Stars Reach pre-alpha testing explainer

Stars Reach is a MMORPG project that’s currently early in development. Pre-Alpha testing started mid-summer 2024, with invites being sent out per emails.

How to get in

• Sign up at the official homepage with an email of your choice
• Fill out the player survey - you will also get this link per email, a day after signing up
• You will receive confirmation that you have been added to the tester pool - but are not in the test yet. that might take a few months.
• Check both your inbox and your spamfolder, and make sure that you can receive emails from @playeableworlds.com
• Invites are sent in batches, with a new batch going out roughly every few days. And the numbers of invites sent per batch keep increasing.
• People who filled out the survey are invited in chronological order of their signup dates. The very first batch was picked from longtime followers on Discord, and right now there’s another exception for Kickstarter followers - but other than that, the chronological order has been kept to.
• The waiting list is very long, and despite increases in invites, the wait time has recently gone up from 2 months after signup, to three months after signup.

How the tests work

• Tests are short events - just a few hours each. They take place on specific days and times under developer supervision.
• New testing waves typically start with a Saturday test, followed by a Fireside chat in the official Discord - most of the time this includes a full wipe
• Then this same test will be repeated multiple times over the next two weeks. These repeats take place at various different times of the day, to enable participation from other timezones as well.
• Testers will receive a test notes documents about what the test is about, are expected to use the ingame bug reporting tool (F11) to report issues, and are asked to fill out a Discord-Bot survey after each session. They can also give free-form feedback in the Discord.
• The testing NDA has been fully lifted. Which means there is no longer any limitation. You may talk about the game, share screenshots, take videos, and even live-stream it.

What happens when you get in

• This is currently undergoing changes, but up until now, it was as follows:
• You receive an email with a Steam-Key, an invitation to the Tester Discord, and your team color.
• Get the game installed on Steam, klick the invitation-link, and post your team color in the verificytion channel
• The rest of the channels will then be unlocked for you.
• The game is still quite incomplete, and the test-version even more so. Only a limited number of game systems and features are available for testing yet.
• Trading and specialization is not in yet, which is why every player has to do and create everything themselves (unless you get some gifts - gifting already works), and this causes a slight “survival game” feeling. But that’s going to change.
• Character creation does not exist yet (you can only choose a name and species) - but you do get a new random look everytime you connect to a zone.
• You start with a number of tools equipped (and maybe in your inventory) - the rest you have to craft yourself.

Why you can’t just play 24/7

• You will eventually be able to do that in Alpha and/or Beta. But right now it’s pre-alpha and the game is not ready for it yet.
• The game world does not automatically save yet. That has to be done manually after all players have disconnected. If the server crashes before saving, a rollback to the state of the last save might happen - loosing all meanwhile player progress.
• The servers still lack a lot of optimization, so running them does not come super cheap. Especially the simulation is quite calculation heavy.
• The devs want to be able to monitor the servers while they run, so they are able to immediately step in, if something goes south.