Many of the quality-of-life changes introduced in Secrets of the Atlas are directly inspired by systems first seen in Path of Exile 2’s Early Access. All of these changes have received positive feedback from players. Features like the new pause functionality (especially for solo mapping and safe scenarios), smoother UI transitions, and improved instance management (e.g., quicker access to Rogue Harbour and trimmed party sizes) were praised in POE2 for reducing friction in moment-to-moment gameplay. By bringing these refinements into POE1, Grinding Gear Games is bridging the player experience between both titles—offering a more modern, responsive feel while preserving POE1’s core complexity. This cross-pollination not only improves accessibility but also sets the stage for a unified standard of quality ahead of Path of Exile 2’s full release.
Path of Exile: Secrets of the Atlas (3.26) is the latest endgame expansion packed with new mechanics, crafting systems, and a fresh challenge league—Mercenaries of Trarthus. In this comprehensive Path of Exile 3.26 guide, we’ll break down everything from the core Threads of Consciousness mechanic, the introduction of powerful Memory Pinnacle Bosses, to the return of influence-based orbs and an overhauled Betrayal system. Whether you’re a seasoned exile or a returning player, this guide explores all aspects of POE endgame content in 2025, including updated crafting orbs, memory-influenced maps, and quality-of-life changes inspired by Path of Exile 2 Early Access. Let’s dive into what makes Secrets of the Atlas one of the most impactful expansions yet.
Secrets of the Atlas: Endgame Update
TL;DR Summary (What You Need to Know)
| Feature | Key Point |
|---|---|
| End Game Update | New endgame with Threads, Memory Petals, Pinnacles |
| League | Mercenaries of Trarthus—hireable companions via duels |
| Crafting | New orbs for Memory Strands & influences |
| Economy | Memory strands, scarab stacks, breach auto-pickup |
| QoL | Pause, UI improvements, Rogue Harbour ease |
| Skills & Items | Rebalances, 20+ Uniques, 5 Div Cards |
Secrets of the Atlas is an additive core expansion delivering:
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A rich new endgame storyline involving Threads of Consciousness, rifts across the Atlas, Eagon, and the fate of Zana
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Three new Pinnacle bosses within memory-influenced maps with dreamlike twists and unique rewards
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Additions of core systems from previous leagues: Settlers city system, Kingsmarch, Recombinator, tattoos, and runegrafts
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Full rework of the Betrayal mechanic
Path of Exile: Secrets of the Atlas Content
1. Threads of Consciousness mechanic
The core of the “Secrets of the Atlas” expansion is a new endgame storyline that delves into Zana’s warped memories.
- New Exalted Orbs: The Shaper and The Elder now have their own Exalted Orbs, which can add their influence to an item, completing the cycle of influence types.
- Atlas Passive Tree Support: New notable passive skills are added, such as Grasp the Past which increases the chance for Memory Strands on items to be lucky, and Traumatic Experience, Remembered Kindness, or Educated Upbringing which decrease the chance of finding specific boss threads, allowing for target-farming.
- Zana’s Predicament and Eagon’s Role: Strange rifts have appeared across the Atlas, and Zana is trapped within them. Players will encounter Eagon, an intelligent man who discovers these tears are actually threads of memory, distorted and made real by the Atlas. Working with Eagon, players must step through portals he opens to find Zana or what remains of her.
- Threads of Memory Gameplay:
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- Eagon transfers a “tear” to your Map Device, revealing a Thread of Memories on your Atlas. You access maps on this Thread sequentially by talking to Eagon.
- These areas can be fully influenced by your Atlas Tree, Scarabs, and Fragments, allowing for highly customized experiences.
- Memory Petals and Special Abilities: Monsters in these maps are imbued with Memory Petals. Defeating them allows you to absorb this power, which can be unleashed as a special ability during combat from an additional mini-skill bar.
- For example, Memory of Disbelief causes affected monsters to stop dropping equipment items, yielding only more valuable items like Currency and Maps.
- Memory of Panic makes monsters revive immediately after death, granting double experience and drops.
- Memory of Impatience causes surrounding enemies to give you their Souls, temporarily increasing your power.
