Stars Reach - Year One (Post Announcement)

Join me on this equanimous stroll down memory lane, where we will be looking back at all happenings in the Stars Reach community this past year: the highs, the lows and anything inbetween that stuck with me.

It was on the 28th of June, 2024 that Stars Reach - the new MMORPG by Raph Koster - got publicly announced. That he had founded a new developer studio and been working on a game had been known since the 3rd of October, 2019 - but no details had been disclosed about the game yet. We knew it was going to be in the same vein and sharing some of the same dreams and ambitions of Raph’s previous games, Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies - but we knew nothing about the game itself. Not the name, not the setting, not even if it would be fantasy or sci-fi.

The Announcement

The much awaited game announcement - the big reveal - saw a lot of hype building upfront. There was quite a marketing campaign leading up to it, making sure that everyone’s eyes were pointed this direction - especially those of the gaming press. Most people familiar with his writings knew that Raph’s return to making MMORPGs did promise both a return to the dreams and ambitions the genre had prior to World of Warcraft - as well as innovation the likes of which simply would not have been possible 20 years ago, as the technology simply wasn’t capable enough yet.

It all started to build up with a series of count-down postings on multiple social media platforms:

The first 5 days of the countdown on social media

There’s a lot of intriguing ideas in there, some of which we still don’t know what form they are actually going to take in the game - or if they are gonna make it in at all. And there’s more than 30 of these in total, because during the final days, we got two posts a day. So the count-down numbers 3 through 1 were all posted twice - with different text. And X even got two 4’s.

The full list of count-down teasers:

X (EX-TWITTER)

• 10 What if… you could easily change your mind about who your character is?
• 9 What if… you could be admired and famous in an MMO for more than just your character level or raid skills?
• 8 What if… the game also rewarded you for playing peacefully?
• 7 What if… an MMO let you reshape the landscape?
• 6 What if… you and your friends could govern an entire planet in your MMO?
• 5 What if… even the devs didn’t know what was hidden out there in the world?
• 4 What if… you could actually irrigate your farm?
• 4 What if… there were ways for everyone in an MMO to have their own house?
• 3 What if… you could be swept away by the current of a raging river?
• 3 What if… you could freeze the poison gas midair and watch it form a puddle?
• 2 What if… it mattered if you accidentially drove a creature extinct?
• 2 What if… you could collapse a cliff onto your enemies?
• 1 What if… you could build a space station?
• 1 What if… you could live your life on a space station or a spaceship and just visit planets when you wanted?

INSTAGRAM

• 10 What if… MMOs actually fullfilled the dreams we once had for them?
• 9 What if… exploring actually mattered (to you and others) in an MMO?
• 8 What if… walking through the grass carved a trail if you did it often enough?
• 7 What if… the season actually mattered?
• 6 What if… you could search and discover entirely new planets?
• 5 What if… you had to decipher ancient languages?
• 4 What if… sometimes the monsters invaded you?
• 3 What if… monsters didn’t respawn in the same place always?
• 3 What if… you could build a city?
• 2 What if… you could actually get snowed in at a tavern, like in the fantasy novels?
• 2 What if… you could run your own tavern in an MMO?
• 1 What if… you could have fun in an MMO in a five minute session?
• 1 What if… you missed your target and accidentially burned down the forest?

FACEBOOK

• 10 What if… you could actually invent new things in an MMO?
• 9 What if… there was a way to discover secrets in an MMO… and no easy Wiki holding all the answers?
• 8 What if… it rained, creating puddles that froze overnight?
• 7 What if… bad weather meant travelling through the mud?
• 6 What if… there were places with lower gravity?
• 5 What if… you could write quests and make contracts for one another?
• 4 What if… you could chop down forests and grow them back?
• 3 What if… you could shout “You shall not pass!” and collapse a bridge?
• 3 What if… strawberries were sometimes in season?
• 2 What if… the creatures in the world actually had feelings you could see?
• 2 What if… icy cliffs were actually treacherously slippery?
• 1 What if… you could choose to make a new life for yourself on a new planet?
• 1 What if… you could pick your style of combat in an MMORPG?

