PoE 3.29 Crafting Changes: Sockets, Cheap Bench Rerolls and What Mirage Removed

Path of Exile 1 is on 3.29 Curse of the Allflame, which launched on July 24, 2026. It landed only a few months after 3.28 Mirage (March 2026), and between them the two patches changed enough crafting basics that a lot of guides written before this spring are now quietly wrong.

This is the short version for crafters: what changed, what it means in practice, and what didn't change. Quoted lines are from GGG's official patch notes, linked at the end.

3.29: sockets work differently now

The biggest crafting change in 3.29 isn't the league mechanic. It's sockets.

• Sockets are white by default. "Item Sockets are now always White by default," and gems can be socketed into any socket regardless of colour.
• Colour is now a bonus, not a requirement. A gem in a matching red, green or blue socket gains +10% quality. An off-colour gem still works; it just doesn't get the bonus.
• Chromatic Orbs changed job. A Chromatic forces one socket to be non-white and rerolls the remaining socket colours normally. Higher item quality improves the chance of additional non-white sockets. They're also rarer, and towns no longer sell them for Jeweller's Orbs.
• Adding sockets adds white ones. Jeweller's Orbs, Tainted Jeweller's Orbs and Orbs of Binding "will always generate the added sockets as White."
• The bench's colour crafts were replaced. The old red, green and blue socket crafts are gone. In their place: At Least Two / Three / Four Non-White Sockets, for 5 / 20 / 75 Chromatic Orbs.
• Vaal Orbs no longer whiten sockets. That corruption outcome now turns a random white socket non-white.

What it means: off-colour gems stopped being a gearing problem. Almost every build can now use any 6-link it finds, and the old "spam chromatics until RGB" loop no longer exists. If you used a tool or macro for colouring sockets, check it against 3.29 before you trust it. Links themselves didn't change; see our 6-link guide for that part.

3.29: Chaos-Orb rerolls on the crafting bench

Two new crafting bench options are unlocked by default:

• Reroll 3 random modifiers on a rare item, for 3 Chaos Orbs.
• Reroll one random modifier on a rare item, for 8 Chaos Orbs.

These sit between a Chaos Orb, which rerolls everything, and metacrafting, which protects half the item. They're random, so they don't pick the mod you hate. On an item where most mods are replaceable, though, they give you a cheap partial reroll that Chaos spam never did. For the protected, expensive version, see metacrafting.

3.29: reflect became Thorns on maps

The old "Monsters reflect a percentage of damage" map mods are gone. Rare monsters roll Physical or Elemental Thorns instead, which return a fixed amount of damage rather than a share of your hit. It's a different danger: the damage no longer scales with how hard you hit, so it matters most to builds that hit very often. Revisit your list of map mods to avoid. Old stash-search strings that exclude reflect won't catch the new mods either; see the stash search regex guide.

3.29: removed or no longer obtainable

• Ordinary synthesis-base crafting is no longer a current-league route. Non-unique synthesised items no longer become available through the old sources; the stated exception is corrupting a synthesis unique into a rare. Harvest's Synthesise craft is removed, and the Bestiary synthesis-implicit reroll works only on uniques. Existing Standard bases are a separate legacy case, not a recipe for making new bases.
• Old splitting recipes are gone. The two-item and three-item beast splits were replaced by rare-Talisman fracture crafts. Fractured Fossils now fracture a random modifier rather than copying an item, and cannot be used on fractured or influenced items. Do not buy these ingredients for an old split-base recipe.
• Incubators can no longer be obtained.
• Timeless, Primal and Abyssal Delirium Orbs can no longer be obtained.
• Abyss is the source of Stygian Vises and Abyssal Jewels, with an exception: Abyssal Jewels can still appear rarely in Abyss biomes in Delve.

3.29: the league mechanic

The Allflame voyages have their own item manipulation. The patch notes describe it this way: feed an item in and "it will split into a multitude of ghostly outcomes, one of which you can keep," and Ducats found on the seafloor are used "to warp and twist items." League mechanics may not stay in the core game, so treat these as a bonus for this league and don't plan long-term crafts around them.

Carried over from 3.28 Mirage

These landed in March and still catch people out:

• Ordinary Cartographer's Chisels no longer drop. Existing ones still work in Standard and apply +20% quality. Maven's chisel variants are separate. Map Device crafting options were removed, and maps now drop by tier. See map rolling.
• Fossils only come from Delve. GGG "removed sources of Fossils from places other than Delve" and made them much more common inside it. Fossil crafting still works the same.
• Exalted and Regal Orbs are more common. Most bench crafts that cost Exalted Orbs now cost 4.
• Essences stack to 10 instead of 9.
• Harbinger currency is dead. Engineer's Orbs, Harbinger's Orbs and Orbs of Horizons can't be obtained, and existing ones no longer work.
• Fracturing and Ancient Orbs now drop as part of the normal drop pool.
• Divine Orbs show what they'll touch. Hovering an item while applying a Divine or Blessed Orb highlights the values that will be rerolled.

What didn't change

The core loop is the same as it's been for years. Alteration and Augmentation still fish a magic item for one key mod, Regal still makes it rare, Chaos still rerolls a rare, and essences still guarantee a mod. Harvest still offers tag-guaranteed reforges, and Eldritch currency still works off dominance. The patch label on a guide identifies its intended version; it is not a guarantee that every craft is unchanged. Check the linked sources and the current in-game recipe before spending on a valuable item.

Where automation fits

None of this changes which part of crafting is tedious: repeating the same orb and reading the result until the item is right. That's the part Exiled Bench automates. For this league specifically:

• Charts — the Allflame league item — have their own page in the app, rolled the same way as maps: thresholds plus wanted and unwanted mods.
• Sockets was updated for 3.29. It rolls Chromatics until the colours you asked for, and it refuses an all-white target up front, because a 3.29 Chromatic can never produce one and that run would never stop.
• Maps has the new Thorns mods in its Mod DB, so you can avoid them (or target them).
• Everything else, from Alt spam to fossils to Harvest reforges, works the way it did in 3.28.

Sources

• Patch notes 3.29.0 — Curse of the Allflame (official forum)
• Patch notes 3.28.0 — Mirage (official forum)
• 3.29 patch notes summary (Maxroll)