It’s almost time to wrap up your current roster of Diablo IV characters and dive into a brand new season with your first “Seasonal Character.”

This means your current characters will be retired—though not entirely. Old characters will be moved to the Eternal Realm, where players can continue to play with them without getting a Battle Pass or enjoying the new seasonal content.

However, if you want to play the new questline or any of the other new content coming to the game in the Season of the Malignant, you’ll need a new character. The good news is if you’ve already finished the campaign, you don’t need to play it all over again. The new content is all end-game content, so you can dive into that directly so long as you’ve already finished the campaign.

Here’s where my warning comes into play, however: Before the new season starts and you create a new seasonal character, you need to take a somewhat strange, mildly annoying, step in order to carry over (some) of your progress into Season 1.

Players need to login between now and Season 1’s start-time on Thursday, July 20th with the character that has the most progression—the most map uncovered, the most Altars of Lilith discovered, the highest level attained and so forth—in order for progress to carry over into Season 1. This is something you can do now that the update is live “behind the scenes” with the patch that went through Tuesday the 18th.

But don’t worry, even if you don’t login until after the start of the season, you’ll still be able to carry over progress according to Blizzard. “Functionally, from [July 18] forward, anytime you ever login on a character, it will just check ‘hey, does this character have any progress that’s not already credited on your account? Cool, I’m now crediting it to your account,’” lead producer Tim Ismay in a livestream covering the new season.

Obviously, the more you’ve completed the better but nothing is time-gated, so you can rest easy before the new season comes out and play at your leisure, which is something I—and many other more casual Diablo fans—appreciate!