Frequently Asked Questions

Our game requires a community to come alive. We’ve reached the stage where we need a live game to keep developing. The feedback we’ll receive from our Founders will help shape what the game will look like at launch.

We’ll also reinvest the revenue from Early Access into making the game better and bigger, fulfilling our vision of a living and breathing world that can be your virtual home for years.

In every way, Pax Dei will only exist with the support of its players.

Pax Dei is still heavily in development and not yet feature-complete. We expect all aspects of the game will require balancing and polish.

Throughout Early Access, we plan to expand the game in terms of content and systems. Check our website and Discord for the latest updates on our progress.

Pax Dei’s Early Access is scheduled to last until at least Autumn 2025, possibly longer.

Throughout Early Access, as we expand the game both in terms of content and systems, we anticipate major updates that will require us to reset the game entirely and start over.

That being said, we will do our best to keep such wipes as few and far between as possible.

Ideally, we will also try to do them only partially: major changes on the terrain of the Home Valleys could lead to a reset of all the plots, but not to your characters. Some deep changes in the skill systems or the crafting progression could lead to a reset of the characters but not the plots…

At least one complete wipe/reset will occur just before the full release, and it should be the last one, as we don’t plan to wipe once the game is no longer in Early Access - once it is fully released.

Yes. Players using Steam, Epic Games Store, or the Pax Dei launcher have access to a common list of shards.

The game is currently available in English, French, German, Spanish, and Polish.

A plot allows a given player to earmark a (limited) in-game area for their own usage, where everything they build can be seen and - if they so choose - shared with other players. 

Multiple plots can be grouped together to allow more space for bigger structures or placed separately to enjoy several homes in different locations or game worlds.

Plots are managed at the account level, so players with multiple plots can choose to allocate them to a single character or split them across alts.

The number of character slots defines the maximum number of characters a given player’s account supports - with each character occupying one slot.

In a game without classes, additional characters allow players to explore, join other clans, or meet new friends.

A given account can only have one character in the game at a given time.

Depending on the Pack they opt for, Founders will be granted several additional crafting recipes. The items unlocked by these recipes are cosmetics. They don’t offer specific gameplay advantages.

These recipes can be used an unlimited amount of times (with the required material) and the resulting items behave like any other similar in-game item.

These recipes are exclusive to Founders. Players joining after the full release of Pax Dei won’t have access to these recipes.

The Founders Outfit consists of 6 exclusive recipes for the Founders Finery, Chausses, Mantle, Shoes, Coronet and Emblem. Founders will recognize each other by wearing these garments!

You will be able to craft these items an unlimited number of times (with the required material), and the resulting items behave like any other similar in-game item.

The Hunters Lodge consists of 7 exclusive recipes: three for the Hunters Blessing Triptych, Chandelier, Drinking Horn, Table and Bench. Add some flair to your interior by crafting the items of this exclusive set of decorative pieces! 

You will be able to craft these items an unlimited number of times (with the required material), and the resulting items behave like any other similar in-game item.

The Wyvern Building Set consists of 7 exclusive recipes for the Wyvern Sconce, Wind Vane, Support Beam, Short and Long Poles and Short and Long Beams. Show off your building skills by incorporating these decorative pieces into your creations! 

You will be able to craft these items an unlimited number of times (with the required material), and the resulting items behave like any other similar in-game item.

We’ll need you to link your Pax Dei and Discord accounts to grant you the Founder’s Role, allowing you to post in the dedicated Discord channels and bring your suggestions and feedback directly to the dev team.

Learn more on our Support Site.

All the information about the Founder’s recipes is up to date on the Support Site.

For every purchase made directly via our website, we offer a bonus recipe, the Gallian Gargoyle, as a thank-you for your support.

• If you bought the game for the Pax Dei launcher, the recipe is automatically added to your account and is available for any character you create.

• If you bought a Steam key (from our website), you must link your Pax Dei account with your Steam account. Of course, it means the Pax Dei account you purchased from and the Steam account to which you added (or will add) the key. Once done, the recipe will appear alongside your other Founder’s recipes as soon as you log into the game - quit and restart the game if you linked them while in-game.

