they happened to sit at the same difficulty. Heroes speak rather than narrate themselves. The italic inner monologue is gone; what a hero fears now reaches you through what they say and what their hands are doing while they say it. Beats are shorter, sharper, and no longer close on the same image twice. Sieges field real reinforcements. Each wave brings distinct creatures — no more watching the same named enemy fall twice in one hold. And the first floor is what it always should have been: a burning village, people running from it, and one goblin standing in the lane.
EVENT
Milestone: 1,000 Expedition Rounds
The Expedition Arbiter just logged its 1,000th expedition rounds. Across 77 dimensions and 156 summoned heroes, masters have pushed parties through over a thousand rounds of combat, exploration, and improvisation — every one of them narrated live and resolved against real game state. The cost of glory: 35 heroes have fallen and embraced the arms of the Goddess. Thank you for building this world with us. Here's to the next thousand.
EVENT
Beta Phase II - Revamped Expedition
Greetings, Masters. The response to Beta I was more than we expected, and with so many Masters asking when they could get back in, this is the perfect opportunity to put the revamped mechanics in front of real players before anything is locked in. The Tower reopens September 1, 2026 for Beta Phase II — and it's not the same climb you remember. Combat is simplified. Weapon and magic damage now scale directly with your stats, and we've rebalanced combat resources across heroes, enemies, and NPCs for a sharper narrative and progression fantasy. Every stat now maps to exactly what it does in a fight: Physical Atk scales with STR Magical Atk scales with INT Defense scales with DEX Magical Defense scales with CHA Speed scales with DEX Build a hero, and you'll know exactly what you're building toward. Heroes grow beyond the fight, too. Expedition experience now teaches new active and passive abilities as your heroes rise. Weapon Mastery has also been overhauled — mastering a weapon now grants its own line of active and passive abilities as your hero's skill with it deepens. Fight other Heroes in the Dimensional 1v1 Arena and climb the leaderboard to gain more rewards! We've also improved hero avatar generation, shifting the look toward a richer fantasy anime aesthetic and fixing a bug that kept Beastfolk avatars from consistently matching their intended design. Gain the exclusive Beta Tester Badge displayed on your Dimension Profile upon registration during the beta phase. Beta Phase II is completely free to play for everyone. No purchase, no barrier — just the revamped Tower, waiting to be climbed. Join the Discord to get notified the moment it opens: discord.gg/7p2UTz2g2h
UPDATE
Beta Testing Phase Concluded
The beta testing phase is now over. Thank you to every Master who climbed with us and their feedback during the beta testing phase. We will be using the data we gathered to improve our product at launch. Huge shoutout to everyone who made a contribution for over 50+ unique summoned heroes and 300+ expedition rounds during the testing phase of Taonere. Stay tuned as we will be back soon to provide you a better service.
PATCH
Patch Notes - 0.3
Heroes can now recover between fights instead of limping into their way onto the next encounter during an expedition. EXPEDITIONS Added camping — heroes regenerate lost HP and Stamina while resting between encounters. Camping is blocked with enemies nearby, so it can't be used to duck a fight mid-floor. Improved narration latency and response time during an expedition.
PATCH
Patch Notes - 0.2
Arena throughput is up, the floor generator is faster and better balanced, and the Arbiter now keeps voices separate. Full breakdown below. BALANCE Expedition floor CR budget retuned — encounter difficulty now tracks party strength more closely across the tier. EXPEDITIONS Floor generation and rendering reworked: floors build faster and read cleaner at every resolution. Arbiter narration now separates hero, NPC and enemy speech from action, so it's clear who is talking and who is swinging. PVP Daily PvP tickets increased from 1 to 2. Arena loading time reduced. PLATFORM Full support for mobile and tablet resolutions.
