Phase One: Before the Trains
Wildoria is in closed beta, and what is open is Phase One: the prologue, played in a browser, inside your own race's town. The rail line out is shut. Everything below is measured from the live world rather than planned for it. See the Road Map for what comes after.
You start where your race starts
There is no lobby and no choice of homeland. Your race decides which of the six towns you wake up in, and the first person who speaks to you is that town's scout. From there the town is the world: its square, its craft hall, its fields, its rock and its woods.
The towns are built from the same bones on purpose. What differs is who lives there and what the land around them gives up.
One story, told in your own square
The main line runs 43 quests, and none of them are locked to a race. A Tiger and a Rhino are handed the same contracts and each one fulfils them at home, because the quests are addressed to a role rather than to a person: "the elder", "the blacksmith", "the conductor". The role resolves to whoever holds it in your town. See Race Based Quests for the full model.
On top of the main line sit the repeatables, and every race reaches all of them:
| Cadence | Count |
|---|---|
| Daily | 24 |
| Weekly | 6 |
| Monthly | 7 |
The clock is the difficulty
Most quests carry a time budget, and how long that budget actually takes depends on whether you are there:
- Played yourself, a quest runs at its face value. The main line's timed work adds up to roughly sixteen hours of quest clock in total.
- Left to run while you are away, every step takes four times as long. The world keeps working for an absent citizen, just slowly.
That multiplier is the whole pacing design in one number. Nothing stops you from playing all day; the game simply does not need you to, and it is markedly kinder to a player who shows up than to one who leaves it running.
The line you cannot take
Eighteen rail routes exist in the world. All eighteen are closed.
This is not an oversight and not a wall thrown up to pad the prologue. The rail line is the seam between Phase One and Phase Two, and the prologue is the work of earning your way onto it: a trade worth practising, a purse worth filling, and a ticket that costs enough to be worth saving for.
Buses, ferries and planes do run, so the world is not sealed. What is sealed is the road to the city.
Pick a gathering trade and a craft that feed each other. The smith cannot make a pickaxe without a miner's iron and a lumberjack's timber, and the miner cannot work the good rock without the pickaxe. Phase One is short enough to rush and long enough to build something in; the citizens who arrive in Wildoria with a grade behind them will not be starting over.