On the Pax Dei launcher: You need to install our launcher (you can always find the link on our Support site, in the article linked at the bottom). Launch it, and log in with the Pax Dei account you used to make your purchase.

On Steam: You will receive a Steam key on the email address you used for the purchase, including all the instructions to redeem your copy of the game. To activate it, click the “Games” menu option at the top of the Steam client, choose “Activate a Product on Steam,” and paste your key in the dedicated field. Pax Dei should be available to download in your library.

Learn more on our Support Site.

Yes!

On the Pax Dei launcher: If a player already owns a Founder’s Pack, their upgrade options will be available on playpaxdei.com.

On Steam and the Epic Games Store: If a player already owns a Founder’s Pack, their upgrade options will be available in the “DLC” section of Pax Dei’s library page.

Learn more on our Support site.

You can’t have more than one license on a Pax Dei account and all your characters will have the recipes from the Founder’s Packs.

That being said, if you create a second Pax Dei account, you can buy a Founder’s pack for this second account. Please note that we are currently working on a solution to let you consolidate your different accounts, one per platform, under one single Pax Dei account, and cumulate the benefits of each account.

Sadly, our system does not handle gifting.

For billing issues and refund inquiries, please head to our Support site.

The final business model and pricing are detailed in our dedicated announcement.

If you’re an Early Access Founder:

• You already have access to the game and won’t need to make any additional purchases to continue playing.

• You will receive a number of free Plot Tokens equivalent to the number of plots of your Founder’s Pack (1, 2, or 4). Each Token allows you to claim a plot for 1 month, or add 1 month to a plot you’ve already claimed. You decide when and how you spend your Plot Tokens. 

• You will also receive one month of Premium Status, granting you exclusive perks that will start the first time you log in. 

• You will keep your Character Slots and the Founder’s recipes granted by the Founder’s Pack you purchased during Early Access.

• Note that your Early Access progress will not carry over once the game is released, as all plots, characters, and shards will be wiped a few days before the 1.0 deployment.

Note: the descriptions of the Founder’s Packs on our website, Steam, and Epic store pages will be updated accordingly with this information. 

If you’re a new player, you’ll need to purchase the base game, which includes:

• Game access

• 2 Character Slots

• 1 Plot Token, allowing you to claim a plot for 1 month

• 1 month of Premium Status

You can then choose between 2 different ways of playing Pax Dei:

• Continue playing for free with access to the entire core experience.

• Subscribe to one of our Membership plans for added convenience, storage, crafting options, plot(s), and bonus rewards. 

You can find our Launcher at this address: https://installer.launcher.xsolla.com/xlauncher-builds/xsolla-launcher-update/9196/bin/web_installer.exe

• You will always be able to find it in the FAQ and on our Support site

• Problem installing it? Please make sure to visit our support article

You can read our blog dedicated to the monetization at release for full details about our pricing model.

If you’re an Early Access Founder:

• You already have access to the game and won’t need to make any additional purchases to continue playing.

• You will receive a number of free Plot Tokens equivalent to the number of plots of your Founder’s Pack (1, 2, or 4). Each Token allows you to claim a plot for 1 month, or add 1 month to a plot you’ve already claimed. You decide when and how you spend your Plot Tokens. 

• You will also receive one month of Premium Status, granting you exclusive perks that will start the first time you log in. 

• You will keep your Character Slots and the Founder’s recipes granted by the Founder’s Pack you purchased during Early Access.

• Note that your Early Access progress will not carry over once the game is released, as all plots, characters, and shards will be wiped a few days before the 1.0 deployment.

Note: the descriptions of the Founder’s Packs on our website, Steam, and Epic store pages will be updated accordingly with this information. 

If you’re a new player, you’ll need to purchase the base game, which includes:

• Game access

• 2 Character Slots

• 1 Plot Token, allowing you to claim a plot for 1 month

• 1 month of Premium Status

You can then choose between 2 different ways of playing Pax Dei:

• Continue playing for free with access to the entire core experience.

