Pax Dei – 2025 Developer Retrospective

Greetings Paxians!

As 2025 comes to a close, we want to take a moment to reflect on a year that was both challenging and transformative for Pax Dei. Together with you, builders, adventurers, crafters, and explorers, we brought our game from Early Access all the way to its full release (1.0) in October.

This milestone represents more than a version number. It marks the beginning of a long-term journey for Pax Dei as a living MMO.

From Early Access to 1.0: A Landmark Shift

Early Access gave us invaluable insight into how you play, where the game shines, and where it needed to evolve. Throughout 2025, our focus was on stabilizing the game’s foundations, refining core systems, and preparing Pax Dei for a sustainable and expandable future.

The 1.0 release brought:

A fresh start for everyone, bringing the era of wipes to an end.
Full availability on Steam and the Epic Games Store, inclusion in PC Game Pass, and support for GeForce Now.
Migration away from the original launcher to ensure long-term support and smoother patching.
System refinements heavily guided by community feedback gathered during the Early Access period.

We want to sincerely thank all Founders and early supporters who stood with us throughout pre-launch. Your feedback shaped the game more than you may realise.

A Clearer Access & Monetization Model

2025 was also the year we clarified Pax Dei’s long-term structure. The game follows a buy-to-play model, with an optional subscription required only for players who wish to own plots of land.

Players who want to explore, craft, adventure, or play socially without owning land can continue to access the game fully without a subscription. To better support this playstyle, we introduced additional systems this year—such as Grace for Plots—to broaden how players can participate in the world.

We know monetization sparked discussion, and we appreciate the candid feedback that helped us refine both the model itself and how we communicate it. Transparency will remain a priority going forward.

Content Growth & Core Systems

With 1.0 released, we turned our attention to reinforcing the pillars that define Pax Dei:

A player-driven economy
Collaborative building and crafting
Social gameplay and community structures
Open-ended exploration and discovery

Throughout 2025, we laid the groundwork for deeper economic systems, expanded clan features, improved worldbuilding tools, and the foundations for future conflict, cooperation, and progression systems. These areas will remain central as we move into 2026.

Challenges & What We’re Improving

While we’re proud of the progress made, we also recognise where the player experience needs improvement. Over the year, you’ve shared concerns around progression pacing, mid-game engagement, update cadence, and expectations surrounding premium features.

We hear you. A large part of our 2026 roadmap focuses on smoothing progression, reducing grind barriers, improving social tools, enriching the mid-game experience, and delivering updates on a more predictable cadence. Clearer and more consistent communication will be a key part of that effort.

Community First

Pax Dei is at its best when the community is alive: villages bustling, clan projects rising, trading channels humming, shared adventures unfolding. The world thrives on collective effort, and we are continually inspired by the creativity, collaboration, and generosity players bring into the game.

We encourage you to keep connecting: build together, explore together, challenge one another, and help shape the world we are all creating.

Looking Ahead to 2026

To give you a bit of a heads-up, we’re currently working on a smaller update planned for early next year. Ongoing work for this release includes:

Master Crafting: When you achieve a very high success on a craft for an item with Item Power, the item will gain a permanent Item Power boost, and your name will be recorded as its master crafter.
Valley-wide markets: The Heartland Market view will be updated to allow you to purchase items listed from any market stall within your current valley. You’ll now be able to make purchases from any Market Stall, the Petra Dei, or a plot you own within the valley. This change applies only to purchasing; listing items for sale remains unchanged.
Crafting XP rebalancing: A major balancing pass across all crafting recipes, adjusting how much XP each item grants.
Clan and Character Sheet UI: We are improving the clan menu and character stats sheet. These changes don’t yet include permissions, which many of you want and is a high-priority item on our to-do list.
New emotes and facial expressions: We’re adding a new set of emotes, along with facial expressions, to the emote wheel, to give your character more personality and emotional range.
Performance improvements: We’re actively profiling performance issues and aiming to significantly improve render performance during combat.

We enter the new year with a solid foundation and a long list of improvements, features, and expansions we’re excited to deliver. The world of Pax Dei is still young, and its future will be shaped by the players as much as by us.

Thank you for walking this journey with us. Thank you for your patience, your creativity, your criticism, and your passion. Here’s to the next Verses and to an even stronger year ahead.

Pax vobiscum,
The Mainframe Team