The Puzzle

You may have noticed (in the image above) that each one of these teasers had a little bar-code looking thing underneath the text. That was a secret - a mystery to be solved.

An inofficial Discord server had been started up right on October 3, 2019 - the day of the company announcement:

Oh Nick, we had no idea how long it would take…

And over many years of waiting, a little community had started to form. Just a few active people enjoying some speculation and discussing the early blog posts Raph had been writing - and a small army of lurkers, just waiting for the game to finally get revealed. And someone else showed up there as well:

Spoiler: he did not just lurk, but actually post and participate in discussions quite a bit

And it was that dedicated, early fan-community - following a game they didn’t even know the name of - that took a serious jab at decyphering these bar-codes. Of course they also were the target audience for that mystery to begin with. Very little was known about the game at that point - and what was known, was kinda general and vague, not any concrete details. There had been some smaller leaks during the “fireside chats” (just meet-ups in Discord voice chat) which Playable Worlds marketing director Carneros had introduced a few months earlier - but nothing “meaty” at all. This was about to change - and people were very excited.

This meant there was plenty of motivation and enthusiasm around solving the puzzle. And so everyone eagerly stormed off in the wrong direction:

My initial hunch should prove right: indeed it was no code.

But at that point in time, people remained pretty undeterred in trying to crack or decypher the code - without success. But the puzzle obviously was not designed to be able to be cracked on just day one. More teaser images had to be dropped first.

We were definitely all over the place

Raph then gave the hint, that we have to look at it differently. Which kinda made people look at all sorts of codes again. Even the previously ruled out QR codes and variants of those, were brought up again and again. Also various ways trying to interpret the square patterns as letters - all not getting anywhere. Other, more out-there attempts didn’t yield anything either. Some people were starting to feel a bit hopeless, maybe slightly frustrated even, by the lack of discernible progress.

The visual approach didn’t seem to get anywhere either

Only after being given some hints by Raph, we got closer

Eventually we ran out of time. For me, these hints came late in the evening, and the last set of teasers as well as the reveal of the solution, came during the night while I was asleep. Maybe I could have gotten it, had I’been given just an hour or two, to try around with having all the pieces… who knows. Aman was even closer, and the actual solution was like a combination of his and mine best guesses. But ultimately nobody cracked it in time, so Raph had to post the reveal:

The solution, revealed by Raph

How he was able to create a perfectly symmetric solution, using those partially asymmetric lines found in the teaser images, remains a mystery.

The Announcement Trailer

And after all this build up of hype, after all this fanfare, great countdown, all the teasers on social media, and all the nicely orchestrated marketing buzz, the first trailer for the game finally landed.

And well… there was some disappointment. Some backlash even. I had to link to Gametrailers here, because on the official youtube account, this video is no longer up. The comments underneath weren’t pretty.

Now, to some degree this is unavoidable. As long as nothing is known, the game could be anything - but when it’s announced, that huge possibility-space collapses in, and inevitably dashes at least some hopes, people had.

But this was different. The effort and polish that went into that hype-campaign leading up to the trailers release, seemed outright unproportional compared to the seemingly low effort and polish of the video itself. The marketing campaign was top notch. The trailer was more like… cobbled together from old and partially fairly outdated (as admitted to by devs later) footage.

Compare these two shots from the trailer - obviously taken from different versions of the game - view distance, distance fog, shadows, the grass, object density, everything differs

It also did not do a very good job of explaining the game, and what made it special. Going by that trailer, it could just as well have been any other survival game the likes of which you find a dime a dozen on Steam. It made some bold claims about a “living world” - but that’s such a common claim in games marketing, it doesn’t really mean anything, if you don’t support it with any evidence. Or at least a deeper explanation.

I have been asked what I think a good trailer would look like, and you can find my answer to that here: PAT12 Seasons, skies and public events
Sadly, no chapters or headlines in that post, and it’s pretty far down. Search for Imagine a british nature documentary to find where it starts.