• Subscribe to one of our Membership plans for added convenience, storage, crafting options, plot(s), and bonus rewards. 

After we exit Early Access, Plot Tokens will be the key to owning land in Pax Dei. Each subscription grants a set number of Plot Tokens every month:

• 1 Plot Token = 1 plot of land for 1 month.

• Tokens can be used to claim new plots or extend the duration of your current ones.

• You decide when and how you spend your Plot Tokens: one by one to maintain a single plot during several months, or all at one time, to maintain several plots during one month.

• When a plot expires, its contents are safely stored in your Redeeming Queue.

  • Once expired, your plot will enter a “frozen” state for a limited grace period. You will not be able to build or destroy anything while the plot is frozen. 

  • If you decide to spend a Plot Token to add one month to that plot, you just pick up where you left off.

  • If you choose not to add more time to that particular plot, then all your plot’s content will be safely stored in your Redeeming Queue after the grace period ends. 

• Tokens are yours to keep and use at any time, even after canceling a subscription.

• Tokens remain valid for 12 months from the date you receive them.

Please note that if you release your plot, your goods won’t be stored in your Redeeming queue, and your building will decay.

This gives you flexibility: whether you’re an active landowner or playing more casually, you remain in full control.

Each subscription plan grants one month of Premium Status from the start date, and this status is renewed automatically each time the plan is renewed. Premium Status and Plot Tokens are not tied: after canceling your subscription, you can run out of Premium Status but still have Plot Tokens left to activate, depending on how you use those. 

The bonuses granted by the Premium Status are: 

• +50% Grace from daily login,

• +50% Grace from Gold offerings,

• +50% XP boost on all activities.

Note: This is the first iteration of Premium Status perks, and they may evolve in the future to align with future content in Pax Dei.

At 1.0 launch, we will offer Membership plans including either 1, 2 or 4 Plot Tokens. Plot Tokens are valid up to 12 months after purchase.

When you activate a subscription, you receive the corresponding number of Plot Tokens and the Premium Status for one month. The Premium Status is automatically activated upon subscription and renewed automatically with your subscription, every month.

We do not propose this feature at present, but it is something we’d like to offer in the future.

You are free to activate your Plot Token(s) at any time, regardless of whether you have an active subscription or not. Each Token has a duration of one month. Plot Tokens are valid up to 12 months after purchase. 

For example, your subscription ends on January 15, but you still have 2 unused Plot Tokens. You can choose to activate both on March 1st, or one on March 20 and the other on May 12. 

Yes. Premium Status and Plot Tokens are not dependent on one another. Premium Status is linked to your subscription and is automatically activated when you subscribe. Plot Tokens can be spent at any time while they are valid. Plot Tokens are valid up to 12 months after purchase.

While regional pricing isn’t available at this stage, it’s something we’d love to offer and very much have in mind as we continue to grow and refine the Pax Dei experience.

We’re committed to making the game as accessible as possible. We regularly run promotions on Founder’s Packs, so keep an eye out for those opportunities. 

Yes, we plan to offer the possibility to purchase additional character slots at some point around release, with a limit of 10 characters per account. 

The Founder’s Packs are only available during Early Access. 

Note that subscription will only be introduced after we exit Early Access, for which we have no set date as of now. After our 1.0 release, you will be able to subscribe to a Membership at any time and upgrade your game experience with additional benefits. Your subscription will then renew automatically every month. Membership is not required to play Pax Dei and is subject to cancellation by you at any time.

You will have the option to renew plot periods automatically or manually. By default, upon expiration, a plot will attempt to consume an unspent token for renewal. However, you can disable this automatic feature if you prefer manual renewal. Additionally, you can frontload extensions by injecting multiple unspent tokens to extend the plot period's duration.

Our first priority is the development of the game and its features, cosmetics are an extra possibility, and will always be fully optional. When it comes to cosmetics, here is an example of how we may implement to ensure that the in-game economy remains 100% player-driven: we would propose variation(s) of recipes that exist in-game, with the same prerequisites to be unlocked, with the same stats and similar components (or even the same).

No, NFTs or Blockchains are not part of our plans for Pax Dei.

