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No organization on Earth operates more robots than Amazon, which has upwards of 1 million machines running nonstop inside its warehouses. Alongside them, the company employs more than 1.5 million people in full-time and part-time roles, according to its 2025 annual report, which ranks it as the world's second-largest corporate employer.Both of those workforces occupy the same facilities. Whether people and robots can coexist is not really the issue. What matters is who controls the tempo when they share the floor.Research that muddies Amazon's narrativeSome of the most nuanced findings so far appeared in April 2025 in the journal ILR Review. According to the study, severe injuries were 40 percent lower at Amazon's robotic warehouses than at its legacy fulfillment centers. That is a significant improvement, and it lends weight to Amazon's argument that machines are taking over the most dangerous physical labor.The same research, however, also recorded a 77 percent rise in less severe injuries at the robotic fulfillment centers, linked to physical strain from repetitive motions.“At least one of the mechanisms by which this appears to be manifesting is through the pace of work, in that pick rates for the robotic fulfillment centers are off the charts higher,” said Brian Greenwood, a George Mason University business professor who coauthored the paper.According to Greenwood, the quicker tempo that comes with partial automation could mean “the robot is dictating the pace of work,” forcing employees to repeat specific movements at higher speed. “That appears to be what's driving the strains and the sprains that we observe,” he said.He sees this as a departure from history. “For the last 100 years, most of the automation that we've seen usually happens away from workers,” Greenwood said. In his view, collaborative robots are different because they operate in close physical proximity to people and because “the robot has the ability to dictate the pace of work.”Dated figures, persistent issuePart of the study relied on internal Amazon data that journalists at Reveal and The Center for Investigative Reporting obtained. The dataset included weekly numbers from more than 150 Amazon warehouses between 2016 and 2019. Those figures are hardly fresh, a point Amazon would readily make.Greenwood nonetheless believes the findings remain valid. “I haven't seen a tremendous amount of evidence to suggest that these dynamics are changing, inasmuch as you still have a tremendous amount of turnover in the warehousing context,” he said, noting that the problem extends beyond Amazon.The researchers also combed through Reddit posts from Amazon fulfillment center staff, and a clear pattern emerged. Employees said robotic sites were easier on the body but draining on the mind, owing to repetitive motions and the quicker pace tied to higher productivity targets.Labor groups and lawmakers have raised the alarm for yearsThe Strategic Organizing Center, a Washington, DC-based coalition of trade unions, released reports in May 2021 and April 2022 indicating that injury rates were higher at Amazon's robotic warehouses than at its non-robotic sites. The analysis used injury data that companies submitted to the US government covering 2017 through 2020.“Amazon likes to talk about its latest robots because it doesn't want to talk about the tens of thousands of Amazon workers who are injured every year due to Amazon's obsession with maximizing speed and minimizing costs,” Joan Moriarty, director of strategic research and Campaigns at SOC, said in an email.In February 2021, the coalition also gathered close to 1,000 responses from Amazon employees through an online survey. “Workers consistently report that the presence of robots increases the pace of work expected in Amazon facilities, forcing them to make fast, repetitive motions, substantially increasing the risk of injury,” Moriarty said.The US Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) conducted its own probe in 2024 under the leadership of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt). Its report observed that Amazon's internal data likewise pointed to a connection between robotic productivity and heightened pressure on workers, resulting in more injuries.Amazon counters with company-wide statisticsAmazon has dismissed these reports as flawed, arguing that they depend on outdated data predating its latest robots, such as the robotic arms introduced over the last several years. To make its case, the company points to network-wide figures.“All of these claims ignore the fact that since 2019 our Global Recordable Incident Rate has improved 43 percent and our Global Lost Time Incident rate, which includes the most serious injuries that require employees to take time away from work, has improved 70 percent,” an Amazon spokesperson said. “Our consistent year-over-year improvements have worked in parallel with our robotics growth across our operations network.”What the company left out is telling. Amazon offered no breakdown comparing robotic and non-automated warehouses, which is precisely the comparison its critics are drawing.Context is also important. According to the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the injury and illness rate in the US warehouse sector has generally been more than twice the average for all industries.“You have almost 2 million people working in the warehousing sector in the United States, and it's characterized by very high turnover and very high workplace injury rates,” Greenwood said. The road to a million machinesAmazon's robot fleet dates back to its 2012 purchase of Kiva Systems, an early maker of wheeled robots that deliver shelves of goods to workers rather than requiring people to walk the aisles. Kiva was renamed Amazon Robotics, which builds most of its machines in-house at sites in Massachusetts. This year, Amazon announced plans for additional production factories in Austin, Texas, and Greenwood, Indiana.