The Chronicle

Mar 06, 2026

Multi-service foundations

Vellum’s six core services (game-client, physics-server, user-be, api-gateway, ai-service, game-website) are born on the same day, laying down the skeleton of the browser 3D MMORPG: a single real-time Socket.IO server, a .NET persistence backend and a web presence.

• exploration
• home

Mar 08, 2026

First playable deploy

In two days the client, physics server and backend are wired together in Docker and deployed as one, with a basic walkable map and player respawn — the first end-to-end version you could connect to.

• exploration

Apr 01, 2026

Quests and NPC dialogue

Quests arrive: quest givers with ! / ? markers, a Missions/Commissions log, an FSM dialogue modal, an in-world HUD tracker, and the ability for players to post their own commissions.

• progression
• fellowship

read the devlog →

Apr 02, 2026

Combat, craftable magic and physical abilities

Combat’s ability-first identity lands: status effects, style-based spell evolution, gear evolution, elemental combos, passives, plus craftable magic and a hotbar of physical abilities. Part of the six-systems wave (economy, P2P trade, durability, parties, guilds, day/night, achievements, leaderboards, tutorial).

• combat
• progression
• economy
• fellowship

Apr 07, 2026

Gathering overhaul

Gathering is rebuilt into 6 skills (mining, woodcutting, herbalism, fishing, skinning, farming) with tiered tools, quality grades, respawns and rare/hidden nodes, a fishing minigame, skinning from carcasses and a plant/tend/harvest loop, plus a resource codex.

• crafts

read the devlog →

Apr 12, 2026

Guilds

Player guilds enter the game, with a guild bank and membership.

• fellowship

Apr 16, 2026

Magic rework and market UI

The magic system is reworked, alongside a refreshed market with category filters and item detail cards, and an expanded inventory sort.

• combat
• economy

Apr 18, 2026

Arena rebuilt as a Roman colosseum

The Arena zone becomes an elliptical Roman-style colosseum: an outer wall with gates and vomitoria, a two-tier cavea with radial staircases, an imperial box and a decorated floor.

• exploration

May 2026

Multilingual support (5 languages)

All player-facing UI text moves to an i18n system covering English, Italian, Spanish, French and German — menus, quests, crafting, spell names and the HUD all become locale-reactive.

• home

May 09, 2026

Private player islands

Players get a private island to build on and place objects, separate from the world’s fixed zones.

• home
• crafts

May 21, 2026

World map and unlockable fast-travel

A global graph map (F key) connects 6 hub-and-spoke zones via physical doors, with no-combat bubbles and fast-travel unlocked by visiting a zone and paying a cost.

• exploration

Jun 13, 2026

Accounts and PayPal subscriptions

The Vellum site gains registration, login and profile editing (email/password/language) plus a two-tier PayPal subscription flow, backed by httpOnly session cookies managed by the gateway.

• home

Jun 14, 2026

Support magic — heal and shield

Magic gains a support role: a new Nature element heals allies and Light is reworked into a shield, with ally targeting, heal-over-time, a Purify passive and dedicated magic XP. A passives panel is added to the Destiny Board.

• combat
• progression

Jun 14, 2026

Removed gathering skill-level gating and fixed fishing

All skill-level requirements on gathering are removed — tier and tool are the only gates — and the missing client-side fishing minigame (bite prompt, hook, catch toast) is added so fishing actually works.

• crafts

Jun 14, 2026

Cinematics editor

An authoring editor that reuses the Map Editor primitives plus admin zone snapshots; deployed across the involved repos.

• exploration

Jun 15, 2026

Economy ledger

An append-only ledger instruments every coin and item faucet and sink (gathering, crafting, quest rewards, repair, market taxes) plus a price index, giving the foundation for balancing the economy. Merged and pushed.

• economy

Jun 18, 2026

New 12-step tutorial onboarding

New-player onboarding is redesigned into a guided 12-step overlay (move, talk, accept a quest, hunt, skin, inventory, assign magic, use an ability, gather, craft, equip, visit the market), DB-seeded and localized, with two tutorial quest-stands highlighted.

• progression

Jun 19, 2026

Chat channels, dialogue bubbles and moderation

Chat expands to multiple channels (Local/Global/Guild/Party/Whisper/Trade) with slash commands, a speech-bubble channel above the character, and a report menu plus delete/timeout/ban. The local-as-bubble follow-up shipped on 2026-06-20.

• fellowship

Jun 19, 2026

Quest stand and active-mission split

The quest modal splits by entry point: the nav bar shows only active missions, while the stand shows a unified “commissions” board (tutorial/system quests highlighted as Game Master, plus player bounties with creator name and time remaining).

• progression
• fellowship

Jun 19, 2026

Black market (gear sink)

A black market where the game itself buys players’ gear — minting coins as a faucet and destroying the gear as a sink, feeding a pool used to arm NPCs, with a job that modulates the order prices.