We plan to release Pax Dei during Autumn 2025, and we’ll communicate on the exact date when we are ready to announce it.

This will be a digital-only release.

The game is available in English, French, German, Spanish, and Polish.

We are using Unreal Engine 5 to create the world of Pax Dei.

The minimum and recommended system requirements for the current phase are:

• Minimum system requirements

  • GPU: GeForce RTX 2060 (12 GB) / Radeon RX 5700 XT

  • VRAM: 8 GB

  • CPU: Intel i5-7600K or AMD equivalent

  • RAM: 16 GB

  • Storage: SSD with 80 GB free space

  • OS: Windows 10

• Recommended system requirements

  • GPU: GeForce RTX 3060 / Radeon RX 6600 XT

  • VRAM: 8 GB

  • CPU: Ryzen 7 3700X or Intel equivalent

  • RAM: 16 GB

  • Storage: NVMe SSD with 80 GB free space

  • OS: Windows 10

The game is built for PC and is in development for cloud gaming platforms, making it playable on any screen. You can already access Pax Dei on Nvidia GeForce Now, and we will share news on additional platforms when they become available.

In short: No.

In detail: Pax Dei does not have the usual survival mechanics where your character can starve to death or lose capabilities because they did not rest. That being said, eating food can give you buffs... or poison you. There are other status effects that exist, but these are common RPG mechanics and don't make Pax Dei a survival game.

Our community has been very creative throughout Early Access; you can find amazing creations on our social media channels and our dedicated Discord channel as well.

No. Building happens in the Heartland valleys and is disallowed outside of them. Additionally, some areas in the Heartlands that would break gameplay are restricted. For example, the Heartlands feature a pre-made road network and you cannot build on top of roads. You cannot build underground either. However, we do allow building on water, and indeed, waterfront buildings look amazing. In some cases, this does allow for building a bridge.

No. We want to guarantee that PvE areas that should be accessible to all, are accessible to all. And it is unlikely that you will find dungeons’ entrance in the Heartlands.

Yes, if a player tears down a plot, the items left behind become available to other players.

You can’t claim the pre-made buildings, but you will be able to build extremely large buildings using the plot permission sharing inside clans.

We don’t want to go into specifics on this right now, but let’s just say trading will be a large part of Pax Dei. There might also be additional reasons you want to visit other people, like politics.

The amount of land available is the only constraint. Each player will get one plot of land you can build on as part of a paid account, and we intend to add mechanisms that allow players to acquire additional plots. 

As an aside, note we’ve noticed during playtests that clans often appoint a player to be the master builder, so if you’re really into building, try to find a guild that wants to make you this person.

You can build almost whatever you want from the building pieces in the game - see the next answer!

The building system features a physics system that forces structural integrity on the buildings, so your buildings will have to make sense from a structural perspective. As an example,  while houses can be pretty big, you cannot build a house that’s infinitely high.

We have multiple building piece sets and are looking to add more customization options to the houses. We’d love to eventually have a system that allows you to make a very diverse set of houses that can all look unique. We definitely won’t have all these features done by the time the game goes to general availability, and plan to keep adding features in the updates.

We’re still debating exactly how much you’ll recoup when tearing down the houses. But we do want the system to be fairly forgiving.

Yes! There are a number of items you can build in addition to just buildings, crafters, and chests. For example, you can craft rugs, chairs, tables, etc. The selection of items in the game right now is not extensive as we haven’t gone into full production on this content set, and we’re looking to add more.

Some are usable and we do want to support full RP gameplay where you can nicely decorate your house also with usable furniture. Lights are especially helpful, with the dark nights you’ll experience in the game. We don’t currently know how extensive this prop set will be by the time you get to play the game, but we will be continuing to develop the game for a very long time, including adding more content over time.

They will be provided by the game.

Yes, but the structural integrity system will block you from making buildings tall enough to hit the cap. We want to enable you to make large multi-story houses, but at the same time, we don't want the game to feature skyscrapers, so the tallest buildings will be somewhere around what you'd expect to see in the Middle Ages.