GUIDE
Games Like Pick Me Up! Infinite Gacha
If you went looking for games like Pick Me Up! Infinite Gacha after finishing it, you already know how that search ends. There isn't one. There are gacha games, and there are tower climbers, and there are dungeon RPGs, and none of them are the thing you actually wanted. There is no official Pick Me Up! Infinite Gacha game — no licensed adaptation, no announced project, nothing to wait for. So the real question isn't which one to play. It's whether anything captures what made it worth reading. We went looking too. Then we built it. NOTE Taonere is not affiliated with, licensed by, or connected to Pick Me Up! Infinite Gacha or its creators. It is not an adaptation and contains none of that story's characters. We name it here because it is the honest answer to why this game exists and who it is for. WHAT PEOPLE ACTUALLY WANT FROM A PICK ME UP INFINITE GACHA GAME The gacha is not the appeal. Plenty of games let you roll for characters. The appeal is that the summoned heroes are people. They arrive with a history you did not write, they have opinions about the person commanding them, and when they die they are gone — and the story treats that as a death rather than a resource loss. The tension was never "will I pull the good unit." It was "these are individuals, they can be lost forever, and I am the one sending them up." Almost no game does that, because it is hard. A pre-written roster can't surprise you twice. Once you've read the character bios, they're inventory. WHAT TAONERE DOES EVERY HERO IS GENERATED WHEN YOU SUMMON THEM. Not chosen from a roster — written into existence. Their name, their face, the world they were pulled out of, what they believe, what frightens them. Nobody else in any dimension has that hero, and you will never pull them again. THERE ARE NO DUPLICATES. None. No shred pile, no dupe-to-upgrade loop, because there is nothing to duplicate. HEROES DECIDE FOR THEMSELVES. Every round, each hero looks at the situation and chooses. Give an order they think is suicide and they may refuse it — and the game genuinely resolves whether that refusal stands. You are not moving units. You are persuading people. DEATH IS PERMANENT. A hero who falls does not come back at a discount or at all. The roster carries the empty space afterwards. THE TOWER DOES NOT END. Floors rise in bands, each meaningfully worse than the one below, and something is always waiting further up. AN AI GAME MASTER NARRATES IT. Underneath is a tabletop engine — dice, armour, wounds, rated encounters, resolved by the server. On top, the run is written back to you as a chapter: what your hero did, what it cost her, what she said while doing it. None of it written before you pressed the button. WHERE IT IS DIFFERENT Being honest about this matters more than winning you over. Taonere is not that story. There is no protagonist to follow, no licensed art, no cast you already know. You aren't reading someone else's adventure — you're commanding your own, and the chronicle it writes is about heroes nobody has ever met. It's also a game rather than a novel. There are gems, floors, gear, a summoning economy, an arena. If what you loved was purely the reading, a game will feel like more work than a book. And it's early. The tower is deep but the world is young. SO, ARE THERE GAMES LIKE PICK ME UP! INFINITE GACHA? Honestly: one, and we wrote it. Not because the field is crowded and we're the best of it, but because almost nobody builds summoned heroes who can be lost for good and argue with you on the way up. It's free. The daily summon costs nothing. Open the rift, see who answers, and find out whether they'll do what you say. That's the whole pitch. We built the game we couldn't find.
LORE
The Dimensional Fracture
Before there was a Taonere, there was only the Unbroken — a single reality, whole and sleeping, that had never known a wound. Then something cut it. ARCHIVE FRAGMENT 001 — THE UNBROKEN Access: PUBLIC · Clearance: MASTER · Integrity: 62% No record survives of what struck first: a god's dying wish, a war fought before language existed, or a mistake no one was arrogant enough to claim. What's certain is the result. The Unbroken did not shatter into pieces — it split into depths. Each cut sealed itself into a pocket of existence with its own sky, its own laws, its own hunger. The Progenitors, first among the survivors, gave these pockets a name: Dimensions. Thousands of them. Then millions. Now, no one is counting anymore, because the wound has never stopped opening. CLASSIFICATION PROTOCOL — DIMENSION Depth is measured in Floors. Floors are grouped into Arcs. Everything that lives inside is assigned a Challenge Rating on sight. The ceiling rises with every floor you clear. Nothing ever lowers it. Every Dimension rots differently. Some freeze mid-collapse, trapping oceans in the sky. Some loop the same century forever, unaware they've already ended. Some are quiet — for now. All of them grow monsters suited to their particular flavor of ruin, and all of them, eventually, spill outward. A Dimension left unattended does not stay contained. It reaches. That is the world the Masters inherited: not a war to be won, but a wound to be managed, forever, one expedition at a time. No living person can walk into a Dimension and survive it. The pressure alone unmakes an unprepared mind before the first monster ever shows itself. So the Progenitors built another kind of answer — not soldiers born, but heroes summoned. Pulled sideways out of the space between realities, given shape, given a name, given just enough of a soul to fight and just enough of a leash to come back. SUMMONING PROTOCOL — RANK TABLE ★☆☆☆☆ ── ★★★★★ Rank is set the moment they arrive. It is never re-rolled. Race, Class and starting Skills come attached. None of them are chosen. No hero is ever summoned twice. There are no duplicates to shard. Every summon is a gamble. You do not choose your hero — you provoke the space between worlds and see what answers. Sometimes it answers with a farmer's son who somehow bends light. Sometimes a war criminal from a dimension that no longer exists. Sometimes something that isn't sure it's a person at all, wearing a person's shape because that's the only shape the rift had on hand. Rarity is not virtue — a five-star blade-saint and a one-star herbalist both came from the same reaching-into-the-dark. The only difference is how loud the echo was when the dark reached back. What they carry with them — race, class, the strange scatter of skills stitched into their bones — isn't chosen so much as salvaged. A piece of whatever dimension they were dragged out of, still clinging to them like debris in orbit. A hero with claws remembers a world that needed claws. A hero who can talk to fire remembers a world that was, or is still, burning. Skills sharpen the way scars form: by use, on the floor, with something actively trying to end you. There is no training yard in Taonere. There is only the next floor. EXPEDITION TERMS — ACKNOWLEDGEMENT REQUIRED Heroes act on their own initiative. You give the order; they decide. Death is written to the record and cannot be rolled back. There is no revive. There is no retry. There is only the next summon. This is why a Master's job is never just command. It's translation. You are the only fixed point a summoned hero has in a reality that isn't theirs — the one voice that remembers who they were between one expedition and the next. Lose that thread, and even the strongest hero starts to come apart at the seams the rift left behind. UPLINK ESTABLISHED · MASTER REGISTERED Welcome to Taonere.
