What You Need To Know About Stars Reach

Stars Reach is the lifelong dream of game design legend Raph Koster. In some ways, it’s the game he has wanted to make for over 30 years now. The culmination of all his ideas and ambitions for virtual worlds.

It is going to be a social sandbox MMO, following the dreams and ambitions of many of the first wave of MMO’s prior to Everquest and WoW: to create a living world, inhabited by a living, breathing society.

It’s in pre-alpha right now, and a lot of systems and game mechanics are still not implemented yet. The developers spent the first 5 years mostly to build the platform and technology game runs on, as well as the underlying simulation and did overcome all the major technical hurdles before announcing the game.

The cellular automata simulation they developed allows for the worlds in the game to be highly dynamic, fully modifyable and have a living nature, with both flora and fauna reacting to ecological changes and survival pressure.

Even though it’s only in it’s testing phase, we already see collaborative storytelling in action - with things that players did in the game, or just in the discord, becoming part of the official lore and being made canon.

Everything about the game economy is geared towards creating collaborative communities and widely spread out supply chains. Large scale cooperative play on a low-trust, asynchronous, solo-friendly basis.

Raph Koster

Raph is well known and highly respected in the gaming industry. He’s known for his games, for his talks and for his writing. He wrote “A Theory of Fun” - one of the most influential books in game design. He’s a regular speaker at various conferences all over the globe and his talks are always well received. He was also the lead designer behind cult classic games such as Ultima Online¹ and Star Wars Galaxies².

Raph also is very approachable. He’ll show up on Discord, Reddit, in Youtube comments and Twitch chat, and in the comments sections of various gaming news websites - and will engage very candidly in conversation with both fans and detractors. And he is listening to criticisms and feedback, and taking it seriously. Outside of the indie scene, it’s kinda rare to find developers who are so close and open to their fanbase.

His game design career began with MUDs in the nineties - textbased, online multi-user dungeons. He was involved in multiple of these, most famously LegendMUD - together with his wife Kristen. That’s how he got noticed by Origin Systems and hired to do Ultima Online. Origin specifically and intentionally hired designers with MUD experience and not singleplayer game designers. To this day, Raph’s design philosophy is very focussed on putting the players and the community first, and designing the game and it’s mechanics around supporting and enabling that community.

And you can clearly see and feel this approach, his signature design style, in Stars Reach - even now, while it’s only in pre-alpha.

Sandboxes And Themeparks

Already back in the MUD days, different camps emerged, each focussing on other aspects of the games’ designs. Before the advent of social media, these online games also served as chat rooms to hang out, socialize and roleplay³. And while some MUDs (or rather MUSHes and MOOs) specialized on these activities and social aspects, the most popular branch - the DikuMUDs - were almost exclusively focussed on leveling, gear and combat. Having a high level and rare items also served as a status symbol, and it wasn’t uncommon that reaching max-level meant even acquiring moderator-powers.

Despite it’s evident popularity, early MMOs did not subscribe to this Diku-formula. Inspired by the older dreams and aspirations of MUDs and especially the work of one Richard Bartle, the very first wave of MMOs was a lot more interested in creating living, breathing societies - rather than just “number-go-bigger” progression systems:

• Meridian 59 emphasized political intrigue, guild alliances and player-driven conflict resolution.
• Habitat was an early pioneer in it’s focus on avatars, social behavior, player expression and emergent storytelling.
• Furcadia was completely centered around creativity, roleplay and social interactions - not featuring any leveling system at all.
• The Realm Online had combat and loot, but also featured strong chat integration, guilds, in-game marriages and player homes.
• A Tale in the Desert had no combat at all, and was entirely focused on cooperative gameplay, economic systems, legal debates and social contracts.
• Second Life may not be a game in the traditional sense - but it is a virtual world emphasizing on user-generated content, economy and social interaction.
• Saga of Ryzom⁴ featured a mutable ecosystem, storytelling through player-driven interactive live events and the “Ryzom Ring” toolset for player-generated content - all focused on roleplay, collaboration and world-building.

Today we call this style of games “sandboxes” - but back then, this was what “MMORPGs” were⁵.

But then Everquest and World of Warcraft burst onto the scene, and the mindset about what it means for a game to be an MMO shifted significantly. The Diku-model proved most popular in MMOs as well, and the idea that MMOs were those linear, quest-driven games featuring quest-hubs, a leveling + gear treadmill, instanced dungeons and a segmented endgame became calcified. Nobody thought of MMOs as “social simulations” or “living, breathing societies” anymore. Even the definitions of “MMO” and “MMORPG” on Wikipedia got updated, to remove or de-emphasize the prior focus on virtual worlds, living societies and player-driven gameplay. (And SWG famously got NGE-d⁶).