Yes, we currently allow the plots to overlap water and probably will want to have this be the case long term. As you saw in the video we posted, lakeside properties are pretty awesome. In the current game build, you can place building foundation pieces underwater, as long as the bottom of the lake is close to the surface, so effectively you can build on the shore with slight overlap with water, but you cannot build let's say a bridge over a lake.

Yes, we have a pre-made road network, and we'll also cover this in more detail in the World FAQ. The short of it is: roads are intended for traveling the world, and you can't build on pre-made roads.

Good question! A plot is a portion of land that belongs to a character and that you can “claim” in the areas open for building. This portion of land is circular and vast enough to build a house of reasonable size and a couple of smaller structures.

After we exit Early Access, Plot Tokens will be the key to owning land in Pax Dei. Each subscription grants a set number of Plot Tokens every month:

• 1 Plot Token = 1 plot of land for 1 month.

• Tokens can be used to claim new plots or extend the duration of your current ones.

• You decide when and how you spend your Plot Tokens: one by one to maintain a single plot during several months, or all at one time, to maintain several plots during one month.

• When a plot expires, its contents are safely stored in your Redeeming Queue.

  • Once expired, your plot will enter a “frozen” state for a limited grace period. You will not be able to build or destroy anything while the plot is frozen. 

  • If you decide to spend a Plot Token to add one month to that plot, you just pick up where you left off.

  • If you choose not to add more time to that particular plot, then all your plot’s content will be safely stored in your Redeeming Queue after the grace period ends. 

• Tokens are yours to keep and use at any time, even after canceling a subscription.

• Tokens remain valid for 12 months from the date you receive them.

Please note that if you release your plot, your goods won’t be stored in your Redeeming queue, and your building will decay.

This gives you flexibility: whether you’re an active landowner or playing more casually, you remain in full control.

Building only happens on plots, but the plots have a permission system that allows them to be shared between players. So yes, you will need a plot to build, but this doesn’t necessarily mean it is your plot. If you have a group of friends and form a clan together, you can have multiple shared houses in multiple locations and work on those together.

Yes, if someone allows you to do so. We expect most clans to share some of their plots, allowing clan members to build on them.

Only the players you’ve given permission to access your constructions on your plot can access your things. And yes, they can destroy it but also help you build more.

Right now, you can move the plot at any time but would need to move all the things on the plot by carrying them from one place to another.

There is no game mechanism at this point to force someone to move; you’d have to talk to the person and convince them to move. Note that the game very much favors cooperation, so there’s very little in the game itself that would motivate someone to do this - someone who dedicates their plot to blocking a clan instead of working with them will have a hard time playing the game.

We understand that players may encounter issues with plot placement, and we want to ensure that our players can resolve these conflicts.

We don't support this feature, but you can build the foundations to flatten the land.

The world of Pax Dei is split into four main regions, plus four in-between regions. The four main regions are Gallia, Gothia, Iberia, and Anatolia. For the release, we are focusing on building a part of Gallia, whose terrain and atmosphere are mainly inspired by the southwest of France (with a pinch of a magical twist). A province is a large section of a region. We will have different types of provinces, but the heartland provinces are the most important (and biggest) ones. Another type of province is what we currently call the contested provinces - which, as you can guess, are related to PvP. A heartland province contains several home valleys (6 in the example below). And a home valley is a blessed land where players can place their plots and build villages.

Here is a sketch of the map used for the Friend & Family Alpha build. It contains one heartland province, and the named red zones ‘Maremna, Gravas, Tursan…’ are the home valleys. In the game, this province is a square of 10 km per side, but the playable area is ‘only’ around 70km² (27mi²).

It depends on what one means by “the world.” The entire world of Pax Dei won’t be available at release, and we’ll start with a portion of the world in the region named Gallia. We already have four heartland provinces (plus some dungeons and another type of province we are not ready to talk about) which give you a playground of approximately 300 km2 (115 mi2), but we plan for bigger for release. Of course, it heavily depends on content production capabilities and some technical constraints.