“There's a theme of how we look at the challenges that we can help our associates and our employees with, and how we can make our customers' lives better through these technologies,” said Scott Dresser, vice president of Amazon Robotics. “Each step of the way, [we are] tackling a hard or deep set of technical challenges to achieve that goal.”The bulk of the million-strong fleet still moves on wheels. Hercules and Titan robots, about the size of a pool table and a baby grand piano, respectively, carry tall fabric shelving units known as pods, filled with plastic totes, to workers at their stations. The Sequoia system orchestrates swarms of these robots, and Amazon says it can identify and store items up to 75 percent faster.Typically, these robots navigate grids of floor stickers within fenced zones kept separate from people. Proteus breaks that mold, using sensors that allow it to move more freely and work safely around humans and objects.Packing swarms into narrow lanes also leads to robot traffic jams. To address that, Amazon built DeepFleet, a suite of AI foundation models designed to anticipate congestion before it forms.An arms race in the most literal senseThe more significant change is the move toward robotic arms. Speaking on a July earnings call, Amazon CFO Brian Olsavsky said the company expects its robotic arm fleet to more than double this year. Dresser put the current total in the single-digit thousands, meaning arms are still a small portion of the million.Robin, Amazon's first in-house arm, entered testing in 2021 and launched in Lakeland, Florida, in 2022. Equipped with eight suction cups, it pulls mailers and boxes from messy piles, ranking potential picks from an overhead view of the conveyor before moving.“With Robin, it was really that first attempt at taking a number of customer orders all in a jumble and building the advanced robotics to identify the items in that scene, to strategize on how to pick them up and build a motion plan that would be successful in placing it down on one of our mobile drive units,” Dresser said. Manually written picking rules repeatedly fell short. A 2023 Amazon Robotics paper outlined one approach that favored bigger packages and faltered when smaller ones lay on top of them. Another prioritized packages near the top of piles but struggled with “unreachable picks” and partly buried items.Machine learning performed better, though the on-paper margin was modest. Trained on more than 394,000 picking actions, a model reached a 93.73 percent success rate, compared with 92.28 percent for the top traditional algorithm. Over a work period involving more than 1 million picks, that difference translated to roughly 16,500 fewer failed picks. In another experiment covering 2 million picks on workstations designed to replicate the Robin fleet, the team lowered the failed pick rate by 20 percent. The research was presented in July 2025 at the International Symposium on Experimental Robotics.Next came Cardinal, which loads packages weighing up to 50 pounds into wheeled carts headed for trucks. It began operating in Nashville, Tennessee, in November 2022.“Think of it as a game of Tetris: You're sorting packages, and you're placing them into the cart, and you want to be able to pack that as densely as you possibly can,” Dresser said. “Dense containers are great from a sustainability perspective and from a transportation cost perspective.” According to Dresser, Amazon has only recently begun rolling out Cardinal at greater scale and will continue doing so over the coming several years.Scaling from packages to hundreds of millions of itemsWhile Robin and Cardinal manage several dozen package types, Sparrow must contend with the hundreds of millions of products that appear in customer orders. It consolidates items from partly filled totes into tightly packed ones and replenishes them as orders are picked.“When we think about how AI applies to the physical space in robotics, Sparrow was really the first place where we truly deployed foundation models that enabled us to deal with that high diversity of products,” Dresser said. He explained that those models allow the team to recognize and categorize items and develop grasping strategies without hand-coding each product.Since then, the team has developed a perception foundation model for products it has never encountered, along with a generalized action model that functions across arms using varying combinations of suction and finger grasping.“If you need to build ad hoc perception models for every such task and embodiment, that just doesn't scale,” Kapil Katyal, a senior applied science manager at Amazon Robotics, said while presenting at the Intelligent Robots and Systems conference in Pittsburgh on September 29. “So one of the initiatives we took up in our team was to design a foundation model which could work for any new embodiment of robots that we deploy, and across all of the perception tasks that we need to perform over those,” Katyal said.Vulcan has a sense of touchThe latest arm, Vulcan, is the first to combine vision with force feedback sensors, giving it tactile awareness for handling items inside fabric pods.