- As you progress, maps can have multiple Memories, allowing for powerful combinations of abilities. Using these abilities strategically, such as combining Impatience for power, Panic for revival, and Disbelief for better drops, enables players to amplify rewards.
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Interact with Memory rifts in Tier 13+ maps, using Eagon’s device to channel map chains
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Monsters drop Memory Petals, which fuel powerful combat abilities displayed on a mini-skill bar
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Each map contains altar modifiers; stacking these increases difficulty and rewards leading to a final warped boss like twisted versions of Sirus
- Altars and Stacking Modifiers: After defeating the boss of each map along a Thread, you are presented with an Altar. Choosing from two options, the Altar applies a modifier to all subsequent maps in that Thread, and these modifiers stack. This, combined with Memory Petal abilities, leads to some of the most “juiced” maps ever run in Path of Exile, offering extreme challenges and rewards.
- Warped Memory Bosses: The final map in each Thread is a significant challenge, with all accumulated Altar mods, and is guarded by a powerful, yet familiar, boss warped by Zana’s memories. An example is Sirus, fueled by Zana’s affectionate memories of him.
2. Memory-influenced bosses & Pinnacle Bosses
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At the end of each Thread, face a Pinnacle boss from Zana’s memories
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Defeating them yields Memory-influenced maps and exclusive crafting currencies.
- Memory-Influenced Tier 16 Maps: After defeating all three new pinnacle bosses, players can find new Memory-Influenced tier 16 maps. These maps feature special abilities and Memory Petal-infused monsters, and can also roll modifiers typically found on tier 17 maps, making them far more rewarding.
3. The Mercenaries of Trarthus: New Challenge League
This new league introduces companions and a new way to acquire powerful gear.
- Encountering Mercenaries: Secret of the Atlas introduced Mercenarise from the cities of Trarthus, one per area. They have unique personalities, builds, skills, and equipped items.
- Duels and Choices: Mercenaries will challenge you to a duel. Before fighting, you get an overview of their gear, skills, and support effects. You then choose to:
- Hire their services: For a Gold cost, they will accompany you as a skilled combatant.
- Take one of their items: Acquire an item they are carrying.
- Exile them: If you win, they leave for a while, preventing you from encountering that archetype again for a period.
- Mercenary Gear and New Uniques: Mercenary gear is generally more powerful than normal drops and can include Unique Items, including new Unique Items that can only be obtained from defeating them, such as Scornflux boots. Scornflux converts increases to Cast Speed from Arcane Surge into Movement Speed and grants Arcane Surge on Movement Skill use.
- Infamous Trarthan Mercenaries: Rarer encounters with “Infamous” Mercenaries from major death-trade families yield even better items with new “Infamous” modifiers
- Party Play: In a party, each player can opt to participate in the duel. More participants increase difficulty but offer a 50% chance for each player to get a random currency reward upon victory.
- Mercenary Archetypes and Skills: Mercenaries have archetypes like “Eruptor” (aggressive) or “Striker” (tanky, uses Vigilant Strike, Enduring Cry). They can also use Trarthan versions of skills (e.g., Trarthan Siege Ballista), which can be acquired as “Trarthan Gems” if selected as a reward.
- Management and Progression: You can have one Mercenary accompanying you at a time, with up to three total in your service, waiting in town. Their equipment can be replaced with items of your choosing. Mercenaries do not level up, so you need to seek out more skilled ones as you advance. If a Mercenary falls, you return to town to heal them with Gold.
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A standalone challenge league launched with Secrets of the Atlas; not forced upon existing leagues
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Recruit from over 30 mercenary archetypes via duels. You may hire, exterminate, and re-hire—each brings unique gear and modifiers .
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Track your progress and display completed challenges in-game through totem pole hideout decorations
4. Crafting & Economy
Memory Strands and New Crafting Currencies:
- Items in Memory-Influenced Maps can drop with Memory Strands (up to 100). When identified, these strands increase the tiers of modifiers on the item, generally making higher-strand items better.
- During crafting with currency orbs, Memory Strands are consumed to make crafted mods more powerful.