Between the huge financial success of these themeparks, and the legal challenges of combating third-party gold-sellers, and the mounting difficulties of managing and controlling any open-ended, player-driven game systems - publisher budgets and investor money moved entirely towards games more curated, more locked-down, with no open economy or any player-driven mechanics at all. (Exceptions like EVE online do show though, that it is possible to create a working, player-driven economy, and emphasize the emergent gameplay of player politics.)

These days, most MMO games are actually hybrids. Publishers figured out that relying purely on developer-authored content is expensive, and that experienced, efficient players will “consume” the new content you took 6 or 12 months to create, within just a week or two⁷. Many of the less problematic sandbox features like extensive visual character customization, decoratable player housing, pets and player expression features turned out to be major revenue drivers in a free to play game - while selling power progression is “pay to win” and not accepted among western players. And even games advertising themselves as sandboxes today, still do feature the typical level progression treadmill that has become synonymous with “MMO”⁸.

But overall the genre is in decline. Publishers have moved on to lootboxes and gacha mechanics or whatever their newest business equivalent of a “get-rich-quick-scheme” is these days. Players who love the structured content of themeparks, have moved on to MOBAs, hero battlers, battle royals and other such games⁹. Players who love the freedom and emergent nature of sandbox gameplay have moved on to games like Minecraft and Roblox. And if the massive popularity of these two doesn’t convince you that there is still a market for true sandboxes, nothing ever will.

Stars Reach is trying to revive that old, original meaning of “sandbox”, and to revisit the “living society” and “player-driven systems” ambitions MMORPGs had back then. But it’s not a nostalgia project, trying to copy or imitate those old games. It’s a modern take on the old dream - using the newest technologies and methods to achieve the same goals, but not necessarily in the same way. Taking learnings from not only MMOs, but from Minecraft and Roblox as well, they are pushing the dream of a “living world” with a “living, brething society” further than ever before. Beyond what some thought currently possible, even.

The Current State Of The Game

Playable Worlds has been founded by Raph Koster in 2018. In October of 2019 the company first announced their existence to the world - as part of a press release about receiving seed funding. Yes, they are a start-up company backed by venture capital investors. Between seed funding, funding round A and funding round B they raised roughly 38 million USD.

They initially had no intentions to ever do a crowdfunding campaign, but in late 2024 they found themselves in need of a strong signal to investors. As the industry was going through a time of lay-offs, cancellations and studio closures, investment money was drying up. But with a hugely successfull Kickstarter campaign proving the game’s audience was willing to pull out their wallet - new investment offers started rolling in immediately.

As of right now - July 2025 - they have around 24 employees in-house, and another handfull of external contractors working for them. This is not a big company, and they are intentionally staying lean and cost-conscious. Between 2018 and the game’s reveal announcement in June 2024, they worked on overcoming the game’s greatest challenges: the simulation, the server infrastructure and the required networking middleware. Only after they had proof of concept that overcame these biggest hurdles, was the game announced.

The game is still in pre-alpha, and a lot of gameplay systems are still missing. For those first five years, they had mainly worked on the technical plumbing and building a solid foundation, that could support a large scale single-shard¹⁰ MMO. The tech was there - but the game was still mostly missing. The first players have been invited into time-boxed test-windows as early as Autumn 2024 - and those first tests featured basically nothing but player movement. The game has progressed tremendously fast since then, and come a long way in it’s first year after the announcement. But it still has a long way to go as well.

Alpha and 24/7 servers - and subsequently Early Access¹¹ release - are planned for later this summer. Beta should start sometime early next year. Follow by a potential release later next year. The game, all characters and all progress are going to be wiped before release - and there’ll probably be more wipes during the time leading up to that. Getting into testing is easy as signing up for it - and then waiting a few days. And many thousands of people have done so - and verified for themselves that the game is real, and that the things that already exist do work - and that includes the simulation.

Right now (again as of July 2025), the tests plays more like a surival-builder than a full social sandbox MMO, due to many of the more advanced MMO mechanics still being completely absent¹². That being said, testers are already enjoying what is there - and we see large scale communal building projects taking shape, entire mountains getting collapsed, lakes being rerouted, creatures and bosses being fought, trees and flowers being planted and harvested, and lots and lots of mining tunnels being dug. Also some item crafting, some surveying (for mapmaking), some healing, a very preliminary form of creature taming, an equally preliminary form of entertainer-like dancing. As more and more gameplay mechanics get added, the game is going to continue from survival-builder game to full-fledged MMO (in the old sense).