I have to add though, the then brand-new official Discord for the game also saw a fairly large amount of positive feedback. Many people were absolutely excited about Raph Koster working on a spiritual successor to SWG. And some genuinely liked the look seen in the trailer. Others understood it was early pre-alpha and not representative of the final game. That surge of negativity and toxicity seen in some places, isn’t representative of the whole audience. And often the more chill people just aren’t shouting that loud. They maybe even avoid the spaces dominated by those who do.

And while the early community on the Discord sure did heat up a bit for a short while back then, it managed to remain chill and friendly in the long run.

Graphical Updates

Either way, the devs reacted fast, and put out a visuals update:

later followed by a new trailer:

And the game has continued to see visual improvements in later patches as well. Look at these screens from the Seasons & Skies update:

I remember how jaw-droppingly gorgeous these felt back then. Don’t get me wrong, they are still beautiful. But looking at those shots now, they feel pretty normal and average to me. Because these days, when I login to the test-servers, I’m used to seeing stuff like that:

But let’s not get too much ahead of ourselves.

Testing

One of the first things they did after announcing the game - was to put out a call for testers. The desire to test the game and get early and repeated feedback from the community may have been a key factor that lead to the announcement happening when it did. And Raph has always been a strong proponent of having an open and transparent communication with players.

The “Early Supporter” role was given to anyone who moved over from the older inofficial Discord to the official one as well as to all new signup for about a month thereafter. This was the devs’ way of giving recognition to the the communities’ earliest members.

These Early Supporters are also the people who got invited to be the first wave of testers in the first round of tests. But invites also went out to people who had previously signed up for the newsletter - and that newsletter signup got then replaced with a test signup. And what a bloody mess that turned out to be!

The Invite Situation

I don’t remember all the details in their chronological order - but there were multiple issues like some confirmation emails not being sent at all, some people receiving the wrong email template, some email blasts going to to the wrong recipient list, and then a switch from double-opt-in signup to single-opt-in made all those previously fixed problems flare up once again. Trust in the system to work properly was at an all-time low, and there was no way for many people to get any confirmation of whether they were successfully signed up. Confusion and anxiety ensued.

And then - as the proverbial icing on the cake - there was bunch of rather click-baity emails asking people to solicit their friends - written in a way that made them very easy to mistake for those typical friends-invites you might get in other games, after already being in testing yourself. But sent to people who were not into testing yet, and not offering actually instant testing invites either (just the regular sign-up). People got very unsure about whether they had (or should have) already gotten an invite, but just missed it.

Play with your friends, now!

There was no clear textual distinction between an “invite” to join the list which testers were picked from, and an “invite” that actually got you into testing. And while everyone who signed up would get in eventually - the wait cold take up to some months. And that fact was never laid out all that clearly - the emails seemed very much designed to drive up the number of signups by making people believe this would be like their last chance to get in quickly.

For many months, questions and confusion about the test invite state basically flooded the Discord. After answering these questions by hand many times, I wrote an explainer - and originally that was a thread on the Discord, as the hooby.blog did not exist yet back then. It was also a bit shorter at first, but I edited it, kept it up to date, and expanded it to answer additional questions that popped up. And it quickly became the most linked to thread on the Discord ever.

I found 114 links to the thread, and 33 links to the first post in the thread - shown here is only a fraction of that - and there’s of course a LOT more posts like that, which didn’t include a link to my explainer

The confusion was so bad and widespread, that some people called for adding a link to this explainer to the email - or copy-pasting text from the explainer into the email. The Mods had quite a few situations to defuse and de-escalate people. Some weren’t even confused - but just pissed, that they got (repeatedly) asked to solicit others before ever trying the game themselves.

Carneros did apologize for the badly worded email text and sent out a clarification email (which may not have gotten to all/the right recipients?) - but only minor changes/improvements were ever made to the confirmation and soliciting emails, and the texts seemingly remained baity and unclear on the difference between an “invite” to the tester pool, and an “invite” to the actual tests. Dealing with the confusion was left to the users and mods of the Discord. And things were a bit rough there, for a while!

I’d like to express my greatest thanks and appreciation to all the users and mods that patiently helped explain things to the hundreds of people who showed up confused and partially angry. Your efforts to support this community helped keep this Discord a nice and friendly place!