“You need to be able to insert an item, create space, or pull something out,” Dresser said. “Those are really hard things to do with traditional non-touch-based systems today, like the suction-based systems that are part of Sparrow.”Vulcan went into service in Spokane, Washington, and Hamburg, Germany, in 2025. Deployment remains limited for now, and Dresser said Amazon plans to scale it up in 2027. Amazon argues that Vulcan handles top-row picks that would otherwise require a step-ladder, as well as items sitting just above the floor, leaving workers with products in comfortable reach. That is a believable ergonomic advantage, but it reveals nothing about how quickly those workers will be expected to clear the middle rows.The staffing calculus Amazon keeps quietAmazon maintains that robotics generates employment. Fulfillment centers equipped with advanced robotics generally require 30 percent more staff in reliability, maintenance and engineering positions, and each new robot factory is expected to add more than 300 jobs.“We've actually increased the number of robotic maintenance technicians that we have in the network by over 30 percent, and that is a much higher-skilled, higher-compensated job,” Dresser said. “As we've deployed robots over the past decade, we've seen our operational footprint grow, creating hundreds of thousands of jobs as we expanded our network,” the Amazon spokesperson said.In October 2025, however, The New York Times reported on internal strategy documents indicating that the robotics effort could allow Amazon to reduce its projected US hiring needs by more than 160,000 people by 2027 and 600,000 people by 2033. At the time, an Amazon spokesperson said the documents represented the perspective of only one group within the company.Just a small share of Amazon's US workforce has unionized, yet Greenwood said unions have “traditionally served a very good role in terms of improving worker safety.”“Now, obviously, I understand that firms are not always excited to engage in that conversation, and I can't say that would solve the problem here,” Greenwood said. “But developing a better relationship between management and labor is usually the best path forward to try to figure out how to reduce these injury rates, which would have benefits for Amazon as well.”The first Amazon Labor Union, formed at a Staten Island, New York, warehouse in April 2022, has been campaigning for a Safety Bill of Rights that spells out the changes it is seeking. The accompanying image carries the message: “We are not robots.”

Eric Barone has some news for anyone who spent their time in Stardew Valley skipping the farm work and heading down into the mines with a sword. His next project is built with exactly that kind of player in mind.Speaking in a new interview about Haunted Chocolatier, the solo developer better known as ConcernedApe put it plainly: "It's for the people in Stardew Valley that go into the mines." He added, "That's what I do, honestly."Most fans probably weren't expecting a change this big. Since Barone first announced Haunted Chocolatier in 2021, many have pictured it as Stardew Valley with a chocolate shop added on. The game is shaping up to be something different.Combat comes before confectioneryBarone said the game hasn't left its roots behind. "It is still what I call a town game," he said, "But it's more of an action RPG."He also explained where the emphasis lies: "the main focus is more about adventuring, finding equipment and getting more powerful. There are monsters, there are boss fights."The setting is different as well. Barone called the game's world more "metaphysical" than Pelican Town. It's a vague description, but it gives away just enough to make fans curious.He isn't sharing much beyond that for now, and that's deliberate.The reasons he keeps the game under wrapsBarone has shown very little of Haunted Chocolatier, and his explanation is simple. "Partly, it feels like I'm serving a half-baked bread. I would rather serve a fully baked bread," he said.He's also wary of showing features that might not make it to launch. "Also, I know that many parts of the game will likely evolve and change before release, so if I reveal them early, I risk disappointing players if the final product does not match their expectation," Barone explained. "Fortunately, I'm in a position where I don't need to market the game, so I can take my preferred approach."That last remark is a bit of a boast, but he's earned it. Few developers could go years without a round of trailers and still have fans eagerly following every update.Barone himself admitted in June that those updates have started to sound alike. "Feels kinda dumb posting this same thing over and over, but that's the reality," he said back then.How one recipe book swallowed months of workIf you're wondering why development is taking this long, look at the way Barone talks about a single menu.Also in June, he said the parts of the game players use all the time have to be "perfect," and described them as needing to be "clear, intuitive, satisfying, aesthetic." The example he gave was the recipe book players will use to make chocolates."To me, it's not a simple task, as I torture myself over every last detail," he said. "This is a UI you will be using fairly often, so it has to be perfect. You need to be able to accomplish your goal with the minimal number of clicks."He went on in more detail, like someone who has redesigned the same screen many times over. "If the data is all clustered together, it will be disgusting to look at," Barone said. "And this is just the bare minimum, that players will likely take for granted. If all of that is accomplished then the player is now comfortable while perusing the recipe book. But I want more than just comfort. I want to delight the player. All of this typically requires me to iterate on something several times before I'm satisfied with it."That much effort is going into a recipe book. If every menu gets the same treatment, fans should