Visually the game has evolved too - and with the next update, it is going to look better than ever. Things looked less than impressive in the initial announcement trailer, due to how early that was, and due to graphics not having been an “unknown” that the proof of concept needed to explore. Since then, there have been some smaller and sometimes larger visual improvements every other patch, and the visual keep improving.

The Cellular Automata Simulation

This¹³ is one of the biggest innovations in this game - and was one of the big unknowns they solved before announcing the game. And therefore this is already in the game, and something that testers can play around with - and confirm that it exists and works.

Think of it as similar to Minecraft, with all it’s cubes - but with the cubes (called cells rather) being smart. They know the contents and states of all neighbouring cells and can update themselves according to that - at a rate of 10 times per second. That allows for heat dissipation, water flow, cave-ins, adhesion values (how far a material can overhang before it breaks off), angle of repose (how tall you can stack a material before it flows apart), and even chemical reactions between neighbouring materials.

This works well enough that testers have actually been able to build a very crude but working heat pump in the game (just for pumping water - no way to extract physical work, at least not yet). During a test recently, I let water flow into a desert area, and then watched in awe how the place slowly transformed: Sand eroded into dirt, grass started growing and the plants (trees, shrubs, cactii) not only grew as well and got more vibrant in color - they also started having offshoots.

As a result, the worlds in the game already do feel a lot more alive, dynamic and changing - i.e. less static - then a Minecraft world ever could. As the cells are capable of being only partially filled, and are rendered in a very rounded, smoothed fashion, the worlds do visually look a lot more natural and organic as well.

Some additional features - which aren’t in the game yet - have been teased as well¹⁴:

• What if… you could be swept away by the current of a raging river?
• What if… walking through the grass carved a trail if you did it often enough?
• What if… you could actually get snowed in at a tavern, like in the fantasy novels?
• What if… it rained, creating puddles that froze overnight?
• What if… bad weather meant travelling through the mud?

And the devs are working on other upgrades to the simulation, like a pressure system for example.

This does of course also affect gameplay - especially farming, mining, exploration have to directly interact with the terrain and simulation. But it also means that homestead building can have both minecraft style blocks as well as pre-fabricated building parts available. On a larger scale the environmental health of a planet is of course also going to matter for player cities and player governments. And there’s also an NPC faction¹⁵ in the game, that might get angry at you, for messing up planets.

This makes the nature and ecology of the worlds feel alive and dynamic - but there’s a lot more to creating a living world and society - as I’ve already hinted at further up in the Sandboxes and Themeparks chapter, and will be talking about again, further down.

The Lore And Collaborative Storytelling

You might remember hearing of or reading about that one day in Ultima Online, when Richard Gariott’s ingame avatar “Lord British” (the King of the realm) was holding a speech - only to get fried by a random wall of fire spell halfway through¹⁶.

The imho truly remarkable part about this though, is not that it happened - random stuff just happens sometimes. But rather that the devs did not revive him, and continue on as planned - but instead embraced the moment and turned it into lore. The killing of Lord British by a firewall spell is canon, and part of the ingame story¹⁷. The devs did see the players as collaborators and participants in the story telling. And UO was not alone in this - others did it too and especially Ryzom tried to turn this into one of their main features and biggest selling points¹⁸.

Later games - in their obsession to strictly curate, control and predict everything - changed this dynamic. Their writers created the story behind closed doors, and players had no input at all. Instead, the way the story was told and quests were structured - player characters pretty much had to do exactly what the writers had prescribed for them. Be the chosen one, defeat evil, safe the world. Storywise, everything was pre-ordained, the world became predeterministic in nature, and free will (and therefore player agency) became an illusion. Instead of being active participants, players were turned into passive consumers.

Stars Reach though, is going back to integrating players and their doings into the official story. What YOU do in the game, can become canon. And that’s not something the developers promised or talked about having planned, or anything like that. That’s something we only know because we have seen it actually happening. Repeatedly.

The very first test ever - when the first group of players ever entered the game - is considered the “first landing”. In the lore that’s the when very first group of humans gets rescued by the Servitors¹⁹. Nothing big - there was no special ingame-event, and players couldn’t do much in that test anyway, so not much happened - but it shows that this sort of collaborative storytelling was intended from the very start.

Higher tier backers get to provide a name that will be put onto a “plaque of heroes”, in the in-game headquarters of the Transplanetary League. In the lore, these “heroes” are supposed to be individuals that in some way greatly supported the League (or mankind) in it’s early days after being rescued from their failing homeworlds. Again, nothing big, pretty normal stuff, lots of Kickstarters offer something along those lines.

