Monsters & Memories has been developed in public since 2020, and the developer has published numbered written updates throughout, 51 of them numbered up to 52 by mid 2026, alongside announcement posts for schedule changes and test results. What follows is the dated record drawn from those posts. Studio background, funding and team composition are on Niche Worlds Cult.
2020: origin
The project came out of livestream discussions in the second half of 2020. Pre-production began in July, the initial team formed in August, and a first playable build existed by September, which the team treats as its anniversary marker. The first written update, published October 9, 2020, describes the first zone work: the earliest versions of Night Harbor and Shaded Dunes, modelled around the turn of September into October. The project was called Project_N at the time. The second update, a day later, put a deconstruction of the intended player experience onto a public board, alongside a worldbuilding board.
2021: proof of concept, company, name
March 2021 brought the first commissioned concept art and a public commitment to developing in the open. Zone lighting, the skybox and the world's moons followed, with the team stating its working principle as gameplay before beauty across roughly five greybox zones. The first human model arrived in late March and set the art direction: low poly geometry with a higher fidelity hand painted texture treatment, with placeholder gnome and ogre models derived from it.
The company was formalised on May 1, 2021 as Niche Worlds Cult. A technical overview later that month disclosed the stack: Unity, client and server communicating over reliable UDP, a client acting as a viewer of server state, a pseudo entity component system on the server, independent zones on commodity hardware, and no plan to shard or instance zones. On June 1, 2021 the project took its public name, and the founding group was named.
The rest of the year was systems work. A single update in July 2021 listed NPC spawning with day and night variants, a faction framework with consider messages, merchants and currency, bags, weight and inventory limits, food and water as real constraints, tradeskill containers and recipes, a skill and spell book with a hotbar, spell scrolls, character creation for all races and classes, per race and class starting locations, starting items, readable notes, zoning and sandstorm weather. By December the team had added five members and shipped banking, AI controlled boats, a breath bar and drowning, doors and locks, fall damage and death, melee hit stun and rear attack penalties, NPC flee behaviour and spellcasting, a pet and charm system, player corpses and naked corpse runs, right click looting, trainers and status effects. Several of those systems are still visible in the shipping game, which is why Death Penalty and Items and Equipment read the way they do.
2022: playable characters and the first external testers
Classes were first revealed publicly in January 2022, with concept art, to a team of nine. February brought playable human, ogre and gnome models with visible equipment, per race armour scaling and the first skeleton NPC, and added audio and music to the team. March saw a decision that persisted: starting attribute values were rescaled from a range of 70 to 90 per attribute down to 7 to 10. The same month included the first serious load test, 500 simulated users in a single spot, and the creation of the Tomb of the Last Wyrmsbane.
April 2022 added fishing, foraging and harvest nodes, reworked the combat formula for scaling, and introduced resurrection with per class resurrection sickness. Later in the year came character customisation, gear attachment points for backpacks, quivers, pouches, arrows, lanterns and torches, a public test milestone checklist, and a mount model. A friends and family playtest was announced for December, with an explicit caution attached that it should not be read as the game nearing alpha or completion.
The two year retrospective, published September 30, 2022, put total spending to that point at just over 20,000 US dollars, paid out of pocket, and recorded the decision to build everything from scratch rather than assemble purchased assets.
2023: public testing begins
Friends and family testing ran from December 2022 into 2023 and produced several hundred bug reports through an in-game reporting tool. The team described entering a hybrid mode of new development alongside live operations, a posture it has kept ever since.
The first public stress test ran on April 28 and 29, 2023, after slipping from an end of March target. Registrations passed 2,000. Night Harbor held more than 500 concurrent players in a single zone without crashing and degraded significantly around 1,000 in zone. Two more servers were opened mid test and three server configurations were trialled. The main outcome was a round of netcode refactoring and positional packet optimisation.
The rest of the year was content and infrastructure: Tel Ekir and Sungreet Strand surfaced as zones, a zone template sped up new zone setup, NPC AI was documented as a finite state machine, and halfling and goblin models arrived. A surprise open stress test ran on July 4. In November the project moved to a newer Unity release and adopted Wwise for audio, ahead of a short stress test on November 11 and a 34 hour public playtest on December 9 and 10. Only each account's highest level character was retained at the end of that test.
2024: the Early Access commitment
January 2024 produced a detailed technical postmortem of the late 2023 tests. FTP patch distribution had saturated available bandwidth and the launcher carried a hardcoded endpoint, so patching moved to content delivery network downloads over HTTP. NPC pathing, awareness and aggro were found to be running per frame, and unoptimised city lighting combined with 500 or more players and thousands of shadow casting corpses had wrecked frame rates. The team wrote headless bot clients so high player count load tests could be repeated on demand.
In March 2024 the Early Access section of the developer's site went up, the first public commitment to a launch timeline. Through the year the team ran further stress tests and a June playtest, articulated the build lock discipline it still follows, began concept work on the gods that would later name the launch Servers, and rebuilt the user interface on a new in-house framework across more than 50 screens. In November 2024 came the first public statement of the launch year: the work planned for 2025 was framed around being ready for Early Access in 2026.
Year end figures for 2024 recorded more than 10,000 commits to the code repository and eight public testing sessions run during the year.
2025: alpha, then the road to beta
March 2025 brought the first published expense report, 104,725 US dollars spent from 2020 through 2024, and a roadmap update naming a Q1 2026 Early Access target. Six people were hired, including the project's first tradeskill designer. An open playtest ran April 11 to 14 and saw the first use of the petition system for in-game support tickets.
Player housing arrived in the spring of 2025, with groundwork for personal, shared, guild and commercial spaces such as shops, taverns and inns. Concept work began on Keepers Bight, Evershade Weald and Rothold, and on an unannounced expedition focused zone that would later ship as part of Early Access.
Test scale climbed steadily through the year. A three day playtest at the end of June 2025 drew 5,592 unique accounts and 1,274 peak concurrent players, at an average of 8.22 hours played per account, holding more than 500 players in Night Harbor at once. A five day community alpha test in late July peaked at 1,710 concurrent. A seven day playtest ran in September on servers named Relle, Krivea and Eltindra, which were test servers and are not launch servers. A ten day playtest starting November 1 peaked at 1,884 concurrent players with staff accounts excluded, the highest published concurrency figure for the project.
In late September 2025 the team walked back a beta start date that had been described in streams as September 30, 2025, and named the work still gating beta: full passes on every class kit, the remaining movement abilities, starting traits and stat points, balance work on pets, charm, group size, experience and difficulty, plus tradeskills, itemisation, religion, commerce, factions, interface, optimisation and stability.
On December 23, 2025 the first fully concrete schedule was published: closed beta from March 1, 2026, running two months, a build lock on May 1, and Early Access starting June 1, 2026. The same post launched the beta opt-in system, which had 4,015 sign-ups at the time of posting.
2026: beta, the slip, and launch preparation
February 2026 reported spending of around 142,000 US dollars covering 2020 to 2025, published three roadmaps, and grew the beta opt-in pool from 4,015 to 11,023. It also extended beta testing from two months to three while keeping the June 2026 Early Access date, and set out the closed beta rules: one fresh start player versus environment server and one player versus player server, no boxing, a crackdown on botting and automation, limited game master support, and no selling of invites.
On April 20, 2026 the launch date moved from June 1 to October 1, 2026. The additional time was spent folding Descent into the Deep into the launch content set, which took the starting city count from two to four and made Deep Elves and Deep Gnomes playable at launch. A full class design review followed on April 28, with further class revamps continuing through the beta patches into September.
June 2026 put spending at just over 160,000 US dollars through May, reported an open playtest running May 29 to June 7 whose metrics tracked closely with previous tests, and reset the server interest poll with a different option set. September brought an account validation email to every registered account ahead of a database cleanup, and then, on September 15, the final pre-launch post: name reservation live, billing and the merchandise store opening September 21 at 9am Eastern, the closed beta closing September 24, servers opening October 1 at 09:00 Bahrain time, and a team of 50 volunteers. The same post recorded that the developer had been running live servers for 8,000 to 12,000 unique players per month through closed alpha and beta for most of the year.
Schedule changes
The launch date moved more than once, and the older dates still circulate. Each row below was accurate when published and is superseded now.
