How to carry (some) progress to Diablo 4 season 1

Diablo 4 is only about 6 weeks old, but Blizzard Entertainment has already made a number of improvements to the game ahead of season 1. One of those improvements, however, comes with a bit of an annoying work around if you want to carry some of your progress over to Season of the Malignant.

In this Diablo 4 public service announcement, we’ll tell you how to propagate your map and Altar of Lilith data to the rest of your characters in Season of the Malignant and beyond.

How to make your progress carry over between seasons

Image: Blizzard Entertainment

If you’ve been playing Diablo 4’s pre-season (June 1 to July 18), login to your main character before you start your new season 1 character on July 20.

Why do you need to login to your non-seasonal character first, you might ask? Well, between launch and season 1, Blizzard took some player feedback to heart, and will allow you to carry over your map (how many areas you’ve discovered) and your Altars of Lilith (how many you’ve collected) to your seasonal characters and any future characters.

The problem is that, in order for the game to apply this information to your entire account, you’ll need to login with your main character first, between the new patch on July 18 and the season start on July 20.

When you login on your existing character, the game will then apply that character’s progress to the entire account. So, for example, if the character you login on has discovered the entire map in every region and found all the Altars of Lilith, all of your other characters — both existing ones and future ones — will also gain that progress. Similarly, if you’ve only uncovered half the map and 20 altars, all future characters will only have that data when they start.

What if you miss the deadline before season 1?

Image: Blizzard/Activision via Polygon

If you miss the deadline, that’s OK. The way the Blizzard developers described it on their live stream is that you can login to your furthest characters before or after season 1, as long as it’s after the July 18 patch.

Basically, the way the system works is that every time you login the game will check your current character’s progress on map discovery and Altars of Lilith. Any new additions the game learns that you’ve discovered since it last checked will be applied to the rest of your account.

“Functionally, from [July 18] forward, anytime you ever login on a character, it will just check ‘hey, does this character have any progress that’s not already credited on your account? Cool, I’m now crediting it to your account,’” said lead producer Tim Ismay in the livestream.

Assistant game director Joe Piepiora also confirmed that if you have multiple characters with different progress levels — maybe one character that's discovered all of Scosglen and only Scosglen, while another has only uncovered the Fractured Peaks — you could login to both and credit both regions for all characters.

Blizzard acknowledged during the stream that this overly complex crediting system isn’t ideal for anyone — however, it was a necessary evil to ensure the system was ready for season 1.

Ideally, Blizzard will fix this in a future season. Until then, if you login to a character and find you have fewer map areas uncovered and fewer Altars of Lilith than you have on another character, swap characters so the system can credit you for the hard work you’ve already done.