• economy

Jul 12, 2026

The quest board grows an escrow

Player-posted commissions start holding their bounty in escrow behind a posting fee, so a bounty can no longer be advertised and not paid; escort contracts join the board as a type of their own, and the ability forge becomes parametric — you ask it for an ability instead of picking one off a shelf.

• progression
• economy

Jul 14, 2026

Taming, pens and mounts return

Live capture comes back with its whole chain: nets thrown at a weakened beast, pens that keep and feed what you caught, breeding, and mounts crafted from hides. The great stag arrives above the bear as the forest’s apex prey.

• crafts
• exploration

Jul 15, 2026

Guild ranks and alliances

Guilds gain per-guild roles and permissions — who may build on an outpost, who may draw from the bank — and then alliances: guilds request, accept and break pacts, and the server honours them in friendly fire, in chat and around outposts.

• fellowship

Jul 16, 2026

A leaner spellbook, and combat power moved to the hands

Fourteen spells nobody had a reason to cast are removed and the fire damage-over-time is reworked into a charge that empowers your next cast. The melee and defence skills are retired at the same time: what you hit for now comes from the ability and the weapon in your hands, not from a level in a stat sheet.

• combat
• progression

Jul 16, 2026

The world is redrawn

Roads stop being straight lines and start winding, with dead-end alleys and arteries that actually reach the doors; resources are redistributed to match their biome instead of being scattered evenly; the crystal cavern is flattened, opened to the sky and walled with rock, and the volcanic peak gets off-centre trails and a colossal boundary.

• exploration

read the devlog →

Jul 20, 2026

The catalogue moves into its own house

Every static definition — equipment, abilities, recipes, species, magic — leaves the main backend for a service that owns it alone, and the rest of the game reads it through a typed client. It is plumbing, but it is the plumbing that keeps the game, the wiki on this site and the bots reading the same catalogue.

• crafts
• progression

Jul 27, 2026

The Pledge Token

A token you can buy, redeem for a window of access — or put on the auction house and sell to another player for in-game coins, which makes access something the economy can move rather than only a card payment.

• economy
• home

Aug 01, 2026

A companion for the phone beside you

A second device stops being a session thief: open the companion page on a phone and it hands you your inventory and, a day later, the live map of the zone you are standing in — four refreshes a second, with a waypoint you drop there showing up on the map inside the game.

• home

Aug 01, 2026

The client stops stuttering

Boot is split from the game so the first paint drops from 611 KB to 12 KB gzipped; the causes of the freezes in the render loop are removed, the minimap is throttled and the fullscreen blur leaves mobile. In the same week shops get a silhouette you can recognise from across the square.

• exploration
• home

Aug 02, 2026

The animals start walking

Wildlife stops being scenery anchored to a coordinate: every beast is born wherever the ground is free and wanders inside a home territory, one loop for the whole fauna, with a declarative roster per zone. The old stationary “guardians” become elites that roam with everyone else — and now have to close the distance to hurt you.

• exploration

Aug 05, 2026

Gathering XP is shared by the party

Swinging a pick beside your party now feeds everyone standing within forty metres of you, out of one fixed pot rather than a bonus per head: gathering together is a choice about company, not a way to multiply what the world produces.

• fellowship
• progression

Aug 11, 2026

Cave spiders and lava worms

The two zones that had almost nothing alive in them get their own fauna — spiders under the crystal cavern, worms on the volcanic peak, bats as the dark’s furniture — each with a body, a model and its own damage instead of the generic fallback.

• exploration

Aug 13, 2026

The world finds a voice

In eight days the game goes from silent to ninety-five sounds, none of them a recording: every blow, spell, tool, level-up, door and click is synthesised in the browser, placed in space, and quietened by distance and by your quality tier. Footsteps read the ground under you; hooves read the beast you are riding.

• exploration
• combat

read the devlog →

Aug 14, 2026

Sieges get an hour, and outposts get a shield

An outpost now declares the four hours a day in which it can be taken, and may only move that window every three days. Attack outside it and you schedule a siege instead of taking the altar: the holding guild is warned in its own language, an armoury doubles its defenders off-hours, and a newly founded outpost is untouchable for a day.

• fellowship

Aug 25, 2026

The economy grows stakes

Dying in the ruins, the arena, the cavern or the peak now spills everything you carried into a bag anyone can open, while the city and the forest stay safe. Items gain weight, bags and pack animals gain a reason to exist, high-tier forging costs coins, and the house starts buying the raw materials and potions the world consumes — and consuming them, so it is a drain and not a tap.

• economy
• crafts

Aug 29, 2026

Loading measured, then shortened

The loading screen gets a profiler that breaks it into sub-phases with real numbers, and then the fetches are parallelised, network is overlapped with GPU work and the precache is deflated — the difference between guessing at a loading time and knowing where it goes.

• home