expect a long wait.Stardew Valley still needs his attentionHaunted Chocolatier doesn't have a release date yet, and neither does Stardew Valley's 1.7 update. Barone isn't building 1.7 directly.Part of the reason he expanded his team was to free up his own time. "Well, part of the reason why I've expanded my team a little bit is so that hopefully I can spend more time working on Haunted Chocolatier," Barone said in a February interview. "And it's worked out pretty well so far, I would say."He described his role on 1.7 as roughly that of a creative director: he passes ideas to the team and then returns to his own game. That setup won't last through the whole update cycle, though."At some point in 1.7's cycle, I will get heavily involved, because I feel like my hand needs to touch every part of the game, every aspect of the update," he said. "That's been a big change from the 1.3 update or 1.1 or something where it's completely me. I had no time to work on a new game. So that has changed."According to Barone, the hardest part is the way his own mind works. "If I'm thinking about Haunted Chocolatier, it's difficult to be like, 'Okay, I'm going to one day of the week or two days of the week work on Stardew Valley.' That's not how my brain works," he said. "I'm all in one thing or the other. So I've been trying to work on that. I feel like it requires a lot of discipline, which I'm always working to improve on."

When a Windows PC keeps churning well after you've logged in, neither the startup apps list nor Autoruns can tell you what's going on. A free Microsoft utility, the Windows Performance Toolkit, can capture a complete boot trace that shows when every service and driver started and how their work overlapped. Use it to work out which layer needs attention: services, storage or hardware. It isn't a shortcut for finding a single app to blame. Why startup tools can't explain a slow boot Autoruns and the startup list in Task Manager show what's configured to launch. They can't show when each entry actually started, how long it ran or what else was happening alongside it. Windows can bring up the desktop while plenty of startup work is still going on in the background. In one example, an 8GB Core i5 laptop showed its desktop after roughly 25 seconds, yet the boot trace revealed substantial activity continuing past that point. That lingering busyness is exactly what startup lists can't account for. Because a boot trace logs activity across several layers at the same time, it captures work that ordinary startup views never measure. Capture a full boot trace Everything you need ships with the Windows Performance Toolkit, a component of the Windows ADK (Assessment and Deployment Kit, Microsoft's free collection of deployment and testing tools). Install the Windows Performance Toolkit as part of the Windows ADK. Run xbootmgr to record a trace covering a complete boot. Run xperf to extract reports from the trace file, among them the service initialization report and the driver-delay report. For boot phase data, which can reveal when Explorer initializes, load the trace in WPA (Windows Performance Analyzer). Check that you have lots of free disk space before you begin. A single boot trace on the 8GB Core i5 laptop weighed in at about 1.07 GB, which is a sizable amount of data to sift through. Interpret the service initialization report This report lists the time each service needed to initialize, and it may turn up lengthy intervals for services you've never given a second thought. In the example trace, these five took the longest: HNS: 9.648s (virtual networking) DellClientManagementService: 6.906s (Dell's management tool) IntelAudioService: 5.641s (audio) DusmSvc: 5.574s (data usage tracking) BITS: 4.757s (background downloads) Resist the urge to total these figures. Since the intervals overlap, their sum won't match your boot time. Each value reflects how long that particular service spent initializing, not how long it kept you waiting for the desktop. Nor will the services appear as one tidy cluster. In the example, BITS sat lower in the report, while DellClientManagementService turned up considerably later. Windows doesn't run through a single startup list in order; separate batches of work kick off and overlap at different moments. Interpret the driver-delay report Rather than whole services, the driver-delay report lists individual events. The biggest entries won't necessarily come from third-party software. In the example trace, core Windows components accounted for the largest events: FLTMGR.SYS: about 799ms (file system filtering) FLTMGR.SYS: about 552ms (file system filtering) FLTMGR.SYS / Ntfs.sys ($Mft): about 415ms (file system bookkeeping) storport.sys: about 295ms (storage stack) pci.sys: about 268ms (hardware bus) Just like the services, these events overlap, so totaling them won't produce your boot time. All of the top three sit in the file system stack, and one involves $Mft, the NTFS Master File Table that holds information on every file and folder on the drive. The remaining two relate to the storage stack and the PCI bus. ACPI.sys, a low-level component responsible for power management and hardware configuration, may also appear. Commonly blamed drivers such as Netwtw08.sys (Wi-Fi), TbtBusDrv.sys (Thunderbolt) and RtsPer.sys (card reader) registered only as far smaller events in the example, and no third-party driver stood out. Let the trace point to a layer, not a culprit It's tempting to hope a single service or driver will jump out so you can disable it and move on. That rarely happens. What you'll more likely find is service startups, driver events and storage activity overlapping throughout the trace. A lengthy service interval, a lengthy