- New Crafting Currencies allow manipulation of Memory Strands:
- Orb of Remembrance: Adds Memory Strands to any normal equipment, allowing players to add strands to ideal crafting bases.
- Orb of Unravelling: Consumes all remaining Memory Strands to randomly upgrade mod tiers, with effectiveness based on strands consumed.
- Orb of Intention: Used on Memory Influenced maps to reduce item drops but improve the chance to find items with Memory Strands.
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New orbs introduced:
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Shaper’s Exalted Orb, Elder’s Exalted Orb: add influence & open new mod pools
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Orb of Remembrance: randomizes Memory Strands.
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Orb of Unravelling: upgrades strands to enhance explicit modifiers.
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Orb of Intention: boosts memory strands on maps, but reduces drop rates
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Atlas Memories removed, but Red-tier Kirac missions revived.
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Breach splinters now auto-collected, and common scarabs drop in larger stacks in high-tier maps
5. Betrayal Rework
The Betrayal mechanic has received a substantial rework to make it more rewarding and less frustrating.
- Mastermind Separation: The Syndicate Mastermind fight is now completely separate from the core Betrayal mechanic. It no longer resets the state of the Immortal Syndicate. Instead, the Mastermind is accessed through a new fragment that has a chance to drop from Safehouse Leaders at high levels. This allows players to optimize their Betrayal board to their liking without losing progress after fighting the Mastermind.
- Improved Mastermind Fight: The boss fight itself has been improved with significantly fewer immunity phases and new rewards.
- Allflame Embers: The Mastermind now drops Allflame Embers, new map fragments that replace monster packs in Endgame Maps with different types of special monsters, offering unusual properties or rewards.
- Allflame Ember of Kulemak: Replaces packs with Syndicate Monsters and their leaders who revive after the map boss is slain, becoming more intense and rewarding.
- Allflame Ember of Propagation: Special Rare monsters spread their modifiers to other Rares upon death, creating powerful, rewarding singular monsters.
- Allflame Ember of Resplendence: Adds monsters that drop no items but grant buff stacks of increased Quantity and Rarity upon death to enhance drops from other monsters.
- Allflame Embers can be used in your Map Device like Scarabs, allowing for diverse map customization.
- Improved Mastermind Uniques: The unique items dropped by the Mastermind now have veiled modifiers from a custom pool exclusive to those uniques, allowing for more specialized outcomes (e.g., Bitterbind Point can now have +1 Additional Spectre).
- Rebalanced Safehouse Rewards: All Safehouse rewards have been rebalanced.
- “Crafting Sprees” Improvement: Many crafting sprees now offer pre-generated items instead of requiring specific player-provided items, allowing for more powerful crafting options. A new orb resembling a Vaal orb allows uniques in these sprees to be corrupted and re-corrupted multiple times, with a lower chance to “brick” the item and a chance for two corrupted implicits.
- Vorici’s Emperor’s Luck chests: A new gambling option providing full stacks of currency, similar to the Divination card.
- Veiled Items Quality of Life:
- All crafting bench options normally granted by unveiling items are now moved to the Core game, found at the entrances to boss rooms in Endgame Maps, meaning you don’t need to run Betrayal to unlock them.
- You no longer need to speak to Jun to unveil items; you can simply right-click them.
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Simplified Syndicate interactions: Mastermind fights via medallions, safehouse and bench changes, Allflame Embers return
6. Quality‑of‑Life & UI
The expansion also brings numerous POE quality of life updates:
- Pausing: Players can now pause the game at any time by pressing escape or opening a fullscreen interface, and the game will also pause on lag or disconnect (with exceptions in certain pinnacle arenas).
- Streamlined Currency Use: Buttons now appear on Strongboxes and Essences based on inventory currency, streamlining their use (Divine Orbs are excluded for waste prevention).
- Orbs of Horizon Update: Can now reroll Elder and Conqueror guardian maps, changing both the base map and its guardian.
- Map Device Inventory: A small additional inventory has been added to the map device for convenience when rolling multiple maps or using various fragments/scarabs.