This (and the subsequent push for Steam wishlisting) may already have been first attempts at getting a strong signal to prove player interest to potential investors. The same reason that later caused them to create a Kickstarter campaign despite no previous intentions of doing so.

PAT1 - The First Landing

Now, what you have to understand is, that yes they had been working on this game for five years already - but no, the “game game” wasn’t five years into development yet. You can get a game engine off the shelf, but getting MMO-capable networking middleware or a cloud-based infrastructure setup to handle a single-shard MMO or cellular automata based simulation or a renderer for that or a platform where most of your game is data that can stream down on the fly…

It took them five years to get all that plumbing in place, to know for sure the game they envisioned could even be done, and to be ready to start developing the actual game on top of that.

But with that foundation in place, they are now developing at amazing speed. And that’s exactly what we have witnessed during testing. The very first test - which took place on the 17th of August - featured only movement. Running around, jumping, using grapple & gravmesh, and some dancing. We’ve already come such an incredibly long way since that!

First time ever logging in to Stars Reach - on quite slow internet

So, why did I name my character ‘hooby-hooby’? Well, because of a little joke happening on the testing Discord. Since the tests were under NDA back then, there was actually a separate Discord for the testers to converse. And somehow, someone came up with the idea of prefixing character names, and I cracked some joke about it as well, and then Dave Georgeson said that they are going to require everyone to to prefix their character-name with ‘hooby-‘. When he then found out I went by ‘hooby-hooby’ in the test, he responded “Well played.” ;)

Isn’t it fun how all of this has already become a piece of history by now? And how ancient the video looks… But I feel it is of historical significance to the development of the game and it’s community. This is the first time that players set foot on the world of Stars Reach. This is the real lore, as it happened!

“A small step for a tester, a big leap for the Stars Reach community.”
— the dark-haired guy in the blue pajamas

And to my best knowledge this has actually been comemorated in the game’s lore as “The First Landing” - the first time humans set foot on a Servitor-kept world. A historic event! And then these humans stumbled about, fighting with some lag and the camera clipping into things. As such things usually play out.

The test lasted for two hours, and despite some sights and hills and caves to explore - that was plenty of time for a test that only featured walking around. So for the final 30 minutes, Raph gathered everyone to show them a cenote and talk about the game a bit. And it was pretty obvious that he was quite enthusiastic about it, and that he truly enjoyed finally being able to show these things.

Under the cover of darkness, we congregate around Raph

Who, in a cenote, explains and demonstrates the simulation

Skills were very different back then - and disabled for testers

Another funny easter egg was, that during those first few tests, using /dance in the game would play a short part of this song:

Which does of course make a lot of sense if you know who the sound-designer of the game is! It still gave it’s very own kind of vibe to the early tests, hearing that line “I wanna know… what you’re thinking” again and again, whenever someone danced (which happened a lot).

And it finally all ended with a big show of meteor showers.

Meteor shower

More Tests

PAT2 followed two weeks later, on the 31st of August, and it was basically the same as PAT1 - just with even more testers. But the same planet map, the same version of the game, the same enabled features, the same tour to the cenote.

Even more testers, though

The draining of the dam was shown again

and how the water floods the valley and erodes the ground

And then, some testers figured out that some dev-commands had been accidentially left in the game, and were available to players. Which they totally shouldn’t have been. This allowed players to gain access to some tools like the Terraformer. Dave Georgeson got noticeably nervous at the prospect of testers abusing dev-commands, and suggested cutting the test short and shutting things down right then and there. But the perpetrators refrained from fully abusing the powers they had discovered, and Raph ultimately didn’t make the call to stop, so things continued on.

In the end it was just a very funny unplanned incident, and definitely something to be remembered as a part of the history of this games’ development!

The planting of trees and effects of a growth pod were shown off for the first time

And then, after the 2 hours of the test were already over, servers were still kept open for a few minutes longer - and the devs suddenly switched on PvP and pulled out some weapons.

Chaos ensued, then the servers shut down

PAT3 took place on the 14th of September - again exactly two weeks later. The game had been updated and patched with a new version, and the test took place on a new planet. Player characters came equipped with multiple different tools, which should later all get merged into the Terraformer (and are basically the different Terraformer modes now).

