Roadmap

Each milestone produces something that can be installed and played or operated on its own.

Where we are (November 2026)

The base game exists and is tested: walking on a generated planet, survival, gathering, crafting at stations, hunting with armour and creatures that bite back, merchants and exchanges between players, dropping items that NPCs and wayfarers scoop and resell, building, farming, fishing, nearby players with text chat, magic, graves and permanent death, story datadisks, portals and share links between worlds. A public server can be limited, observed and backed up, and a contributor can extend the game with the developer guide. Since October the game also gained a quest log, achievements, a photo mode, generated trails and a first vehicle, and a tutorial datadisk; the public web portal is online. The November audit lists where documentation and code still disagree. M1 is done. Parts of M2 (day and night, animals) and M3 (inventories, merchants, exchanges between players) exist, but the seasons, the cell-level ecosystem, player-made currencies and the double-entry ledger are still open, as are M4 to M7 in their full scope. The newest open work is listed in M7a to M9.

Milestones

#	Milestone	Scope
M0	Foundations	Repositories, Debian packaging, CI, documentation, identifiers and ruleset versions in ishtaria-core, cube-sphere generator.
M1	Single world, single biome	Authoritative server, client connects and walks on generated terrain, gathering and primitive crafting, persistence of deltas.
M2	Living world	Simulation levels of detail, cell-level ecosystem, offline avatars, day/night and seasons.
M3	Economy	Inventories, barter, player-made currency, double-entry ledger.
M4	Federation: avatars	@user:server identities, server keys, portals carrying avatar and cosmetics only.
M5	Federation: items	Item provenance, import/export policies, two-phase handover.
M6	Federation: currencies	Exchange between world currencies with caps.
M7a	Content without recompiling	The next, smaller step towards M7. Rules that are data today (recipes, spells, shops, crops, creatures) are read from a content directory or a datadisk instead of being compiled into the server, and items can be defined by data instead of by a migration. Today these files live in ishtaria-server/etc/ and are compiled into the binary. Needs a decision record for the item catalogue (it is in the database now), validation of foreign content, and a way to ship the matching icons and models.
M7	Custom content	Hash-addressed content packs, fallbacks for unknown kinds, sandboxed WASM server logic.
M8	Community and visibility	Exists: achievements, the hall of fame, the public web portal, a developer guide (Contributing) and a hardened, observable server (Hardening a public world). Planned: share links for social networks (0011 – Sharing achievements and memorials on social networks, a proposal only), memorial pages, a showcase on the web portal, the chronicle of a world, creator tools, a press kit with screenshots and a trailer made from the real client.
M9	Complete the base game	What players of today expect and the game still lacks: skills instead of a single experience level, a general hotbar (only a spell hotbar exists), weather and sleeping in a bed, a built-in first-run tutorial, graphics and accessibility settings. (A minimap ships: the HUD draws one, and a datadisk may hand it a baked picture of a city. A photo mode ships, and the tutorial datadisk demonstrates the implemented features, but it is not a first-run flow.) Open design questions: player versus player, animals that chase, protection of leased land, collision of placed things.
M10	Release on Steam (optional)	Only if the project owner decides so: conditions, costs, timeline and the gaps of today are in Publishing on Steam. The open decisions are the publisher, the platforms and what happens to real-money land leases, which Steam does not allow outside its wallet.