driver event and a late-starting service are three separate things, and none of them proves that the item held up your desktop. The xperf reports record what occurred and when, but by themselves they can't tell you which events caused the sluggishness after login. Treat a large number as a lead worth investigating, not as evidence: Don't switch off a service simply because it tops the list. HNS, for instance, is a Windows networking component that supports features like virtualized and container networking. A long initialization time alone isn't grounds for disabling it. Don't uninstall or attempt to repair a driver just because a large event appears beside it. A big FLTMGR.SYS event doesn't indicate that FLTMGR.SYS is faulty. Disabling a service because it ranks highly could break a feature you'll need down the line. So instead of asking which app is dragging your PC down, ask which layer merits closer inspection: services, storage or hardware. Then dig into that layer before making any changes. Frequently asked questions Can I add up the service times to get my total boot time? No. Because services and driver events overlap, summing their durations won't give you your boot time. Each figure reflects only how long that single item took. Should I disable HNS if it has the longest startup time? Not on the basis of its startup time alone. HNS powers virtualized and container networking, and disabling it could break features you'll need later. How is a boot trace different from Autoruns? Autoruns lists what's configured to launch with Windows. A boot trace reveals when each service and driver actually started and how their work overlapped. How big is a boot trace file? Potentially very large. One boot trace captured on an 8GB Core i5 laptop came to about 1.07 GB.

In Brief:Portal has released new Portal 2.0 updates that, according to the company, allow users to earn Shards and monetize their skills.Creators collect Shards by making game assets in Nexus or building games in Gen8, and can then redeem them for gift cards in the Portal Shop.The rollout arrives during Gen8's open beta, running Oct. 1-31, as CEO Benjamin Charbit steers Portal toward AI game creation.Portal's Shards reward currency is now linked to creative output on the platform, following a new round of updates to Portal 2.0.The company announced the change on X: "Your creativity is now your currency," Portal wrote. "We just rolled out major updates to Portal 2.0 that let you monetize your skills, earn Shards and fuel your next big game." Earn with PortalYour creativity is now your currency. We just rolled out major updates to Portal 2.0 that let you monetize your skills, earn Shards and fuel your next big game.Let's dive into how it works@PortalView on X ↗ The announcement gave no dollar value for Shards. Portal also left open whether the changes affect how many Shards a particular task pays.How the Shards loop worksPortal's website sums up the earning model in a single line: "Generate assets or games to earn Shards for rewards."The model rests on two main tools. Nexus covers assets, giving users the ability to "Create game-ready sprites, audio, and art your agentic team can put to work." Gen8 is for complete games, letting creators "Shape your concept, then prompt to build your game into something playable."The site says Shards can also be earned through app usage, events, game jams and community engagement.Options for spending them are more limited. In the Portal Shop, users can "Spend shards on gift cards that fuel accounts for the games you keep playing." Credits, Shards and creator packs are sold there too. The site does not list any direct cash or token payout for Shards.Gen8 beta and eventsThe updates arrive partway through "Portal Gen8: Open Beta for All," which runs Oct. 1-31. Gen8 turns text prompts into playable 2D games. A user enters an idea, chooses a template and then refines what comes out.Ahead of the beta, Portal ran a Gen8 Creators Program from Aug. 1-31, which gave early access to 20 selected creators.The company also staged two game jams, one in August (Aug. 15-17) and one in September (Sept. 19-21), each with a 50,000 Shards prize pool. A Nexus Asset Sprint took place July 6-20.Portal lists integrations with Claude, OpenAI, Unity, Unreal, Godot, Cursor and HelloMinds.The Portal 2.0 pivotPortal 2.0 grew out of a reset that started after Portal merged with BLIFE Protocol in December 2025. A new leadership team, drawn mostly from Animoca Brands, took control, and Benjamin Charbit, a former Ubisoft game director, was named CEO.With the relaunch, Portal moved toward what it described as "AI-native tools and a creator-first workflow" intended to "enable non-developer users to create through AI-powered game development."Portal Studio is on the 2.0 roadmap. It is a virtual workspace where AI agents work together. So is Portal GameRouter, a single API for managing agents, assets and pipelines. Portal also described GameGen, for games generated from prompts, and GameHub, a monetization platform it planned to launch. GameHub has not gone live yet.For the token, Portal intends to put revenue from its AI tools toward regular PORTAL buybacks. Holders receive early access, advanced tool usage rights and voting rights.Shards, round twoPortal has used Shards before. During its Crystal Dash campaign in late 2023, users earned points for creating and sharing content about Portal. The points became crystal shards, which could be fused into virtual crystals.After PORTAL launched in January 2024, Crystal Dash participants converted their shards into the token airdrop.This time the Shards lead somewhere different. As things stand, the Portal Shop's catalog is made up of gift cards for other games.