This was the first time that players could modify the terrain. We could mine materials (extract), we could deposit, we could melt things. And the goal of the test was to really stress-test how the simulation would handle so many players all modifying the terrain all at once. It was quite fun experimenting with that for the first time.

Diggy, diggy hole!

After digging a hole in the center of a pond, the water drains into it

But the truly most memorable event of this test happened right at the end, when the devs suddenly spawned in a bunch of hostile creatures, and the players had no way to damage them, other then the melting rays of the Terraformer.

Going down, down, down, in a burning ray of fire

Thanks for trying to revive me - whoever that was!

PAT4 then - again two weeks later - was then the same as PAT3 again. Except, that unless I missed it, this time there was no crazy Sky Shark invasion or other madness going on. Which is a shame, because these crazy events are the sort of shared history that, when recorded for posterity, really can bond a community together. This is our collective past, and kinda like the source of future myths and legends.

For PAT5 and onwards then, the NDA got lifted piece by piece. At first, only writing/talking about your experience got allowed - then screenshots were greenlit as well, quickly followed by videos. Livestreaming followed not as quickly, but still within that year.

With the NDA gradually allowing more and more things, I started writing posts about each new patch, and they are all available in Category: Test Reports. I’ll not mention every single patch here, since I already got that covered. These test report posts used to be more popular when many people were still waiting to get their own test invite, but now we’re down to about 5 to 10 regular readers… so here goes hoping this special will fare better!

Beanstalk City

A whole number of conducive things converged to create the perfect storm that lead to the creation of Beanstalk City:

• The update adding Homesteads had just landed on Dec8 - including a full wipe
• the jungle planet had been added just two weeks prior, and featured several nice flat spots for building with almost no creatures present.
• Fabricator and Instaformer had already been in the game with the prior patch - so people got to try out a little bit of random building experimentation, then things got wiped - and now everyone felt ready to build a real house.
• Due to the holidays and many devs taking some time off, there wouldn’t be another update until January 12.
• as a little holiday present, the devs decided to run two tests for 3 hours each, every day - for an entire week.
• the game ran pretty stable on that patch, almost no issues with server crashes, or rollbacks, or players loosing progress
• the idea to build a city came up right on the first day, and people latched onto it immediately. beanstalk just mentioned the idea, whisperin immediately sprung into action to make it happen
• it was very FFA, very uncomplicated. someone paved two crossing roads on a relatively flat site on jungle, and anyone could just immediately plop down their homestead wherever they wanted, within that area. everyone welcome

Within just a few days and tests, a large number of homesteads sprung up there. Not all would actually be built to completion, and at first there was a bug (that got quickly fixed then), which could cause some fabricator tiles to get stuck and become unmovable, when put at the outer borders of a homestead. That lead to a few complications as well - but other than that, the city progressed well.

It was (and always will be remembered as) the first large communal build project that the game ever saw.

Occasionally, a boss would wander into town, or follow a player there.

And there is a hilarious little story to it as well - some real lore, some real history of something that really happened! In a few of those shots, you will see some water. Like, there’s some sort of fountain filled with it, and there’s a little pond underneath that gazebo. There was (and still is) no way for players to carry around water in the game. You can redirect it’s flow - but you can’t pick it up, and deposit it somewhere else. Developers can though. And so, the water features you see in these pictures - those have been filled with water by Raph.

Who in the process of doing so, flooded most of the city, and caused some serious mud-slides and water-damage to many house’s cellars. It then took several developers and players and some hours to get that mess mostly cleaned up again. I’m of course sorry for anyone who got negatively affected by this - but isn’t it still mind-blowing that something like that can happen? Name any other game out there, where such a thing is even possible!

Hortus Renovae

This was a little player-made event planned and setup by a player guild. They prepared garden art - i.e. colorful plants and flowers planted in different patterns and designs - across all the accessible planets, and wrote short riddles, providing hints on how to find each one. Also some lore and roleplay to go with it. It took place on the 8th of April, 2025.