A player-built city called “Mycityum”, and it’s destruction in yesterday’s wipe have made it into the official lore drops as well. The city was a huge building project that a number of testers collaborated on, and dumped a lot of hours of building time into. It’s only mentioned in passing, during a discussion about the threat of total loss of that planet to the Cornucopia²⁰ - but it is in there!

Yesterday’s wipe itself was a huge event. Sadly I couldn’t be there myself, as it was from around 4am to 5am, my timezone. All the planets got destroyed and are going to be replaced with entirely new ones, come the next patch update. Yesterday saw some massive creature invasions and large scale fighting, entire planets getting molten into Lava, before disappearing forever. Players did participate and several things happened - we’ll have to wait for the next lore drop though, to see if any of that is going to be mentioned.

Something that started as a Discord meme has made it into official lore as well: Space otters are a thing now! They are only mentioned on the side - one of the characters in the story has been trying to catch one of the elusive space otters for a while. Even silly jokes can become canon!

And last but not least, there’s a whole bunch of Haikus that a player has been posting, styled as Skwatchi poetry²¹. Skwatchi poetry and their love for poetry jams has now been canonized as well - through mention in a lore drop.

The game is still in pre-alpha and hasn’t even launched yet - and already player’s actions are being integrated into the lore. You can definitely see, that the approach to story-writing taken here, has more in common with the collaborative ideas of early MMOs - and way less to do with the static stories of most quest-driven, later games.

The game doesn’t tell you what your story is. You tell the game!

The Player-Driven Economy

Now we are entering the territory of things which aren’t in the game yet. We know quite a few things about what the developers have planned for the economy, and also that it’s gonna have strong parallels to the economic design of Star Wars Galaxies. That should give us a pretty solid picture - but the caveat remains: It’s not in the game yet, and we don’t really know yet how it’s gonna turn out in the end.

• There will be no real money trading, no crypto coins or tokens, no web3 stuff - the economy is meant to be ingame-money only. But there possibly might be something similar to EvE Online’s Flex.
• There will be 40+ different professions in the game, covering combat and non-combat activities, including lots of crafting jobs but also including less usual choices like entertainer, politician, farmer, journalist, cartographer, merchant, xenobiologist, geneticist, architect and more.
• Professions are not like classes where you pick one to get locked in to - you can mix and match skills from different professions as you like, up to a total skill limit that’s yet to be defined - and you can swap out skills later
• There are no level ups - your skills will gain skill XP either when you use them - or when another player uses something you made.
• All professions will play a role in the economy, and will offer some sort of goods or services that other players will pay for.
• For example, even planetary exploration will result in sellable maps and mini-maps, and be an ongoing effort as new planets get discovered, and existing planets might change enough to warrant a map-update.
• There will be a contract system that is robust enough, that you can even sell stuff that is not covered by the profession system. You can theoretically earn ingame-money with things like for example monster extermination, or even out-of-game activities like for example live streaming.
• Almost all items will be player-made, all materials player-harvested/mined/farmed²².
• All items will suffer degradation, be repairable, and break eventually - requiring replacement.
• No soulbound items. Used items can be sold, gifted and traded just like anything else - with full support for second-hand markets to form.
• Planet numbers will be adjusted to active player number to ensure optimal population density.
• Non-renewable raw materials will not respawn and can be mined dry.
• Inactive, no longer visited planets will be replaced by newly generated planets with new raw materials and wild planets (only temporarily available, on a timer) will offer additional raw materials.
• Each planet will have it’s own version of the raw materials, with random attributes/stats on them.
• Transporting materials and items around the universe will take some time and effort - thus leading to regional pricing (regional price differences)
• No global AH, no perfectly identical/comparable items (because of differing stats), no perfect information economy
• Players can form cities and vote a city mayor, and even form planetary governments, ruling over an entire planet.

The obvious goal is to have perpetual game loops (see: Endgame), and to create interdependency between players (see: Interdependency)²³. Combined with the planetary governments, this creates an economy and society, where people know that everyone provides something that contributes to this economy and society, and thus supports their shared planet. And this indirect cooperation also strengthens a sense of community among the citizens of the planet - who do depend on each other. Basically, everyone else is part of your personal supply chain in some way or form. All the items and services you get to enjoy - is the community’s collective doing.

We are truly playing with each other - and not just next to each other²⁴.

Conclusion

There’s a deeper purpose behind many of the things that Stars Reach is doing or planning to do. These are not just basic MMO features, or throwbacks to older games. There is rhyme and reason to why things would be done this way - and it all revolves around player agency and that old dream of creating living, breathing societies.

And in my humble opinion - that’s exactly the special sauce that turned games like SWG into cult classics, while at same time also being what’s missing from a lot of new games out there. It would seem that Everquest Next had figured this out as well - and was trying to pull off pretty much the same thing. And I was following EQN with great interest. Not as closely - but I had high hopes that it might bring a renaissance of this older style of MMO design. But alas, that wasn’t meant to be.

One thing is for sure though - the MMO genre does need a fresh wind, something that breaks with the current mold which has grown too formulaic and stale. And I have been waiting for exactly this fresh wind for a long long time now.

Footnotes

1. Richard Gariott was working on a singleplayer Ultima expansion and initially not part of the UO development team. He only joined after the core game design had already been finalized and contributed a lot to the game’s world, lore and story. But the core game mechanics were all designed by a team led by Raph Koster. ↩︎

2. Raph also designed Privateer Online - which sadly got cancelled before release. ↩︎

3. The make-believe, improvised-acting kind of roleplay. ↩︎

4. When a group of friends decided we should all start playing an MMO together, Ryzom was my personal first choice. Due to lack of agreement, we ended up choosing a game that was nobody’s first choice, but that no one objected to either: the then upcoming World of Warcraft. (Don’t judge me - we had a lot of blind trust in Blizzard back then.) ↩︎

5. I know that WoW predates some of these games. This are still the best examples of games made in the old pre-WoW mindset - even if a few may have released a bit after WoW. The mindset didn’t change from one day to the next - it was more of a gradual process. ↩︎

6. The “New Game Experience” expansion to Star Wars Galaxies was an ill-fated attempt to add more WoW-like elements to the game. In hindsight, doubling down on their unique strengths might have been a better choice than trying to become a copy of WoW, just worse. ↩︎

7. This realisation that the themepark approach was not (or no longer) sustainable is also why Everquest Next went all in on trying to become a player-driven sandbox. Dave Georgeson - Director of Development for EQN and Landmark - joined Playable Worlds to work on Stars Reach soon after finding out what they were aiming for. ↩︎

8. So much so in fact, that you can describe a game like “Kingdoms of Amalur” as a singleplayer/offline MMO - and people will understand what you mean by that: A singleplayer RPG, with a level-treadmill that just feels like a themepark MMO. ↩︎

9. Games that offer gameplay roughly comparable to (parts of) the often instanced endgame of themeparks, but without the level grind treadmill that precedes it. ↩︎

10. Single-shard means that all players will share the same single universe like for example in EVE Online - and not be split up and distributed among many different servers. ↩︎

11. Steam Early Access release is planned for later this year (2025). ↩︎

12. Almost all economy features, guild features and politics features are not implemented yet, among other things. ↩︎

13. For the simplest and easiest to understand version of a cellular automata simulation, check out Conway’s Game of Life. ↩︎

14. These teasers were dropped on social media during the countdown to the games’ announcement. ↩︎

15. The servitors are an intelligent robotic species, tasked with taking care of “the garden” (i.e. terraformed planets) that the old ones created before disappearing. They don’t seem to much like humans (i.e. the old ones’ favourite pets) but consider it their duty to protect them, as they are their master’s creations. ↩︎

16. He had forgotten to turn on invincibility, and stepped into the wall of fire, believing it couldn’t hurt him. The result was British Barbeque. ↩︎

17. The devs did have plans to have Lord British be assassinated for story reasons - but not during this speech. It was supposed to happen weeks later. ↩︎

18. Sadly the game didn’t do very well, and seemingly these orchestrated, player-interactive story events were among the first things to get axed as a cost cutting measure. ↩︎

19. They need saving, after destroying their own home planet some way or another. ↩︎

20. Cornucopia: a planet-eating mass of flowery tentacles. Brought into existence by Servitors taking an order of the Old Ones a little bit too literally. ↩︎

21. The Skwatchi are a large, ape-shaped humanoid species sporting tusks in the game. Basically like fluffy space orcs. ↩︎

22. With the exception of your starter gear. ↩︎

23. Even Themeparks do have some interdependency, but only in combat: tanks, damage dealers and healers do need each other to form an efficient combat group, espeically for content you can’t do solo. Having economic interdepency expands this to all the many different profession, each needing each other - but also makes it more solo friendly because you can use vendors and buy orders instead of having to group up and play together in a high-trust fashion. ↩︎

24. Many themeparks have truly earned the moniker “massively singleplayer” that they’ve been given, by how little they allow what players do to influence other players - keeping them completely separated, economically. ↩︎