Path of Exile: Covens of Umbra is live and replaces Scarabs with Threads

Grinding Gear Games released Covens of Umbra, the new expansion for Path of Exile, on November 13, 2026 at 11:00 AM PST on PC and consoles. PCGamesN lists it as version 3.30. The same day, the free-to-play action RPG entered Steam's most played chart at rank 50 with a daily peak of 152,021 concurrent players; a week earlier it was not in the top 100.

On November 14 it stood at rank 10 on Steam's current players chart, with 100,350 players online and a peak of 125,841 that day.

What Covens of Umbra changes

The developer's Steam post from November 6 describes a new challenge league built around the Coven Queen. After defeating covenites, players choose a Fate for the area's boss, which raises both its rewards and its difficulty. Fate-empowered bosses drop Viscera that go onto your own Wickerman. GGG's press release says over 120 Visceras can be collected, with up to four equipped across head, arm, body and leg slots. Grim Fates extend the system to the hardest Atlas bosses, and the press release adds more than two dozen new campaign bosses.

The larger change sits in the endgame. Scarabs are gone, and the 3.30.0 patch notes confirm that a new item type, Threads, takes their place. Threads are set in the Map device and apply a chosen league mechanic to the map. According to GGG's FAQ, primary league mechanics no longer appear unless a thread is spent to cause them to. The Atlas passive tree has a new layout, and many of its effects used to sit on Scarabs.

Almost every existing endgame league mechanic has been reworked, and loot drops have been changed at a fundamental level. PCGamesN quotes game director Jonathan Rogers calling this "one of the biggest transformations to the endgame in a long while" and saying "Over time, the core drop pool has become stale". The press release names Simplex Amulets and Cord Belts as base types that can now drop from the core pool at the highest tiers.

Reception and launch

The game itself holds a Very Positive rating on Steam, with 89 percent of 250,600 user reviews positive. SteamDB lists its all-time peak on Steam at 229,337 concurrent players. PCGamesN calls the new update "a perfect time to start" and describes the league mechanic as "relatively approachable for newcomers".

Launch day was not smooth for everyone. In its live update thread, GGG said it was working on a fix for a client crash when using waypoints under a certain language setting, and one player in the same thread reported being number 61,000 in the queue.

Path of Exile costs nothing to start, on Steam or through the Grinding Gear Games launcher; the press release also lists PlayStation, Xbox and Epic Games. A Twitch Drops campaign runs until November 22 at 11:00 AM PST: three hours of watching Path of Exile streams unlock the Umbral Tentacle Slam Rare Finisher Effect, and GGG says these cosmetics will later be sold in its store. Players attached to the previous league should know that, per the FAQ, Curse of the Allflame will not go core straightaway, while the Valerie mechanic is set to make an eventual return.