While I did not actively participate in the hunt, I ran across a few of these accidentially, just while gathering a few things for my build project. Other players were more active and successful in finding those little plant-based artworks.

Hortus Renovae

It’s a very clever idea, making the most of what little player tools the game offers so far. There are plans for the future, for advanced player contracts which likely will allow players to combine something like that with player-made ingame “quests”, and rewards, and other stuff.

Player participation seemingly wasn’t stellar, but overall it was well received, and even if it didn’t fully take off - it’s still going down in history as the first player-made event in the game. I’m sure that once contracts and other tools are in, we will see a lot more of these kinds of efforts.

Various Other Build Projects

There was a ton of those - a lot more than I can go into here - and I have not many screenshots of these either. There’s been an underground town, a western-styled town, a town built into the walls of a ravine, various space stations, and buildings designed to look like space ships or vehicles, including some resembling stuff from different well known IP like Back to the Future and Star Wars. But mostly original builds. And the biggest so far is the huge mushroom structure with a city inside of it, work on which is still ongoing.

Build Project: The Hanging Gardens, v2

Combat “Raids”

As far as I am aware, the first one of these happened on the 23rd of March 2025, when the procedural creatures update landed. There’ve been spontanious player soft groupings before - to take out bosses for example - but this was, to my best knowledge, the first larger effort by a bigger number of players. And they tried and succeeded to take out all the Makers (creature spawners) on Zaraxa, the desert planet.

I’ve already written about this in detail in PAT13 Procedural Creatures - so I’m not going to repeat it here. There have been several more attempts at manipulating the Maker makup of a planet since - attracting larger groups of players, working together.

Fighting makers on Zaraxa

There’s also been several extermination raids, when players (including myself) had to ask for help to get rid of a Maker that was just situated way to close to their homestead, to allow them to continue building there.

I think these combat excursions are well worth mentioning - they are a first, and part of the history of the game and it’s development. And if you consider that loot sharing and soft grouping only got added very recently, and there was absolutely no grouping mechanics in the game before - it’s pretty amazing to still see players “grouping” up like that, and working together strategically.

They’re also a heck of a lot of fun ;)

Overall Progress

The game has been progressing fast. I’ve already shown the progress in graphics and visual representation above. I’ve also talked about how the first test was purely movement only - and about several things that got added during later tests. The game has been growing by leaps and bonds, and we’ve seen a new patch update land every two to three weeks, with the content of these patches growing increasingly larger.

• August 24: Walking around. Jumping. Dancing.
• September 17: Terraformer, Mining.
• October 23: Surveying, Camps, creatures, first combat, first skill trees, Harvester, first few crafting recipes.
• November 3: Space Zone, more mining.
• November 16: Jungle and desert planets, more creatures, tougher combat, first character clothes (randomized).
• December 8: Instaformer, Fabricator, Homesteads, house building.
• January 12: Planet Pyromycis, longer tests (4h), crafting changes (rare materials, anti-gravium added), first botany: plant seeds/seedlings to replant them
• February 1: Refining and a lot more crafting changes and new recipes.
• February 19: Planet Escarion, Kickstarter rush.
• March 9: World events like meteor showers and bosses, survey points now must be searched
• March 23: Creatures with randomized abilities and attacks, elemental damage and status effects, first maker hunts
• April 13: Post KS cleanup, return of character progression, preparations for wipe-free patches/updates
• May 4: Big crafting changes, player trading window, new skill trees, physics and simulation improvements
• May 25: Lots of changes to growing and harvesting plants, bushes and thickets, soft grouping and xp sharing, loot sharing, preparations for 24/7 starting
• June 12: Wormholes and wild planets, new creatures with new combat behavior, new planets with every test, more 24/7 prep.

Within the span of a year, we’ve gone from just running around on one single map (planet) - to building cities across 5 planets, having new wild planets every test, crafting, trading, combat and makers, randomized creatures, botany, forestry, and getting close to 24/7 servers.

Memes

Of course there’s memes, and inside jokes. What did you think? This is the internet after all!

