[Update #2]: My review for Darktide is now live and, long story short, it's as rough and fascinating as the world it takes place in!

[Update]: After playing for about 50 hours now I've decided to create a beginner's guide covering some of the basic concepts and combat strategies. So if you'd like your first run through Darktide to be a nice and pleasant one, I'd welcome you to give it a look.

If you've been playing the recently launched Warhammer 40,000: Darktide pre-order beta, chances are you've noticed that getting stronger weapons and curios is a bit of an annoying process as it mostly involves camping the in-game store and hoping for something good to randomly appear. Thankfully, today's beta Update 1.0.8 has sorted this problem out by introducing the weapon crafting/upgrading system!

In order to make use of the freshly unlocked Hadron’s Workshop you'll need to collect crafting materials scattered throughout the levels. These are found in the same sort of locations as consumable items, and they are shared across the entire team, so even if you're the least observant player in the whole world you should still be able to, eventually, craft the weapon of your dreams.

There is unfortunately a bit of a catch. Instead of the crafting materials being shared across all of your characters, they are completely locked to the one that obtained them. What this means is that once you assemble a loadout you enjoy and want to start working on some of the other classes, you'll pretty much have to start the whole grind all over again. This was thankfully not the case in Vermintide 2, and I can only hope that after a couple of updates it will not be the case in Darktide either.

On a more positive note, it's also worth mentioning that Fatshark has added a variety of new character and weapon skins to the in-game store! These appear to be mostly recolors of the skins that are already available through achievements, but considering how you can get them fairly easily by just playing the game, I'd say that's perfectly fair.

As is tradition, Update 1.0.8 has also brought with it a couple of balance changes, performance improvements and bug fixes. You can check out the full list of tweaks over at Steam.

Once the next big update arrives, or Fatshark announces some major new addition, I'll make sure to let you know. Until then, I'll leave you with the recently posted overview trailer: