Floor 1 is the opening area of Echoes of Aincrad. Every player character starts here, in the shadow of the Town of Beginnings, which acts as the floor's hub.
Major Locations
Town of Beginnings. The floor's hub and the starting point of every player.
Tolbana. A smaller settlement on the first floor.
Horunka Village. A small village on Floor 1.
Medai Village. Another first-floor village.
Floor Boss
The floor ends with a confirmed encounter against Illfang the Kobold Lord, the first floor boss of Aincrad.
Floor 1 as the Opening Hub
Floor 1 of Aincrad is the mandatory starting point of Echoes of Aincrad. Every player character spawns into the Town of Beginnings when the servers open, regardless of the difficulty setting picked from the difficulty modes menu, which means the floor doubles as both the game's tutorial hub and the shared memory point for the 10,000 players who end up trapped inside the castle. The town walls frame every early scene in the main story and act as the line between the first safe area and the dangerous overworld beyond.
Gathering After the Announcement
The town is also where the 10,000 trapped players first gather once the death game is announced and the log-out option is revealed to be missing. The announcement cutscene plays out from this central hub, and in the moments afterward the crowd that fills the plaza is the first large-scale picture the player is given of the scale of what has happened. The Town of Beginnings is therefore not just a spawn point in gameplay terms: it is the stage where the premise of the entire campaign is established.
Reunion with Iori
The protagonist's reunion with Iori also happens inside the walls of this town. At launch every player's custom beta avatar is stripped away and their real appearance is restored, so when the two former beta acquaintances meet again here they are seeing each other's true faces for the first time. The scene tells the player who their main partner will be for the journey to come, and it does so in the same location where the trapping announcement has just landed.
A Month at the Inn
Before the party ever steps past the town gates, the group spends roughly a month lodged at the inn in the Town of Beginnings. That stretch is spent weighing a single decision: stay in the safe zone and hope for rescue, or press outward and start climbing the floors. The developers have pointed to the end of that month as the moment the real story of the game begins, because the decision to leave is what turns the cast from survivors into floor-clearers and sets up every event that follows.
Outside the Town Walls
Once the party does leave, Floor 1's overworld opens up into a connected stretch of countryside and ruins that the player unlocks piece by piece. Smaller settlements dot the map, with Horunka Village among the named stops, and further out the floor holds the labyrinth tower where Illfang the Kobold Lord waits as the raid boss at the top. Between those fixed points sits a patchwork of hazards, quest hooks and Safe Areas. Each Safe Area has to be unlocked through exploration or by completing the quest that gates it, and once it is opened it works as a respawn-and-restock point that makes the next leg of the floor easier to approach. The overall shape of Floor 1 is therefore a walled starting town, a ring of smaller settlements, and a long winding path that ends at the labyrinth.
Content Scale of Floor 1
The developers have specifically addressed the concern that a game scoped to only two floors might feel short. Floor 1 is densely packed with content in its own right, and together with Floor 2 the pair supplies roughly 30 hours of main story plus another 20 hours of side content on top of postgame activities. A sizeable share of that runtime sits on Floor 1 thanks to its role as the opening stretch, the tutorial-heavy safe zone, and the home of the first raid tower, which in practice makes the Town of Beginnings and its surrounding overworld the single region the player spends the most time in across the whole campaign.
See Also
For the detailed breakdown of the town's interior, the Main Terminal, the shops and the inn itself, see the dedicated town article. For the combat mechanics used during the first tutorial fights in and around the town plaza, see the combat system overview.