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Written for people who want to know how it works. Pre-production entries are drawn from the commit history rather than published as they happened.
Release 0.1.25 lets you choose your target with a click or Tab, opens a character pane on C where you put on what you carry, gathers your quests into a log on J, gives Reedhaven a third quest and pays experience for a kill. The zones ran it for more than five and a half days before the download did, and by midday on release day nothing in it had been killed, gathered or crafted on the live servers.
Release 0.1.24 brings a marsh that fights back and drops things: mire wolves beside the deer, a loot window under your pointer, three reed beds that make the first quest finishable, quest marks, a twelve-button action bar and a thirty-second logout. In its first two days on the live servers nothing was killed or looted, and the second quest is still out of a new character's reach.
Release 0.1.23 brings copper: a counter at the harbourmaster that sells the marsh's three materials and buys back what you carry, a purse on the bag, a price on every crafting attempt, and 500 copper for the first quest. Nobody has earned a coin yet, and a new character cannot until the marsh gives something up.
Release 0.1.21 in the small hours with the framed HUD, the F8 card and the item tiers; release 0.1.22 at night with Reedhaven lit at dawn under a cloud deck, four people to talk to and a journal, the bag on I, chat on Enter, two abilities on 1 and 2, a body in the character creator and a Controls page in words. And what is not in it, which starts with copper.
Release 0.1.20 carries the first craft: a panel on P, five professions, thirty-six recipes read from the world's own data, and a server that keeps the clock. Also the first thing a server compiler refused that a desk compiler had let through for four days.
The first thing ever made in Zizeeria is a reed bow, crafted this morning from four reed fibre and a marsh hide. Thirty-six recipes, five professions, a chance to fail and a drawing that teaches seven at once -- all on the server, and none of it yet reachable from inside the game.
The Tearers were a side with Callings and nobody to be born to it. Now they have four peoples, the same stock as the Weavers' four after the tearing, and the other side is whole in the data.
The game has had six Callings and one side. It now has two: six Tearers, one for each Calling, drawn and on the site, and not yet choosable.
Every picture this project had ever taken of its own client was of the login screen, because the rest are behind a sign-in. Three faults had been shipping in the dark.
The client has a look now, and getting there meant finding out that both of its scale settings were quietly destroying themselves.
Pre-production is closed, on evidence this time. The check that closed it very nearly passed with the keyboard unplugged.
Pre-production was declared closed on a criterion with the word move in it. Two clients did see each other. Neither of them could walk.
One of them could not have fired in any state the world could be in. Finding that out took asking a question the green dashboard could not answer.
Two clients, one zone, and each of them can see the other standing there. Corrected on 2026-08-15: neither of them could move, so this was not the end of pre-production.
Two clients joined the same zone at the same time and each was given a character in the world. The line that says so did not exist this morning.
The Linux server is built from the engine source and running on its own machine — one dedicated process per zone, each with its own map and its own port.
The fifth service runs. A character can be created, its stats computed by the server and read back — over the same route a zone server will use.
Six independent reviewers were pointed at one evening's code and found fifty-seven things. Twelve of them were real, and two had been introduced by earlier fixes.
Unreal Engine 5.8 is built from source on a dedicated Windows host, with a cross-compiler the engine itself agrees can produce Linux servers.
The ecosystem service ticks: populations, predation, food coupling and migration between regions, on a fifteen-minute cycle.
Accounts, characters, content, the ecosystem and the Chronicle, with migrations, seed data and a verification pass.
Monorepo layout, the Git/Perforce boundary, local infrastructure and the first meta-service.