Runic Games has posted on the Torchlight Forums that the first patch is for Torchlight is now ready.
This is a full installer so you have to uninstall and re-install the game to do the update.
You also must install the version available from the vendor from whom you purchased the game. So if, like me, you purchased from Direct2Drive, don’t go download the version for people who bought direct from Runic.
Abstracts from the announcement:
NOTES ON THE PATCH! PLEASE READ!
SUPER-IMPORTANT! YOU MUST USE A PATCH FROM THE VENDOR YOU PURCHASED FROM! Each vendor has their own DRM solution, and none are compatible. If you purchased from Steam, you’ll need the Steam patch , and so on.
This if a FULL REINSTALL. The packaged files for the patch changed entirely to improve loading times, so a full reinstall is necessary. If you are patching, you’ll need to uninstall your previous version.
BACK UP YOUR SAVE GAMES! Your uninstaller may ask you if you want to delete your save games. Make sure that it is UN CHECKED! If you want to be extra safe, you can manually back up your saves – I’d recommend this. Better safe than sorry!
Start->run
%appdata% and press return
Then browse to Runic Games\Torchlight\Save – and back up all the files there.
———————————————————————————–
Torchlight 1.12 Patch Notes –
* Fixed several issues which could overwrite saves, and protected against possible save loss. Save backups are now also generated.
* Much reduced load times for many users
* Some minor ingame performance improvements
* Fixed Needle Arc XP exploit
* Fixed Shadow Armor stacking effects
* Fixed vendor dupe bug
* Fixed various fullscreen startup issues
* Fixed broken Brink cinematic on subsequent plays
* Fixed merchant ‘thief’ exploit
* Fixed right clicking in inventory casting certain spells
* Fixed console not activating on Steam builds – this also fixes the fact that subsequent characters didn’t see the random dungeon unlock after the first completion
* Fixed issue with Syl’s cinematic not being “skippable” during first boss fight
* Fixed some DOT deaths not dropping loot
* Quest items no longer allowed in stash
* Several level fixes for a few places where things overlapped, or collision was missing, or stuck-issues cropped up
* Fixed texture/mesh/ replacement issues with mods
* You can now change difficulty level on the fly from the console without being branded a Cheater ( UNLESS you’re playing hardcore )
* Fixed pet minions not awarding fame
* Fixed slow load times when mods were enabled
* Pets inherit your spell masteries
* Magic find takes the max value between you and your pet when pets or pet minions make a kill
* Visible/increasing chance of stripping enchants via enchanter. Price based on # of enchants. Variables tunable in globals.dat
* Troll pet is properly invincible
* Tree Boss could be charmed – fixed
* Fixed issue – Returning to town if you died during Ember Colossus or Medea would make them dormant on return
* weapon + shield doesn’t count as ‘dual wielding’
* Shimmering Scale ( and 2 other socketables ) now work properly when socketed
* Ember lance slight nerf
* Ember lightning slight buff
* Aloe Gel summon provides better healing
* Equippables properly provide bonuses to passive skills
* Fixed display issue where multiple skill bonuses on the same item would collapse into a single display
* Hardware skinning settings respected properly for pet paperdolls
* Fix for potential bad state in the henchman battle
* Enchantments at level 100 now work
* Relabeled difficulty levels, and added tooltips explaining each
* Fixed ‘free spell purchase’ exploit
* Socketables cannot be heirloomed
* Fix for masteries not updating certain spell bonuses until logout/login
* Summon Blood Skeleton has 11 levels now
* Various small grammar and spelling fixes* ADDITION : Rimlights, HW Skinning, and VSynch can all be altered from the Settings menu now.
* MODDERS: Items can be set to ‘always identified’
The Ancient Gaming Noob 
I downloaded TL per your recommendation last week. I really enjoyed the roughly 3 hours I spent playing. Lots of good click-click-click fun, but in the end it just felt too much like Fate to me and I couldn’t stay hooked. I guess I’d rather be flying through New Eden.
On topic however, this seems like a pretty heavy-handed way to patch, no? Hopefully next on their list is an update system.
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Full re-install to patch, is that a first?
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A first? I’m going to say “no” because if I sit and think for a bit, I’ll bet I can come up with a dozen products that have required (officially or unofficially) something similar. (Only one of which I worked on!) But none are games.
Is it an awkward? Yeah. I think this is the sort of thing you get a pass on once. How do you ship a consumer product in this day and age and not have a patch deployment plan?
I’ll be interested to see how this gets deployed to the various distribution venues. This is the full installer. Is Direct2Drive, for example, going to want to post that on their patches page? I’m going to guess not. So how will I get it?
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The first Unreal and Unreal Tournament games required you to enter the CD to basically reinstall the game.
It didn’t require a complete uninstall though.
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Terrible way to patch, but this brings up questions regarding their DRM and they don’t have a dedicated FAQ for those issues (but I’ve asked for one so we’ll see). You are given a limited number of “uses” on your key you bought, so does this patch sequence of uninstall/reinstall screw you out of key uses? Because it will prompt you to enter your key again once you uninstall it and reinstall it and run it for the “first” time…again…
:(
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“but this brings up questions regarding their DRM ”
which has laready been asked on their forums and to which they have already replied. They will “refund” any uses taht get used.
“this seems like a pretty heavy-handed way to patch, no?”
the main reason for this is because the game is built with the ability to mod as a prioity
then Runic discovered that users who had special chars in their name, like the french e or other unicode accented chars, were having problems because of the way the game and the game’s graphics’s engine was looking for mods in the user’s appdata folder;
the unicode chars were causing the mesh files to not be able to find the modded textures in the users mod folder
so they had do a rewrite of the main exe and some other things regarding modding
and since the game is small with little dialog and no cinematics, the full game is not very large anyway. The full game is about 400mb. That’s smaller than an update to World of Warcraft or Warhammer Online.
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@JamesL – Actually, that “refund” only applies to those who purchased from them directly. As they explained, each distribution scheme has its own, incompatible DRM solution, so the story may vary from vendor to vendor. That is, once your particular vendor makes the new installer available. (No Direct2Drive version yet.)
And because of that, plus the uninstall, plus the possibility to accidentally blow away your characters, I would say that this is considerably more annoying that a WoW or WAR patch, regardless of the size. So trying to minimize the impact based simply on size isn’t really a valid argument in my opinion.
But like I said somewhere else, a fun new game with a low price from a small company, they get a pass from me (not that anybody cares), but please don’t make this the standard update process. And it certainly doesn’t seem like they plan on that. From the forums:
Yes, our aim/hope for subsequent patches would be for them to be ‘normal’.
This one was a bit of an exception, because the whole package changed, and we didn’t want to delay the patch to build a new installer to ‘patch’ it.
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And further on the Runic DRM reset:
For any of you with the Runic version of the game, we’ve reset your key activations. It’s like you never activated the game! That way if you have to re-enter your code to activate the game on any of your machines, you should be all square.
So, to reiterate – as of now, everybody who bought the game from us has 10 activations again.
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Thank you for the infos! Some tricks and easy ways concerning the mods for Torchlight are here: http://bit.ly/6JFxUa
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