Timeline
Lord of Mysteries was in development at SPARK NEXA from the studio's founding in 2021 until its Mainland China launch on August 21, 2026, a little over four years from greenlight to release. This page traces the public-facing milestones along that route. For what the studio has committed to building after launch, see Dev Roadmap.
September 2021: Studio Founded
Xu Jie (徐杰) founded SPARK NEXA / 弹指宇宙 inside Kuaishou Technology. The studio's stated goal was long-cycle PC and mobile titles with AAA production values, and Lord of Mysteries became its flagship project. It started with a few core members; by launch the developer's own store copy described a six-hundred-person team. The project was formally greenlit in February 2022.
February 3, 2023: Codename Revealed
China Literature Group publicly announced a Lord of Mysteries game adaptation under the working title Code:Mystery (代号：诡秘), developed by SPARK NEXA. The licence was brokered through China Literature's rights arm and signed off by author Cuttlefish That Loves Diving. The studio dates the game's first public reveal to this month.
March 14, 2024: 'Tingen's Old Dream' Trailer
First public gameplay reveal. The 'Tingen's Old Dream' (廷根旧梦) cinematic-and-gameplay video showed the city of Tingen under gas-lit fog, an early Beyonder Acting Method ritual, and a Seer-pathway potion-drinking sequence rendered in Unreal Engine 5. The trailer established the MMORPG framing and the Sequence 9 entry rank. It did not use the term open world, which the studio's own published material does not use anywhere this wiki has been able to check.
September 2024: Tokyo Game Show 2024
SPARK NEXA showed Lord of Mysteries at Tokyo Game Show 2024, the game's first international demo appearance. The booth ran guided sessions of an early Tingen build and a stage panel discussing the Acting Method and the Pathway system.
Throughout 2025: Internal Alpha and Pre-Registration
Multiple internal alpha rounds with Kuaishou employees and a small invited tester pool. Public-facing trailers continued quarterly, including a Backlund preview ('Imperial Backlund' / 帝都贝克兰德) and a combat video showing card-throwing Seer abilities and Spectator hypnosis encounters.
September 2025: the studio's official English account posted an in-character tribute to Dunn Smith ('Captain of the Tingen Nighthawks. Fearless warrior against unseen dangers. A silent guardian until the very end. Sleep well, Dunn Smith.'), confirming the character is in the game and signalling that his canonical fate is preserved in the campaign.
November 2025: all-platform pre-registration opened on November 26, and the studio's in-character mascot Susie had taken up residence as a moderator on the official player forum the day before. The campaign ran for nine months and closed above 2.1 million appointments.
January 2026: Crimson Test Sign-Ups Open
January 14: an official 'Tingen' promotional video posted to the studio's WeChat channel, signalling that a public closed beta was imminent. January 15, 09:30 China Standard Time: Crimson Test recruitment opened online, with Susie walking applicants through the survey. Sign-ups closed on February 1, 2026.
February 5, 2026: Crimson Test Goes Live
The first closed beta launched on PC for selected Mainland China testers, and concluded before February 23, ahead of Chinese New Year. Six of the 22 Pathways were playable: Seer, Apprentice, Spectator, Warrior, Bard, and Mystery Pryer. Tester reports surfaced during and after the test, including confirmation of the Mr. Fool grafting mechanic, holy-trinity dungeon composition, and PvP scaling targets.
Spring 2026: Between the Tests
Communication from this period signposted several further CN closed-beta rounds through spring and summer, expected to widen the Pathway roster and push the Sequence cap past 7. In practice there was one more test. Recruitment for the second beta opened on May 22, 2026, and the studio went from there straight to launch. An English-supported global beta that earlier communication had gestured at never opened, and no release outside Mainland China has been announced since.
June 26 to July 5, 2026: Gray Fog Test
The Gray Fog Test ran as the game's first test on all three platforms at once, with PC, iOS, and Android players together, after the PC-only Crimson Test. It was a limited paid deletion test: payment functions were enabled and all data was wiped afterwards. Applicants registered through a recruitment questionnaire. Reports from the period put the tester population in the tens of thousands, on a server named 愚者 (the Fool). Servers closed at 21:00 on July 5 after a finale week that opened the test's capstone raid and its large-scale PvP modes.
Ahead of the test the studio published a dedicated gameplay showcase trailer, 'Welcome to the MMO New World,' distinct from the May recruitment teaser. It highlighted the Unreal Engine 5 city, day-and-night urban exploration, and the Acting Method, and put the wider gameplay on screen for the first time: blended firearm, melee, and Beyonder-ability combat with a third-person shooter mode, traversal by horses, vehicles, and a railway, water-surface dashing, a multi-region world, and side-activity minigames. It arrived as pre-registrations passed 1.5 million in mid-June.
July 10, 2026: Launch Date Confirmed
The studio confirmed August 21, 2026 in a letter that doubled as a retrospective on the beta cycle. It quoted the two pieces of tester feedback the team said had affected it most: one player writing that they had not skipped a single line of the novel-line story, and another saying the Dunn and Daly side quest 美梦成真 had moved them despite never having read the books. The letter also carries the line that when the project started, nobody on the team believed Unreal Engine 5 could run a thousand players on one screen on mobile.
