Vespera Combat and Offline Guide

Vespera’s pitch is not “the game plays itself.” It is “the game keeps the same combat math while you are at work.” Loop-Fight (the old Auto-Combat switch), auto-cast, auto-heal, consumables, gathering, crafting, and loot rules are all configurable. Supported activities continue offline for up to 24 hours at the same speed as online play. If those sliders are wrong, you return to a corpse, an empty mana bar, or a Tower floor that never advanced. This page is the settings pass you should do after getting started and the controls switchboard, and before a long night in dungeons or the Tower.

Loop-Fight is a loadout, not a cheat toggle

Patch 0.11.3 renamed Auto-Combat to Loop-Fight and cleaned the ON/OFF labeling. If a July screenshot still says Auto-Combat, look for Loop-Fight in the client. The Abilities screen is an Auto-Cast Logic board: Primary / Boss / Utility sockets, Life Trigger, Ward Trigger, and a priority list you can reorder. Conditions stack with AND. Turn Loop-Fight on only after you have watched one manual pack and copied that order into the list. The named switches, Escape menu, Damage Report, and Steam Deck mouse notes live on controls. This page is the overnight math. Each class has a resource meter. Barbarian bleed windows, Arcanist mana, Warden trap setups, and Nightblade poison stacks all punish a rotation that dumps the expensive skill first. Auto-cast should fire the filler, then the spender, then the defensive cooldown. If your class page — Barbarian, Arcanist, Warden, or Nightblade — says a shield or barrier is the survival button, put that skill on a health or incoming-damage condition rather than “always.”

Auto-heal and auto mana potions are separate. Patch 0.15.2 made Auto Mana Potions work during offline combat in Areas, Dungeons, Nightmare Dungeons, Tower, Frontier, and Spire. They respect the mana threshold, restore amount, cooldown, remaining potion count, and activities that ban consumables. If you set the threshold at 90 percent, you will drink the bag dry on a long Tower reclaim. If you set it at 10 percent, Arcanists will sit on empty mana and auto-swing for nothing. Start around 35–45 percent and watch one online fight before you leave.

Direct healing abilities were also retuned so they recover a meaningful percent of Max HP at high health totals, online and offline, with safety caps. Triggered flat heals still scale separately. That matters once Soulbound gear and element trees push your pool into the absurd. A heal that looked fine at campaign start can become a rounding error; percent heals and food both need a second look after Awakening breakpoints.

Loot rules and bags

Loot rules decide whether a long idle session fills the inventory with vendor junk or with the crystals you actually socket. Filter for element crystals, Skill Engravings, upgrade materials, and class-usable weapons. Let the rest vendor or skip. Vespera publishes loot tables on enemies; use them. The gear and gems checklist is the wiki-side reminder of what Divine salvage, Aberration Shards, Aether, and Honing Stones are for.

Bank space matters because offline settlement can dump a night of drops at once. If storage is full, later patches try to resume rewards, but you should not rely on overflow as a plan. Clear the bag before a 24-hour window.

Offline settlement after 1.0

Early Access players burned a lot of words on loading times and offline reports. Patches 0.15.1 through 0.15.3, then the 1.0 QoL pass, changed the rules:

• Long offline combat, including Tower and Spire, processes in batches. You can enter the character while calculation continues.
• Offline results no longer pop automatically. An Offline Rewards button shows progress and then the itemized report.
• Starting Spire, Tower, or Frontier while a previous offline calculation is still running should no longer let the old activity steal control when the math finishes.
• Extreme offline Spire sessions are bounded so you do not jump an unintended number of floors or Combat Levels.
• Repeated Tower floors keep that floor’s XP budget instead of inflating low floors.
• Skill Engravings now apply to damage, crit, cooldown, lifesteal, and bleed in supported offline routes.

If you still see a stuck auto-advance, check whether the Spire run is paused, unpaid, or waiting on a Tarot pick. Paused Spire should not block Veiled Reliquary, and Reliquary should not wipe the paused run. Global Loop-Fight should not restart a Spire you explicitly stopped.

What to run while you are away

Match the activity to the bottleneck:

• Need Combat XP and a story beat? Campaign areas with Loop-Fight already proven on one pack.
• Need gear tests? Repeat a dungeon you can already clear. See dungeons.
• Need a ladder? Tower floors you can survive, not floors you can “almost” survive. See Tower and Spire.
• Need food and bars? Gathering plus Academy, covered in gathering and crafting.
• Need a mercenary XP trickle? Expeditions on the mercenaries page.

Do not queue a Nightmare key, a paid Spire, and a world boss at the same time and hope offline logic picks the profitable one. Pick one combat activity, keep gathering in the background, and let Academy study finish.

Deaths, recovery, and food

Offline combat still tracks deaths, recovery, and partial encounters. Auto Food remains a thing. If you starve, the idle window turns into a graveyard. Craft or buy a stack that covers the hours you will be gone, then set auto-food on. World-boss days are worse because you also want potions in the faction War Chest; read factions before you donate the last flask.

When the math looks fake

Vespera includes an in-game combat math page and a build planner. Use them. The wiki will not pretend a spreadsheet we cannot see. If a Steam review calls a system dead after a point — gathering, Spire, Frontier — treat that as a mid-game warning, not a day-one skip. 1.0 is the moment to re-test those loops rather than to copy an August rant.

For official notes, use updates and Patch 1.0. For a buyer’s summary, use the review.