In Brief:Splinterlands (official site) launched its Hallow's Fall 2026 Halloween event on Oct. 13, once scheduled maintenance was finished.Reward chests start carrying the new Halloween skins on Oct. 15, and the team urged players to "Save that Glint!"This is the third time Hallow's Fall has run. In 2025, Spooky skins sold for between 500 and 20,000 Glint, and a limited Haunted set was added to Ultimate chests.Hallow's Fall 2026 went live in Splinterlands on Oct. 13, after a maintenance window. Two days later, on Oct. 15, the new Halloween skins will be added to reward chests.Splinterlands announced the event in a post on X. "Fresh frights, new Halloween skins, and more to collect!" the game's account wrote. Hallow's Fall 2026 is almost here!Fresh frights, new Halloween skins, and more to collect! Kicks off October 13, after maintenance! New skins hit reward chests October 15. Save that Glint!Check out the spooky new looks!@SplinterlandsView on X ↗ Players were told to "Save that Glint!" in the post. The announcement gave no skin count for the new batch, no prices and no end date for the event.How last year's event ranThe 2025 edition began on Oct. 14 and ran until the Nov. 4 update. It brought in two holiday skin sets, Spooky and Haunted. It also added a limited holiday ruleset, plus battle backgrounds and chest images across the site.Most Spooky skins were sold for Glint in the Reward shop. Prices were 500 Glint for commons, 2,500 for rares, 8,000 for epics and 20,000 for legendaries. The skins were purely cosmetic and gave no edge in battle.The rarer items came from chests. "A handful of limited Spooky summoner skins and older cards, along with a very limited Haunted set will be added to Ultimate chests at the start on the new season on the 15th," according to the 2025 release notes. "There will be a 3% chance of finding a skin, which is removed from the potion chance."Blood Moon was last year's holiday ruleset. "This causes all units to begin the match with the Blood Lust ability," the notes explained.The first Hallow's Fall began on Oct. 15, 2024, and was a far smaller event. Splinterlands temporarily swapped some of its artwork for holiday versions. The studio said players might be able to get permanent copies of those skins after the Glamour system launched.The Oct. 13 announcement didn't say whether any of last year's mechanics will return.A year of holiday skinsHallow's Fall follows several skin-based holiday events that Splinterlands ran in 2026.Amorendel took place in the first season of February under the "Hey Jealousy" ruleset. The Jan. 27 release notes said, "10 different Sweetheart skins will be available in the Reward shop for either Glint or DEC for the duration of the event."Eggstravaganza came next, in April. "A new holiday is hopping into Splinterlands for the first season of April," the March 30 notes read. Then the Summer Fun update on June 2 said that "A new set of gift boxes are coming, along with more than 50 new skins!"Alteration arrived in the June 30 release notes. The feature "Grants a monthly skin airdrop, as well as a chance to get rare premium skins." It went live on Aug. 18.Glint and chestsGlint dates back to the April 2024 rewards overhaul, which removed daily and seasonal chests. Players earn it by playing. It can't be bought directly, and it can't be traded between players or on Hive Engine.Splinterlands has adjusted the Glint economy several times this year. A Feb. 17 change let players in Silver league and above automatically burn their SPS rewards for extra Glint. "This effectively doubles your reward shares," the release notes said.Under a May 26 update, new players also receive 30 Glint for each of their first 10 Frontier battles.Chest odds have changed as well. "Jackpot cards for reward chests have run out and temporarily been removed from the chest odds," the Sept. 15 release notes said.