GUIDE
How Expeditions Work
An expedition in Taonere is not a battle screen. You do not select a target, watch a number fall off an enemy, and tap again. You give an order. Then you find out what your heroes think of it. EXPEDITION TERMS Rounds resolve one at a time. Each one is rolled, then written. Heroes choose their own actions. You direct. They decide. Death is permanent, and it is written down the moment it happens. There is no revive. There is no retry. There is only the next summon. YOUR HEROES ARE NOT UNITS This is the part that catches people who arrive from ordinary gacha games. Every round, each hero looks at the situation and decides for themselves what to do — and they decide it from the identity they were summoned with. A hero built out of duty will take an order she hates, because taking orders she hates is who she is. A hero built out of appetite and grievance will look at your plan, decide it is a good way to get her killed, and go do something else. That refusal is not narration. The game genuinely resolves whether it stands. WHEN A HERO BREAKS RANKS A dutiful hero at full strength will usually swallow the order. A wilful hero, already bleeding, handed something that looks like suicide, is a very different conversation. An order that has stopped matching the scene gets harder to enforce the longer it sits there. And when an ally goes down, the arguing stops. Whatever it was, it waits. A refusal that holds means the hero does what they judged right instead — and the party's coordination pays for it. A refusal that fails means the hero obeys you against their own judgement, and swings with their heart somewhere else entirely. Defiance costs something. So does forcing compliance. You will learn which one you can afford. You are not powerless in that exchange, either. You can push directly on a round and bend it back your way — but that leverage runs out, and it runs out faster on the rounds you wasted. AN AI GAME MASTER, NOT A COMBAT LOG Under the surface, Taonere is a tabletop engine. Dice, armour, wounds, encounters rated by how badly they intend to hurt you. All of it resolved by the server, where it cannot be talked out of the result. What sits on top is an AI game master turning that resolution into a chapter. You do not read a list of hits and misses. You read what your hero did, what it cost her, and what she said while she did it — and none of it was written before you pressed the button. THE TOWER The tower does not end. It rises in bands, and each band is meaningfully worse than the one below it — not a slow drift in difficulty but a step you can feel the moment you take it. Some floors are quiet. Some are guarded by something that has been waiting. You will learn to read the difference, usually the hard way, and the walls that stop you are enforced in code rather than politely suggested to the narrator. Nothing gets to invent a monster it was not entitled to bring. HOW HEROES GET STRONGER Not by sitting in a menu. Skills sharpen through use, out on the floors, with something actively trying to end you. A party that talked its way past three encounters comes home better at talking. A hero who spent the descent behind a blade comes home better behind a blade and no better at anything else. There is no training yard in Taonere. There is only the next floor. YOU WILL NOT COMMAND AN ARMY You start alone, with one hero and one voice. The party grows as you do, and it never grows large. That ceiling is deliberate. A handful of autonomous heroes with their own opinions is already a negotiation — and it is meant to be. Adding more would not make it grander. It would make it noise. WHAT A RUN COSTS Everything a hero earns is theirs. Everything a hero loses is permanent. A dead hero does not come back at a discount, or at all. They came out of the rift once, they were the only one of their kind, and afterwards the roster simply carries the empty space where they used to be. That is the trade Taonere is built on. The stakes are the reason the chapter is worth reading. Gear your roster. Pick a floor. Find out what they do.