I’m definitely not gonna be able to find and look into every joke that has ever been cracked on either Discord (official and inofficial), dating all the way back to 2019. So, this will have to be limited to the big running gags, as far as I can recall them.

Insider jokes generally are a form of community bonding, as they generally do divide people into those get it (part of the group) and those who don’t (outsiders). Being in on the joke is like a form of belonging. I think the devs are well aware of that, which is why you’ll see them post in support of many of the memes below.

Spham

This gotta be the oldest (unless you count “DEEBEED GO!”) and definitely the most persistent one. And it was born right after the game announcement - newcomers were showing up in the newly opened official discord in droves, and people were just having a good time - sharing their excitement and happiness. And in this electric atmosphere, one thing led to another.

How it all started

And then it just kept going increasingly nuts and nutser

There’s way too much Spham chat to post it all here - this just keeps flaring up again and again and again - and while it’s supposedly some sort of highly processed meat-product of dubious origin, there’s also been theories floated around that it’s made either some sort of toxic waste, no meat in there at all - or that it’s human meat, Soylent Green style. Meanwhile it’s turned from meat product into full on religious cult.

Sphalogna

We see “Sphalogna” mentioned in the Spham paragraph above - it was a very shortlived attempt to create a competitor extruded meat product next to Spham. It didn’t really catch on, so it’s probably more of an offshoot to Spham, than it’s own thing.

Ledge Crabs

This was another rather shortlived one - but it did have it’s peak. It just then disappeared again, just as quickly as it had appeared. But it was fun, while it lasted!

The invasion of the ledge crabs

It fizzled out rather quickly - with only JesDyr hanging on to it, and trying hard to keep it alive for longer. Without much success though.

Tim

JesDyr also tried to establish the cult of “Tim”. Not really sure what that was about - maybe inspired by Monthy Python’s Holy Grail - the scene with “Tim the Enchanter”, where he says: “There are some who call me… Tim”- ? But that whole Tim thing never took off in the first place. There’s some piece of roleplay writing about “Tim the Terrorformer” around though - check that out, if you are interested.

Otter Space

We saw the first instance of this occuring just above during the Ledge Crabs meme. Bascially just a typo by JesDyr, who wrote “otter rim” instead of “outer rim” - which Valannor found very hilarious indeed. It could have been just that one gif - and it almost was just that.

But again, it was JesDyr hanging on to it, and trying hard to keep it going - and with a lot more success this time. Not as big a Spham maybe, but it’s really hard to recreate something that was born in the spur of the moment, caused by the overflowing excitement of the game’s announcement. JesDyr tried again and again, and with the Otters he finally succeeded - but it took some dogged persistence to initially get it going.

Otter Space

I think the otters do work well because of the cuteness factor. That’s definitely what otterly endeared them to me! But what made it really take off had to be the puns, I think.

Otterly cute

The otters have also been a great service to the community - as they’ve been featured in helpful/guiding images, explanations, infographics and the likes, that help newcomers find their way around.

Chicken war

I honestly don’t know what to say about this one.

Depictions of heavily armed chickens killing and eating defenseless otters

Is this supposed to be funny? Or some sort of power-/superiority-fantasy? Or some uncalled-for, overly aggressive provocation? I don’t even…

This is simply bullying, isn’t it?

Kickstarter

Around 2024, the gaming industry did not appear to be in a very healthy state. We saw wave after wave of huge layoffs happening. Studio closures. Project cancellations. It was a phase of contraction, consolidation - and uncertainty. That’s exactly the sort of climate when investment money is extremely hard to come by. Because you better invest in surviving companies during a recovering market - not in potentially next-to-fail companies during a crashing market.

Why they did it

Playable Worlds - the developer studio creating Stars Reach - is an investor-funded start-up company. They received $2.7m initial funding in their seed round on October 3, 2019; another $10m in Series A funding on June 11, 2020; and another $25m in Series B on April 20, 2022. They never planned on doing a Kickstarter, because the sums they need to create an MMO are orders of magnitute higher than what a games Kickstarter can typically get you, and because they were fully aware that past high profile projects that failed to deliver, had somewhat soured gamers’ perceptions and acceptance of crowd-funding.

