RACTR ONLINE
Yesterday New Earth was a single-player world. Today it has a server, accounts, netcode, character select, NPC merchants and bankers, a quest chain, four chat channels — and multiple players standing on the same planet watching the same AI build it. Every feature verified end-to-end by bots before this post was written.
One world, everyone in it
The new world server runs the same engine the client renders with. When the Shaper raises a tower or a player digs a pit, everyone online sees the same tower and the same pit, and they're still there after a restart. Accounts, characters, inventories, bank vaults, quest states, and every change anyone has made to the land all survive.
The setup is deliberately simple. It's a single program you can run on a laptop or a $5 VPS. No sprawling cloud stack.
What's live on the wire
Accounts and characters: register, log in, create up to nine races and three classes, pick your character, enter the world where you last logged out. Chat: /say carries 30 meters, /shout fills your zone, /world reaches everyone, /tell finds a name. NPCs: Foreman Duri hands out a two-quest chain, Meridia the Provisioner buys and sells, Vault-Keeper Bramm guards your coins and goods, and villagers wander the spawn valley. Combat is server-authoritative — the server rolls the crits, credits the quests, pays the coin, and respawns the fallen 45 seconds later. The Shaper now lives on the server: when it raises a watchtower, every player on the planet watches the same tower rise, and it's still there next week.
Proven, not promised
Alongside the server ships a test client: two bots that run the entire feature surface against a live server and check every reply — account creation (including duplicate-name and wrong-password rejection), character creation, world entry with the full NPC and creature roster, all four chat channels, quest accept and kill credit, merchant purchases with price verification, bank deposits and withdrawals of both coins and items, a full fight to the death with XP and loot, item use, cross-client visibility (bot B watches bot A move and receives A's tell), shared digging and building, and the departure broadcast when someone logs out.
Thirteen stages, all green — while the real game client sat in the same world: the bots counted its character among the entities, and its chat panel recorded their conversation and the blow-by-blow of a troll fight it was standing next to.
This is a first-generation MMO backend, and we'll say so plainly: one zone, one shard, small scale. What it is not is a mock-up. Every listed feature round-trips a real server and a real database.
Engine v0.12.0. All four physics gates green; 28/28 tests. The public build stays gated until the game earns its release — follow the devlog.