Major progress on Lumenshard’s core systems — including procedural dungeon generation, guilds, crafting, and combat — as the project moves toward its first public milestone, the Overworld Playtest.
It’s been a quiet year on the surface, but behind the scenes, the world of Lumenshard has been evolving every single day.
Over the past year and a half, our team has seen many changes. Like many indie and community-driven projects, we’ve faced the natural challenges that come with relying on volunteer developers and artists, balancing passion projects with professional lives, and sometimes rebuilding what earlier contributors left behind. At times, progress meant revisiting systems that no longer met our growing technical ambitions — and yes, tackling our fair share of inherited tech debt.
But through it all, our core team has remained consistent and focused. We’ve spent the last year closing out the backbone systems that will power the world of Lumenshard for years to come. It hasn’t always been flashy, more of a grind (less about new builds, mobs and screenshots, more about frameworks, testing, and iteration), however, it’s been a very productive period for the project.
And now, with so many of those foundations complete, we’re thrilled to share that we’re approaching a major milestone: the Lumenshard Overworld Playtest — our first truly connected, playable slice of the world we’ve been building together.
When we talk about Lumenshard, we aren’t just talking about another Minecraft server. We’re building a fully realized MMORPG ecosystem, complete with procedural generation, instanced worlds, a living economy, and deeply customizable and personalized player progression.
To achieve that, we’ve spent the past year reengineering much of our infrastructure under the leadership of our new Technical Director, a full-stack software engineer who is helping stabilize and rebuild our backend from the ground up.
This includes:
Every world in Lumenshard, from the open Heartlands to the smallest dungeon, is an instanced environment that lives or sleeps based on player activity. This dynamic system will allow for seamless scalability, efficient resource use, and endless variety in gameplay.
With our foundation in place, here’s a comprehensive look at what’s now complete and ready for playtesting across both the Lumenshard Overworld and Dreamfarers, our roguelike adventure mode.
Our PvE combat experience is at the heart of Lumenshard.
We now have hundreds of custom mobs, each handcrafted with thousands of unique attack animations, patterns, and behavioral AI systems. Every encounter is designed to feel distinct, tactical, and engaging, no two fights play out the same way.
The mob corpse system is fully functional as well: when a mob dies, it drops a temporary lootable corpse, allowing players to interact with it for rewards before it disappears. This adds immersion, pacing, and a rewarding rhythm to combat.
Guilds are the cornerstone of community in Lumenshard. For our MVP, players can form a guild with five or more members, earning a Founding Standard, a flag used to claim land in the Heartlands.
Placing this standard establishes a 3×3 chunk territory, marking the future site of the guild’s town.
While this first iteration focuses on core claiming mechanics, we have expansive plans to evolve the guild system over time into one of Lumenshard’s most social, strategic, and persistent experiences.
One of the most ambitious systems we’ve built is our multi-station crafting system.
Instead of a single crafting table, Lumenshard introduces six refinement stations and sixteen assembly stations, each tied to a player’s profession level, learned recipes, and specialization.
These are multi-block workstations, meaning players can upgrade them by constructing additional connected components, allowing access to higher-tier recipes and mechanics.
This system underpins Lumenshard’s economy, itemization, and player-driven progression, offering a level of depth rarely seen even in the Minecraft modding space, but all accessible through vanilla powered by the magic of custom plugins and resource packs.
Every player in Lumenshard will have access to their own Homestead — a personal, instanced space where they can build, craft, decorate, and relax alone or with friends.
Homesteads will feature:
Homesteads represent a peaceful refuge amidst the adventure, and a canvas for creativity that ties into progression and exploration alike.
At the core of Lumenshard’s adventure experience lies one of our most ambitious systems, our Procedural Dungeon Generation.
Over the past year, we’ve refined and expanded this system into a powerful worldbuilding tool that dynamically generates dungeons, troves, and sub-dungeons in real time with the ability to freely customize and personalize based on player activity. Each dungeon is assembled from a growing library of modular tiles, pathways, and specialty rooms, ensuring that no two runs in any dungeon, trove, or Dreamfarer’s experience ever feel the same.
The system intelligently selects and connects tiles to form coherent layouts that balance pacing and challenge, weaving together corridors, combat arenas, puzzle chambers, and boss rooms according to the player’s level, party size, and difficulty modifiers.
Every generated space pulls from handcrafted environmental sets, ambient decorations, and scripted events, allowing procedural content to feel crafted, intentional, and atmospheric rather than random.
This system is already powering our Dreamfarers roguelike mode and will play a major role in the Overworld Playtest, forming the backbone of all instanced exploration and PvE experiences moving forward.
Our new Achievement System tracks progress across every game mode, from combat milestones to crafting goals, and rewards players on daily, weekly, monthly, and lifetime cycles.
This unified system powers future cross-game rewards, integrates with our Patreon tiers, and creates a continuous sense of progression across both the Overworld and Dreamfarers.
Combat depth is one of Lumenshard’s proudest achievements.
We’ve built a system featuring three disciplines (Martial, Arcane, Covert) each branching into multiple aspects that define playstyle and specialization.
For the MVP playtest, players will be able to choose from pre-built RPG classes with fully realized skill kits and passives, encompassing over 200 abilities.
Long-term, this system will evolve into a fully customizable skill tree, empowering players to craft their own hybrid playstyles.
Lumenshard’s item generation system is fully operational. We’ve developed thousands of unique models and textures for weapons, armors, and crafting materials, all dynamically generated through a custom configuration engine.
This system allows for:
Every category has been designed for visual and mechanical variety, blending classic fantasy archetypes with our own original flavors.
Our economy system is up and running, allowing players to buy and sell items through NPCs using a custom UI.
Player-to-player trade will come later, but for the MVP, the NPC marketplace provides a strong foundation for progression and resource flow.
We’re also excited to introduce the questing for Lumenshard, with everything from the smaller daily objectives from various NPCs and questboards throughout the world, to fully playable narrative arcs featuring branching dialogue, alternate outcomes, cinematics, and dynamic quest triggers.
Many of our quests will begin, progress or end in multiple ways, inspired by modern RPG storytelling.
Our next major milestone is the Lumenshard Overworld Playtest, where all of these discrete systems, from guilds to homesteads, combat to crafting, will finally come together in a cohesive, playable state.
This pre-alpha playtest represents the first vertical slice of Lumenshard as a living world. It will be available first to a select group of players as we make sure everything is working as intended, then expanded to public testing phases.
While not yet the full experience we envision, it will already surpass anything we’ve released before, a true demonstration of how far the project has come, and a solid foundation for everything that follows.
Once the playtest launches, we’ll continue refining, optimizing, and expanding every core system.
Future milestones will focus on:
To our long-time followers, testers, and supporters — thank you.
Your patience and belief in what we’re building mean everything to us.
While this past year has been quieter than usual, it’s been one of incredible focus and progress. We’ve built the foundation that will carry Lumenshard forward, and we’re more confident than ever that this project can deliver something truly special.
If you haven’t already, we invite you to join our Discord to follow development, see behind-the-scenes updates, and be among the first to experience the Overworld Playtest when it arrives.