But then, they seemingly found themselves in a situation, where they could not get the additional investment they needed to hire, grow their team and ramp up for the final phase of development, now that all their technology was in place, their infrastructure setup an working, and their concept proven. Investors wanted to see a strong “signal”, proof that there was demand for this game. Good press, Steam wishlists and testing signups showed high interest, but that wasn’t good enough. Investors wanted proof that there was an audience willing to put down money for this.

How it went

And that’s where Kickstarter comes in, obviously. If you want more detail on how the campaign did, I wrote about that while it was happening, in:

• PAT11 Planet Escarion
• PAT12 Seasons, Skies and Public Events
• PAT14 World Reset

In short: it went all very well. The KS hit it’s goal within a single hour, many stretch goals got unlocked, the investors were pleased, new investors showed up - success in every regard.

The community reaction

But the community wasn’t all excitement and exuberance. There was a lot of that, but there also was criticism, anxiety and tensions. New people showed up, with tons of questions (most of which were actually answered right on the Kickstarter page), and I created this reward tier list to help - which was very well received:

Kickstarter reward tiers

The property pass powder keg

But there were also questions about the details of homestead ownership - and those property passes - and what people would later get, when buying Early Access passes. Some people seemed to be really on edge about things - especially concerning monetization. Tensions were rising, and it felt a little bit like a power-keg that could get ignited by any spark any time… but maybe I was just beeing overly sensitive regarding the mood?

I pulled up the recording of the video, increased the playback speed and started searching for the exact moment, when Raph talked about the property passes. And to my relief, he actually made it pretty clear, that other things like event passes would be a part of the property pass. So… people could put their pitchforks away again, no need to go ballistic over exploitative monetization or being played dirty.

Any other time of the year, people would have just said “I don’t think they’d do something like that - but let’s ask for clarification.” - but at this moment, people seemed more willing to get angry first, ask for clarification later. And I really didn’t appreciate that “on edge” feeling. Was a bit of a stressful time to me.

Other points of questions and discussion

Another point that saw some more discussion, was the whole thing about owning a planet. And how exactly a planet could get lost (i.e. a wormhole could be closed). And there was some confusion over planet health and planet being considered active. Turns out those two things are completely indepent of each other - and low health does not mean the planet dies and the wormhole closes.

And there was also debate about how you would be able to keep your special terraformer cosmetic forever, while the terraformer you initially get would just decay and eventually break like any other.

Reward-Anxiety

Then the KS ended and - even earlier than that - the questions about testing access started. The Kickstarter rewards had written, in their text, “testing access NOW”. And while people were able to get into a test within a matter of days - going the old signup route - there was no way of handing out any backer rewards until after the two week payment phase, and another two or so weeks for filling out the backer survey. Therefore it took another whole month, before the first backers would actually receive their KS backing reward tester access.

That of course caused a lot of questions as well, and as people didn’t have super high trust in KS to begin with, some where kinda anxious about getting lost or somehow never receiving their rewards at all. It felt a little bit like the testing signup confusion after the announcement all over again. Sadly the reward-text is not something KS allows you to edit after the campaign has started - so there was no way to remove that “NOW”. And the clarifications posted to the FAQ section on Kickstarter didn’t seem to get read by many people.

And with the whole process across firstlook.gg and the Discord bot dishing out the Backer role not being exactly reliable and failproof, it took a while until this repeated question became less frequent again.

The Stretch Goals & Finale

A very fun aspect of the Kickstarter was the general happiness and excitement about the stretch goals. While I highly suspect all the races had been already planned for previously, and no additional races got added just for the KS - it was still very cool to see them revealed, and to see people gush over them.

Every morning or so, a mod would post a screenshot of where the tally is currently at, and how close we are to the next stretch goal. And after people had overcome their initial misgivings, and most questions had been answered, the overall mood and vibe was pretty good.

The Kickstarter finale

In the end it definitely was another big event for the community, that we lived through all together!

Closing Words

It’s a been a densely packed year, full of memorable events. And we have grown a lot as a community - not only in numbers, but also in shared history that bonds us together.

And nothing is more important for an MMO, than it’s community!