We have published numerous Lore articles on our website, and we recommend you check them out to learn more about the Lore of Pax Dei. Look for the Diegesis category at https://playpaxdei.com/news.

Our world generation process is semi-procedural, or what we like to say, procedurally assisted. We believe that a human should make the interesting decisions, while the computer should do what it excels at, filling in the details.

In very simplified terms, a human creates a map of the world, and the computer makes a 3D game world out of it. In software terms, our world generation pipeline runs entirely in SideFX Houdini, which is a great match for what we are doing.

In more detail, we start with three main inputs: a very rough height sculpt, an annotated 2D map of what is where, and a bunch of tabular data like what plant species grow in which biomes. First come the geological processes, erosion, lakes, river pathfinding, and such. Then we add the human influences, mainly road carving and modifying the terrain to fit the structures we want. Lastly comes all the plant life and other decoration, with only a minor influence on the terrain itself.

The process also creates a lot of other data than just the 3D environment. A game like ours requires a lot of auxiliary data for things like resource distribution, pathfinding, player map, and so on. It is important to us that we do not edit the world manually, as that would mean making changes would be harder.

No, we won't provide any detailed map. Discovering the world is part of the game. However, the community has already built different detailed maps. Don't hesitate to look for them or to ask on our Discord channel.

In our game, we strive to make every resource valuable and useful throughout your entire journey. Even the simplest resources have their place. Whether it's building walls for your village or equipping warriors with weapons and armor, the demand remains constant. Just like in real life, even if you've mastered the art of crafting steel, you'll still find yourself in need of iron. At the beginning of your adventure, you may find yourself gathering these resources on your own. However, as you explore and progress in the world, you'll have the opportunity to rely on other players who are newer to the game or experts in their respective trades to fulfill your resource needs.

A player should be in full control of his own land. Likewise, Clans will put their mark on the world by organizing villages and communal buildings they work on together. Clans that decide to cooperate and become allies can create larger social units and should therefore gain control over more land and building features than those who choose to go at it alone.

In our quest to create a world that feels authentic and familiar, we've placed a strong emphasis on verisimilitude. We believe that by making the environments and transitions between biomes believable, we can offer players a truly immersive experience. Our goal is to transport you into a world that feels both authentic and grounded rather than purely fantastical. As a result, you'll find that our biomes often partially overlap or interweave, adding to the sense of realism and exploration. Currently, we have four distinct forest biomes that each have their own unique characteristics. Additionally, we have a couple of captivating mountain biomes, along with several open lowland areas and swamps that provide a different flavor to the landscape. Each of these biomes offers its own visual aspect and various ways to navigate and explore. Furthermore, they are home to specific endemic flora and fauna, as well as shared species that add to the rich diversity of the world.

They usually continue seamlessly from one to another, depending on geographical factors and bodies of water. We aim to make a real and believable world.

We want our world to have some verisimilitude, to look like a plausible medieval world that can resonate with the mental image we all share about the Middle Ages. If one was walking around in the forested areas in Pax Dei, one would obviously expect to run into individuals representing Europe’s typical forest fauna: rabbits, boars, deer, wolves, and bears... So you’ll have these. And because our world is not the real world, but a fantasy world where “myths are real, and ghosts exist,” one might also run into unexpected creatures that could qualify as mythical or fantastic, or even demonic. Not everywhere and not every time…

Generally speaking, resources will respawn unless a character has claimed the land they were on (i.e., different rules apply on resource spawning when it comes to players’ plots).

While the most basic resources can be commonly found, most resources tend to be distributed in an asymmetrical pattern. Their exact location and their abundance are dependent mainly on geological factors. Hence, people who spend some time out and about looking for specific resources should relatively quickly learn where it is best to look.

As you may know, the World of Pax Dei consists of a few regions (Gallia, Anatolia, Gothia…) split into several provinces (Ancien, Merrie, Kerys…). A province is a very large geographical area with several valleys interspersed by big mountain ranges. In specific provinces called heartland provinces, we have multiple valleys we call home valleys, and those are where you can build your home. And, of course, you also have dark dungeons and caves that mainly exist below the surface of these provinces.

