Eastern Herald sits right at the center of two frustrations in Where Winds Meet: Kaifeng completion stalling out, and players being unable to start the Fairgrounds encounter A Study in Slacking even after clearing everything else in sight.
Eastern Herald is not an Encounter Quest or a Wandering Tale. It is a Kaifeng exploration objective tied to the city’s newspaper network and future map expansion on the east side of Kaifeng. Until that expansion is fully online, it acts as a hard gate for both your exploration percentage and one of Kaifeng’s Encounter quests.
How Eastern Herald fits into Kaifeng’s progression
Kaifeng’s content is layered. Regional completion is built from:
- Sentient Beings in each sub‑area (Riddles, Gift of Gab, Meow Meow, Boundary Stones, and so on)
- Wandering Tales and Encounter Quests such as The Ephemeral Blight, Winter Gambit, and A Dog’s Ambition
- Exploration items that often have their own subtitles, like “Kaifeng Exploration: Eastern Herald.”
Eastern Herald belongs to that last group. It is a named Kaifeng exploration task connected to the city’s eastern press district and is referenced directly in encounter requirements: players aiming to trigger A Study in Slacking in the Fairgrounds are told they must first complete “Kaifeng: Eastern Herald.”
That makes Eastern Herald functionally similar to how Culinary: Hotpot Fever in Qinghe is required to unlock Deerforage’s Remedy, or how Gift of Gab: Silver Tongue must be cleared before A Duel of Wits appears. The difference is that Eastern Herald is tied to content that is only rolling out gradually.
Why Eastern Herald icons appear on your Kaifeng map
After recent maintenance, new icons began showing up across Kaifeng. These mark out locations tied to Eastern Herald’s future route: places where you will eventually pick up leads, speak to news vendors, or interact with Herald infrastructure once the exploration becomes active.
At the moment, these icons behave more like placeholders than live objectives. You can see them on the map and ride past the locations, but you do not receive a true exploration entry or a new quest chain when you arrive. That is intentional rather than a bug; the Herald’s full interaction layer is still date‑gated.
In other words, the game is telegraphing where Eastern Herald will live in Kaifeng without yet letting you clear it.
Timegates and the December 14th Newsboy hint
Several NPCs in Kaifeng, including Newsboys, mention specific calendar dates when asked about the newspaper storyline. One key hint is that certain Herald content will not be available until the 14th of the month. Players logging in immediately after maintenance can see the new icons but cannot actually complete the related exploration or encounters.
That Newsboy line is the core of the timegate: Eastern Herald is tied to a rollout schedule, not just to your main chapter progress. When global time reaches the specified date, and the server switches over to the corresponding content flag, Herald‑related steps begin unlocking in stages. Early steps may involve simple errands or introductory errands the day after maintenance, with additional steps held back until the 14th.
Until those dates pass on your server, Eastern Herald remains listed but unfinishable, and anything that depends on it remains locked as well.
How Eastern Herald blocks A Study in Slacking
The Fairgrounds encounter A Study in Slacking has two hard requirements before it can even trigger:
- Finish the news storyline prequel – the exploration labeled Windpress: The Scoop.
- Complete the Kaifeng exploration entry “Eastern Herald”.
Only after those two lines are satisfied does the encounter itself become available. When the prerequisites are met, you teleport to the East Cross Street Boundary Stone in the Fairgrounds and speak to Mo Yuwang to start the scene.
Right now, that chain is broken not by a bug in A Study in Slacking itself, but by the missing Eastern Herald exploration. With Eastern Herald still time‑gated, A Study in Slacking never flips from “requirements not met” to “ready to spawn,” no matter how many times you rest, time‑skip, or reload the Fairgrounds.
That is why completion‑focused players see the preconditions listed in their Encounter Journal, yet cannot force the quest to appear. Until Eastern Herald is marked complete on your Kaifeng exploration list, Mo Yuwang will not offer anything new.
Kaifeng’s wider completion cap and Herald’s role
Eastern Herald is one piece of a broader pattern: Kaifeng’s total exploration percentage currently stalls long before 100 percent. Even players who have:
- Finished all visible Encounters and Wandering Tales
- Cleared every Riddle NPC in the city and suburbs
- Explored every accessible sub‑region, from South Imperial Garden to Petalfall Crossing
still tend to sit at roughly three‑quarters completion. That plateau comes from several missing or locked elements across the region, including:
- Wandering Tales that rely on access to Martial Temple and the deeper Jade Palace content
- Encounters that explicitly wait on later story chapters or patches
- Exploration entries like Eastern Herald that exist conceptually but are not fully active
Eastern Herald, therefore, acts as both a narrative hook into Kaifeng’s newspaper network and a visible example of how the region’s completion is being staged over time rather than shipped as a single finished set.
What you can (and can’t) do about Eastern Herald right now
There is no workaround that brute‑forces Eastern Herald early. The gate is not tied to your current chapter in the main story, your exploration score, or your choice of sect. It is pinned to a server‑side schedule and patch content.
The only productive steps at the moment are:
Step 1: Make sure everything else that does count toward Kaifeng completion is genuinely finished. That includes all visible Encounters, Riddles, Boundary Stones, and accessible Wandering Tales in Kaifeng City, the suburbs, and surrounding zones.
Step 2: Complete Windpress: The Scoop as soon as it becomes available in your log, so that you are not blocked by that separate requirement once Eastern Herald unlocks.
Step 3: After each content update or specified calendar date, log in, check your Kaifeng map for any interactive Herald icons, and re‑visit East Cross Street to see if A Study in Slacking has quietly become available from Mo Yuwang.
Other common approaches—switching between Solo and Online modes, skipping in‑game days, or idling at the Fairgrounds landmark—do not bypass the fundamental time gate. They only help with encounters that are already flagged as active but have strict in‑game time requirements, such as Winter Gambit at Goldwater Street or the dog‑related events in Masterwood Hamlet.
For now, Eastern Herald is best treated as a coming‑soon pillar of the Kaifeng experience: its map icons preview a future circuit of errands and reporting, its name quietly blocks off one of the city’s Fairgrounds encounters, and its completion status prevents regional progress from reaching the elusive 100 percent mark. Once the specified dates and patch stages roll through, Herald steps will begin to resolve, and A Study in Slacking will finally be more than an entry in the Encounter list.
