# Dota 2 Explore Wandering Waters in the 7.38 Gameplay Update

- Product: Dota 2 (https://whatsnew.fyi/product/dota-2)
- Vendor: Valve
- Date: 2025-02-19
- Original notes: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/570/view/737004388447420792
- Permalink: https://whatsnew.fyi/product/dota-2/releases/2025-02-19-explore-wandering-waters-in-the-7.38-gameplay-upd

What's New is an index, not a publisher: every entry below links to the vendor's own release notes, which are the authoritative source. Entries are labelled where they are hand-curated sample data, pre-releases, or drawn from a secondary source such as a developer blog.

Reuse: the summaries, labels and curation here are © What's New. Quote freely with attribution and a link back; wholesale republication of the corpus is not permitted — terms: https://whatsnew.fyi/terms. The vendors' own release notes remain their publishers'.

---

- **changed** — River width increased and river current can speed movement
- **changed** — River creeps are now amphibious and can slow movement by killing units
- **added** — Madstone resource can be used to craft unique neutral items
- **changed** — Map updated with various improvements
- **changed** — Wisdom runes replaced with wisdom shrines

Much like the galactic water miners in the movie and possibly the book Dune Part 2, Dota has always been the only game in any genre that believes water is the most valuable resource in both the Dune-iverse and our universe, the universe. It's kind of crazy, then, that it's taken more than a decade for us to finally prove that bold claim by saying it out loud in print.

And if that was all we did, it would be enough. But we didn't stop there. We've re-made the river that runs through the Dota map. Not only is it wider, its current can speed your movement. Conversely, the new river's new evolving, amphibious creeps can drastically slow your movement by killing you.

And that's not all: How about a new resource! "Waterstone?" you say. In retrospect, that would have made sense. But it's actually called "Madstone" and you can use it to craft your own unique neutral items. Which is crazy, so the name actually fits pretty well.

We've also made some other map updates, replaced wisdom runes with much cooler wisdom shrines, and made a bunch of quality of life changes. It's all too much to detail in one blog post, which means you'd be out of luck unless we made a page dedicated to describing all the stuff in great detail. [Which we did.](https://www.dota2.com/wanderingwaters)