But how do these geographical features map down to actual physical servers, and how do they affect how you play the game?

Worlds/Shards

The first choice you will face when creating a new character in Pax Dei will be the selection of a specific instance of a World, also commonly referred to as a Shard. Even though the world of Pax Dei is geographically vast, it can only accommodate a certain number of players in total. This is why we run multiple copies of the world, each being identical but completely independent of the others in terms of actual inhabitants. Each such copy we call a shard.

We estimate we’ll start with a maximum population in a single shard of around 7,000 players. A single shard is run wholly within one physical cloud hosting center. We will run shards in different availability regions worldwide, e.g., North America and Europe.

The factors that will mainly influence your choice of shard will thus be the following:

• Latency to your main game computer

• Seat availability, as some shards might be full

• Shards where you have many friends already playing

Zone Servers

From a computational point of view, a shard consists of a large collection of various servers and cloud services, each of them fulfilling a specific function. The most numerous ones are what we call zone servers. This is because the simulation of a whole world is much too computationally heavy to be handled by a single hardware instance and is thus divided into smaller computational units that we call zones. A single zone server is a Dedicated Unreal Server that handles the simulation of a specific part of the world, e.g., one home valley.

At any given time, you, as a player, are automatically connected to a zone server. Whenever you move across a zone boundary, your connection automatically moves to the adjacent zone server. This is what we call a zone transition. In most cases, these transitions should be seamless, except for a few important exceptions:

• Transitions between different provinces or into dungeons will typically incur some loading time as the client loads an entirely new map

• There is currently no visibility of other players or NPCs across zone boundaries

Zone Instances

As mentioned above, a zone server is a dedicated Unreal Server handling the simulation of a small subsection of the world. Eventually, a zone server can also become overwhelmed with too many players. Currently, this limit is around 150 players, but it is expected to change with better hardware and optimizations. To avoid having to close off zones when the maximum number of players is hit, e.g., during peak hours, we introduce the concept of zone instances instead. The mechanism is such that when we surpass the maximum number of players in a zone, we distribute the whole set of players within a given zone boundary between two or more separate instances of the zone. Each zone instance is actually running a separate zone server for the same zone, but players within a given zone instance can not interact with players in another instance.

This separation only applies to direct player interactions, but the persistence of the buildings, amongst other things, works across instances, meaning the buildings are visible to all. Once the zone population levels go down, instances merge together. For regular operation, after a shard has reached maturity, instancing should only happen in exceptional cases, but it might be common at the beginning.

Persistence Backend

Apart from zone servers, the rest of the backend handles coordination between zone servers, transactional game logic, communication, and persistence. There are situations where the clients connect directly to this backend through secure APIs, e.g., for authentication. Still, in most cases, the zone servers are the ones communicating with the backend to specific services such as inventory service, resource management, etc.

All of this infrastructure is then deployed, coordinated, and scaled through a Kubernetes architecture running on top of a cloud infrastructure.

The biggest challenge is how complicated the tech stack is. The whole tech stack comprises various components, some being 3rd party components (e.g., the Unreal Engine or PostgresDB) and others fully developed in-house. Most of these are not specifically designed to be used in an MMO. The functions of these components range from physics simulation, graphics rendering, AI behavior to transactional integrity and high scalability of server transactions. They cover multiple programming languages and must be built and deployed in perfect harmony to function all together as intended. Finally, testing an MMO without actual players is difficult, hence the importance of early user testing.

No, the plan is currently that all shards will be identical.

Currently, each shard can welcome up to about 14,000 plot owners.

We can spin up additional shards as needed to accommodate more and more players, but the zone-instancing mechanism will also help mitigate the initial load per shard.

Shards will be available in different geographical regions, so new players should be able to find a shard that is geographically close to them. Furthermore, the combat system and typical MMO interactions are such that they are more tolerant of lag as compared to first-person shooters.

Our team is constantly monitoring the population level on all shards and is ready to open new shards when needed. That being said, character transfer to a new shard in the same region may be an option if the situation requires it. Currently, all transfers are manually handled by our Support team; however, we are working on an automated process. More details will be shared once the feature is ready.

