Early Access

Early Access for Monsters & Memories begins on October 1, 2026. The developer's framing of that date is deliberate and worth stating up front: Early Access is treated as the initial launch of the game, not as a paid head start ahead of a later real launch, and the servers that go live will not be reset or wiped afterwards.

Launch timing

The opening hour looks odd from a North American perspective and is chosen on purpose. Two of the people who keep the servers running are awake at 09:00 Bahrain time, which gives the team a full working day to handle problems as players filter in rather than a scramble in the middle of the night.

What is in it

Early Access is a full 1 to 60 leveling path rather than a slice of one. The content set at launch is:

• A level cap of 60, with a leveling path the developer describes as fully fleshed out across the whole range

• 28 Zones in total, counting cityscapes, outdoor zones, dungeon zones, overland dungeons, ocean zones and mini-dungeons

• All 18 Classes

• Nine playable Races: Humans, Gnomes, Deep Gnomes, Dwarves, Wood Elves, Deep Elves, Ogres, Halflings and Goblins

• Four Starting Cities: Night Harbor, The Underdocks, Faelindral and Ail'vorith

• Three regions: Szuur on the surface, Calafrey to the north, and the Deep region running beneath both

• Descent into the Deep, originally planned as the first post-launch module, folded into the launch content set

The move of Descent into the Deep into the launch build is a direct consequence of the schedule change from June to October 2026. The extra months were spent finishing the Deep zones rather than holding them back, which is also why Deep Elves and Deep Gnomes are playable from day one and why the starting city count went from two to four.

One planned zone did not survive that reshuffle. Fields of the Lost was originally slated for launch, and the time was reallocated to a new dungeon called The Blind Midden, near the Deep Elf city of Ail'vorith.

No wipe, and no head start

The standard early access caveat does not apply here, and the developer has pre-empted it explicitly. Servers that go live as part of Early Access will not be reset or wiped. Early Access is described as the initial launch of the game rather than a head start period, and the team states it will not sell head start services in which an additional fee buys earlier entry. Everyone who subscribes starts at the same moment for the same fee.

Players who would rather begin later are served by new servers instead of by wipes. Fresh servers are planned to go live as needed, and once the Early Access development phase is finished, fresh servers launch with the whole content set available from day one. Those later servers may eventually merge with the original ones, depending on population and player feedback.

Character slots

Slot limits change at launch. From September 21, once an account is subscribed, each account can create up to five characters on each server. From October 1 that rises to 25 characters per server, and the 25 includes the five created earlier rather than adding to them.

Getting an account and a client

Accounts are created and managed on the developer's own account site. Registration has been open since long before launch, and there is no third party storefront involved: the client is distributed by the developer's own launcher and patcher, which downloads updates over a content delivery network. The client can be downloaded at any point before October 1, and there will be further updates between now and then, so an early download does not remove the need to patch.

Subscriptions become purchasable on September 21, 2026. The payment taken that day covers October, and the next charge falls on November 1. Details of the fee, the regional pricing position and the other revenue streams are on Subscription and Pricing. Hardware expectations are on System Requirements.

Name reservation

Name reservation went live on September 15, 2026, as part of the account confirmation and server interest poll flow. The first 4,000 names registered on each server are reserved, and each account may reserve one name. Server choice matters here, so see Servers before reserving.

The end of Closed Beta

The Closed Beta closes on Thursday, September 24, 2026, leaving roughly a week of preparation before the servers open. Beta characters do not carry into Early Access; the fresh start happened at the beginning of Beta, and the no-wipe promise attaches to the Early Access servers rather than to the test servers. The full test record is on Development History.

What Early Access is for

The developer is direct that the game is not complete at launch and that this is by design rather than by accident. The stated purpose of Early Access is to expand the game world and its content, not to run an extended testing phase, and subscription and merchandise revenue is intended to let the team pay some of its members and scale art and design production. Development is expected to continue much as it has, if somewhat faster.

There is no published 1.0 date or window. The developer's definition of the finished state is that all of the racial cities are online along with release ready regions to support them, and a new or updated roadmap describing the path there has been promised but, as of September 2026, has not been published.

What is not in Early Access

Each of these is a current absence as of September 2026 rather than a permanent one, unless noted:

• Deep Dwarves, High Elves and Trolls are designed and documented but are not playable at launch

• No roleplay ruleset server. One was on the server interest poll and has been removed from the list for now, which is not the same as cancelled

• No Oceania server. An Oceania option was polled in February 2026 and is not among the six launch Servers

• Module 2 is acknowledged as a concept only. No name, content or date has been published

• Gift subscriptions are planned but are expected to be turned off at launch

• No macOS, Linux or console version. The game is Windows only