The same letter runs through the details testers had noticed and the team had not expected them to: Old Neil filing an expense claim for things he personally felt ought to be claimable, the 往日之影 sequence collecting Klein Moretti's most-missed moments, Melissa handing over a bouquet of Seville chrysanthemums, Gehrman Sparrow rumours circulating among Tingen NPCs, and a running joke that one of Roselle Gustav's original poems is nothing of the kind. The team's summary of four years of work: turning a novel of more than four million characters into a world that actually exists. See Quests and Story for how that material is structured in game.
August 2026: Launch
Pre-download opened on August 19 at 08:00 and in-game pre-creation at 12:00 the same day. The game topped the domestic app store's pre-order chart during that window. Pre-creation filled fast enough that capacity was raised the same afternoon and further server groups were opened that evening. The first batch of server names had been chosen by a player vote, and the winners included 白银城, Silver City, a place-name lifted from the setting's own history.
Public launch (公测) followed at 10:00 on August 21, 2026 across PC, Android, iOS, and HarmonyOS, on 20 server groups, with a cloud-gaming client running alongside them. The studio reported more than a million new players inside the first hour and over 700,000 online at the same time. A launch-day post from the studio summed the project up in its own words as 经过4年多的研发, after more than four years of development. See Release and Platforms for the launch matrix in detail.
Two team-size figures circulate and they are not the same claim, so this page keeps them apart. The studio's own store copy describes a team of around six hundred people (六百人的团队). Separately, Chinese games media reported on August 25, 2026 that the whole project carried an investment of 1.2 billion yuan and was built by a 624-person team under Xu Jie. That second figure is a reported one and this wiki records it as such. No first-party publication of it is reachable; the same outlet framed the same 1.2 billion yuan a day earlier as research and development spending over close to five years, a framing that also attributed the game to a studio name contradicted by every first-party source. The figure belongs on the page as a reported total project investment, dated August 2026, and not as a development cost, a first-party statement, or a correction to the six-hundred-person figure above.
The launch campaign extended well past the client. A summer gaming festival ran at a Chengdu theme park from August 14 to 16 with a themed float parade, exhibit booths, and merchandise giveaways, and separate mall activations ran across launch weekend. Earlier in August the studio had planted roughly twenty mu of rice as 愚者先生的家乡饭, Mr. Fool's hometown meal, with technical guidance from a provincial rice research institute, tying a real crop to Roselle Gustav's in-fiction agricultural reforms. An official soundtrack album, 《赞美愚者》 (In Praise of the Fool), produced by 阿鲲 (A Kun), was released to Mainland China music streaming services on launch day itself, August 21, 2026.
Codenames in the Shipped Build
The launch client carries the project's internal identifiers in plain sight. The Windows executable is C7-Win64-Shipping.exe, sitting under a C7 folder inside the install directory, and the studio's own download configuration serves a PC launcher named GMZZLauncher_v1.1.43.0.exe and an Android package named GMZZ_1995721_1.1.1_ks_hardening.apk, dated August 4, 2026. C7 and GMZZ are the project's internal codenames rather than public branding, and they are the most reliable way to tell an official build apart from a repackaged one.
After Launch
Post-launch content is planned as a four-year programme built around four stages of Klein Moretti's life, with regions opening in sequence from Tingen outward. That programme, the season structure, and the systems still waiting to ship are covered on Dev Roadmap.
Launch Week, Day by Day
The studio published a ten-day opening plan in advance and then confirmed each unlock on the day it landed. The record below is the confirmed version rather than the plan, and it covers the first six days.
Date | What opened |
|---|---|
August 21 | Public launch at 10:00. A cloud-gaming client went live the same morning, free to play for its first week. Registration volume tripped a capacity circuit-breaker and every server was expanded that evening at 22:00. |
August 22 | The Connections System opened, together with a new dungeon and a twelve-versus-twelve arena bracket. The Railway Tycoon commerce loop was promoted the same day. |
August 23 | Extraordinary Substance aggregation opened alongside another dungeon, and the studio published an attribute progression guide for it the same afternoon. See Extraordinary Substances. A 90 percent appearance discount voucher was announced in response to player feedback. |
August 24 | The level cap rose to 56. The thousand-player battleground opened for the first time, an Old Neil side story from the source-material line went live, and two more Hidden Spaces arrived. The studio also published a reminder that Sequence advancement is reached from the main menu and that 400 potion digestion pays out a claimable reward. See Sequences. |
August 25 to 26 | A short-form official tips series began, covering mobile character creation, appearance discount vouchers, hiding other players, experience farming, and camera controls. |
One operational incident is on the public record. On August 26 the studio published a notice about an exploit in cross-server mail, patched it, and paid every affected player 1,000 bound gold pounds in compensation. Accounts that had used the exploit were suspended for thirty days and had the gains clawed back, with the deduction allowed to run an account's balance negative.