When a World becomes overcrowded, it will be locked to safeguard the quality of service. So, our objective is to strike a balance between preventing overcrowding and ensuring friends can easily play together. The key here is to be smart about the indicators we will use and how we guide people towards specific Worlds. In critical situations, we would like to be able to offer character transfers from a crowded World for free, as it’s one of the best ways to ease overcrowding. We will provide more information at a later time.

We're open to third-party programs and add-ons (as long as they are not about cheating), as we recognize that these contributions can often enhance user experiences and provide valuable functionalities. However, at the moment, we regrettably lack the necessary resources to offer proper support for them. We genuinely hope that in the foreseeable future, we will be in a position to provide the support you deserve. Rest assured, we will keep you informed and share more information as it becomes available.

Mainframe is an independent, venture-backed game developer founded in the spring of 2019 by 13 game industry veterans, mainly from CCP and Remedy. The studio aims to create the first open-world, massively multiplayer online game (MMO) built from the ground up for cloud gaming networks.

Our mission is to create a virtual world that millions will live in for decades.

We do have offices in Finland, Iceland, and France. Still, some team members are spread worldwide and working from Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, Estonia, and even Australia! We have 17 nationalities represented at Mainframe.

For us, the most important thing is that people work from where they are most productive, which can mean working remotely.

Mainframers in Helsinki, Reykjavik, and Paris meet regularly in their respective offices and try to share a weekly lunch. There are weekly online team meetings where everyone joins and shares company information and updates.

The game teams occasionally meet to workshop and plan together in one of our offices.

We also gather the whole Mainframe team once per year in a big summit, mixing workshops and fun activities to keep the team spirit and get to know each other better. We also gather to celebrate our milestones - whether online or offline - as we recently did for the announcement of Pax Dei.

We started with 13 founders from Finland and Iceland who represented all game development disciplines. Now (May 2023), we represent 17 different nationalities and a (super) wide variety of skills needed to develop an MMORPG.

Our current team consists primarily of Engineers, Designers, and Artists, but we also have a Publishing team, Producers, and people taking care of running the company. We are a small team considering the challenging vision we want to deliver to gamers, but we can do it. To keep the team small, we try to find ways to do things smartly, and we have also hired mostly people with seniority and extensive expertise and experience. We hope that in the future, we will be able to mentor more developers at the start of their journey with the game industry.

We are an online community at Mainframe. We are spread in several locations and split into teams (each team is developing a specific aspect of the game - the world, combat, the crafting...). Members of any feature team may come from any location. Our teams have come up with their own way of working together in the past three years. Because our work happens mostly online, our use of offices is finding its way. Our offices in Helsinki, Reykjavik, and Paris are centrally located and support everyone who wishes to work there with good / plenty of coffee and excellent company.

We take on team members based on their skills and merits - everyone on the team should feel they were hired because they were the best candidate for the position. Our team trusts each other, and we are very open in our plans and discussions. It is a balance of inviting everyone into the conversations and ensuring we all spend our work time on the most critical tasks for each of us. It is not always easy, but we constantly evolve in how we work by being honest with each other and dedicating effort to improving.

When we have a chance, we hire for diversity - meaning that we tweak the role a bit to get a wider pool of applicants.

We are all gamers in our own way. Some of us play more on PC, some more on console, and others only play mobile games (thus why they don’t own a gaming PC…)! We also all have different tastes in terms of game genre, so overall, that makes a big potpourri of experiences - good and bad - that help us shape Pax Dei every day for the best.

The game's concept was in the founders' heads for quite some time, way before Mainframe was founded. We really started working on it in 2019 when we launched the studio and hired more people to make it a reality.

You can find all the details in the press releases that were issued for our two rounds of funding: https://themainframe.com/en/media/

Funnily enough, the average experience in the gaming industry for the company is 15+ years… Are we old? It all depends on how you define “old”.😉 We prefer to say that we are experienced. And we want to put that experience into creating the game of a lifetime. Are we a bunch of geeks? Definitely! We all have our favorite universes and references, but we are definitely geeks, and proud of it!