Superseded statement | When it was current | Position as of September 2026 |
|---|---|---|
Ready for Early Access in 2026, no month given | November 2024 | Year correct, month is October |
Early Access starting target of Q1 2026 | March 2025, restated September 2025 | Superseded |
Beta begins September 30, 2025 | Described in streams, corrected September 2025 | Beta began March 1, 2026 |
Beta runs two months, March to April 2026 | December 2025 | Extended to three months, then run through September 24, 2026 |
Build lock May 1, 2026 | December 2025 | Superseded |
Build lock September 1, 2026 | Earlier 2026 announcement | Moved to September 15, 2026 |
Early Access begins June 1, 2026 | December 2025, restated February 2026 | Moved to October 1, 2026 |
Only two starting locations | Material before April 2026 | Four, listed on Starting Cities |
Deep Elves and Deep Gnomes are a post-launch module race | Material before April 2026 | Playable at Early Access launch |
Descent into the Deep is the first post-launch module | The developer's own earlier FAQ text | Folded into the Early Access content set |
Fields of the Lost is a launch zone | September 2025 | Cut from launch, traded for The Blind Midden |
The merchandise store opens with or after the game | April 2026 | Opens September 21, 2026, ten days before launch |
Total development spend of 142,000 US dollars | February 2026 | Just over 160,000 US dollars through May 2026 |
A team of 49 | April 2026 | 50 as of September 2026 |
Server interest poll options including a roleplay and an Oceania server | February 2026 | Poll reset with different options. Neither made the launch six |
Testing history
External testing ran for nearly four years before launch and was free throughout. No subscription was ever required to take part, which the developer frames as having given everyone a chance to try the game before paying anything.
Date | Test | Scale or result |
|---|---|---|
December 2022 into 2023 | Friends and family | First external testers. Several hundred bug reports through an in-game reporting tool |
April 28 to 29, 2023 | First public stress test | Over 2,000 registrations. Held 500 or more concurrent in one zone, degraded near 1,000 in zone. Drove a netcode refactor |
July 4, 2023 | Surprise open stress test | Unannounced |
November 11, 2023 | Stress test | Roughly two to three hours. Exposed the FTP patching bottleneck and the cost of city lighting and shadows |
December 9 to 10, 2023 | 34 hour public playtest | Patching moved to content delivery network downloads afterwards. Only the highest level character per account was retained |
June 2024 | Stress tests and a playtest | Response described as better than expected |
July to December 2024 | Further stress tests | Eight public testing sessions across 2024 in total |
April 11 to 14, 2025 | Open playtest | First use of the petition system for support tickets |
June 27, 2025 | Three day playtest | 5,592 unique accounts, 1,274 peak concurrent, 8.22 average hours per account, 500 or more players in one zone |
July 23 to 28, 2025 | Community alpha test, five days | 1,710 peak concurrent |
September 2025 | Seven day playtest | Ran on test servers Relle, Krivea and Eltindra |
October 4 to 5, 2025 | Stress test | Preparation for the November playtest |
November 1, 2025 | Ten day playtest | 1,884 peak concurrent, staff accounts excluded. The highest published figure |
December 27 to 29, 2025 | Open playtest | Final open test before closed beta |
March 1, 2026 | Closed beta begins | Fresh start. One player versus environment and one player versus player server, no boxing |
May 29 to June 7, 2026 | Open playtest | Metrics tracked closely with previous playtests |
Through 2026 | Live closed alpha and beta servers | 8,000 to 12,000 unique players per month for most of the year |
September 24, 2026 | Closed beta ends | One week before Early Access |
The beta lottery
Access to the closed beta that began in March 2026 was handled by an opt-in pool and a weekly lottery. The pool was joined through the developer's community hub and grew from 4,015 sign-ups in December 2025 to 11,023 by late February 2026.
200 people were drawn per week for ten weeks, adding roughly 4,000 testers, about 30 percent of the opt-in pool
Each winner received a guest invite for one friend
Being present on a stream or in chat was not required. Notification was by email only
The 2,000 closed alpha testers transitioned into closed beta automatically
Other routes in remained open, including giveaways during streams
Selling invites was prohibited, boxing was disabled, botting and automation were cracked down on, and alpha testers were asked not to spoil high level content
The February 2026 invite email incident
On February 27, 2026, the first batch of beta lottery invite emails exposed the email addresses of all 200 selected accounts to one another. The developer was made aware in the early hours of February 28 and published a disclosure on March 1. The stated cause was an error in the email sending configuration that was not caught in testing, and unopened emails could not be recalled.
The remediation described at the time was that legal counsel was engaged on data protection compliance, the email service was changed, everyone affected was contacted with a support address, and new testing protocols were put in place for future invite batches. The incident was disclosed by the developer within two days and is a closed matter rather than an open issue.
Sources of dated material
Two of the developer's own pages are stale by its own admission and should not be read as current. The roadmap page carries a note that it will be rebuilt in a new format before October 2026, and the development history page on the developer's site is an image gallery whose most recent timeline board covers 2024. Dates on either should be checked against the newer written updates. For the state of the game at launch rather than the road to it, see Early Access.