- Breach Splinter Auto-Collection: All splinters during Breach encounters are automatically collected and dropped at the end of the Breach.
- Gamepad Targeting Separation: Targeting of monsters and non-monsters is separated on gamepads, reducing frustration when interacting with objects near enemies.
- Vendor Search Memory: Vendor windows will now remember your last search per NPC until logout, and the search field character limit has increased.
- Currency Highlight: Right-clicking a currency item will highlight all other items it can be used on.
7. Skill, Balance & Unique Items
For a full list of new and changed gems, checkout the official New and Changed Gems in Path of Exile: Secrets of the Atlas
Starcaller unique Abyssal Axe: A weapon that harnesses the power of stars, casting the new Starfall skill on melee crit to carpet areas with immense damage.
Wine of the Prophet unique flask: Consumes many charges, but each use draws a random Divination Card correlating to a powerful buff/
8. Settlers of Kalguur into Core Game
The “Settlers of Kalguur” expansion, which introduced Gold, is now being integrated into the core game, with Gold finding new uses as well
- Gold as Currency: Gold now funds various town services and has a new use in the Mercenaries of Trarthus league.
- Kingsmarch Goes Core (No More Building): The town of Kingsmarch is now fully developed and will be a thriving hub, but there will be no more town-building.
- Accessible Services: Features previously confined to Kingsmarch are now more widely available:
- Gold-based Passive Respeccing: Available by talking to NPCs like Bestel in Lioneye’s Watch.
- Black Market Item Gambling: Buying randomly generated item bases for gold is now available in each town.
- Currency Exchange: Returning and accessible via Faustus starting in Act 6.
- Mining and Shipping: In the endgame, players will find ore veins that Kalguuran workers can mine. The shipping mechanic allows sending ores and crops to Karui and Kalguuran ports for rewards.
- Passive Tree Customization (Tattoos and Runegrafts):
- Tattoos: Received from sending shipments to Karui ports, Tattoos can be applied to your passive tree to change what stats they grant.
- Runegrafts: From Kalguuran ports, Runegrafts are a new passive tree mechanic that replaces a passive tree Mastery node (instead of stat nodes like Tattoos). Examples include Runegraft of the Bound (reduces boot bonuses, increases glove bonuses), Runegraft of the River (chance to recover full life at low life), and Runegraft of Time (chance for cooldown skills/triggers to instantly recover). They offer extensive build customization.
- Recombinator Rework: Isla has modified the Recombinator, offering two methods:
- New Method (PoE2-style): Allows you to decide which modifiers on two input items to merge, with a visible success chance. This method can destroy items but is useful for creating items with fewer mods for crafting projects.
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- Old Method: Kept for powerful top-end crafting, this method randomly combines items without risk of destruction but is less predictable.
- Atlas Passive Tree & Scarab Support: New Atlas passive nodes are added to support Kalguur mechanics, such as increasing specific ore yields. Kalguuran Scarabs are also added, allowing players to add more ore deposits, increase rarity of guardians, or gather smelted bars directly.
Secrets of the Atlas (Patch 3.26) is a pivotal moment for Path of Exile 1, delivering the long-awaited follow-up to Settlers of Kalguur after nearly a year’s wait. During that time, resources were heavily prioritized toward Path of Exile 2 development, leading to community frustration—some players felt the original game was “neglected” and clamored for fresh POE1 content. The return of a new league, capped with a rich expansion, marks a renewed commitment from Grinding Gear Games to balance both titles thoughtfully.
Secrets of the Atlas revitalizes the endgame through layered mechanics like Threads of Consciousness, Pinnacle Boss encounters, and deterministic Memory crafting—all built to reward preparation and strategic play. The Mercenaries of Trarthus league adds a novel tactical layer, while QoL enhancements inspired by Path of Exile 2 Early Access significantly smooth the experience. For veterans and returning players feeling let down during the PoE2 shift, this update delivers a powerful return to form. With robust systems, improved pacing, and responsive design, Secrets of the Atlas reestablishes PoE1 as a vibrant, evolving ARPG—ready to stand alongside its sequel.
ethugamer- Path of Exile
- June 12, 2025
