Realms playtest goes live, putting Frontier and Blitz on a single site

In Brief:

• Realms opened its playtest on Oct. 21 at play.realms.party, where the Frontier and Blitz modes run side by side on one site.
• According to developer djizus, the Loot Realms team has been rebuilding the game since August, and a breakdown of that work went up with the launch.
• Commits in the public BibliothecaDAO/eternum repository show a new Frontier economy, new contracts and a reworked client merged in the weeks leading up to launch.

Players could get into the Realms playtest at play.realms.party from Oct. 21. The site hosts both Frontier and Blitz.

djizus, one of the developers, announced the launch on X in a post titled “Rebuilding @LootRealms, from August to the playtest.”

“Today the Realms playtest opens on https://play.realms.party, with Frontier and Blitz together,” djizus wrote.

In the same post, djizus added: “Time to dive a bit into the last couple months, and shine some light about the work behind the scenes.”

A single app for all modes

The project’s GitHub repository shows the team has merged its separate game clients into one Play app. Anyone visiting the old /blitz, /frontier, /eternum and /dominion paths now gets a permanent redirect to it.

An open issue in the repo lays out plans for a single in-game HUD that every mode shares, with each mode layering its own panels on top. In that design, Blitz plays as an RTS, Frontier as a roguelite and Eternum as a 4X.

That work is still unfinished. In a pull request merged Oct. 16, the developers wrote that they had tried a HUD redesign and returned to the classic sidebar HUD for the time being.

A new economy for Frontier

Frontier gets most of the rebuild work you can see. An Oct. 7 pull request logs an “owner ruling” that changes how the mode’s economy works. Production no longer needs inputs and buildings keep producing with no end point. Players only spend wheat when they raise and move armies.

A later change brought the client and the test bots in line with this. When players create an army, reinforce one or recruit guards, they now see the wheat cost, and the action is disabled if they can’t afford it.

The redesigned Frontier contracts arrived in release shard-v0.6.0. They changed the format of stored data, so the old shard couldn’t be upgraded in place. The team launched a fresh staging chain on Oct. 8 instead.

Another change, dated Oct. 9, lets players sign their own actions. Its notes say Blitz keeps the contract’s 24-player roster limit, and Frontier can fit all 96 players into one season.

Load testing and a Blitz playtest

On Oct. 13 the team ran a Blitz playtest. Fixes merged the same day moved production and stamina from tick-based timing to elapsed seconds. Stamina in Blitz now settles at one point every two seconds and in Eternum at one point every three, while production stays on two-second blocks.

A bigger pass covering Frontier and Blitz was merged Oct. 16. Blitz now holds off starting until its roster is full and keeps its five-minute freeze. In Frontier, players can queue only one next order, which can be cancelled, and exploration now costs more.

The same change included load-test figures. The system handled 2,000 seats across 84 games in 54.9 seconds, and serial state-root work was identified as the bottleneck. In the Herald indexer, median outcome visibility fell from 9.4 seconds to 1.5 seconds, and p95 went from 11.3 seconds to 2.8 seconds.

On measured 24-seat games, contract execution got 8.2% to 8.9% faster. All 24 CI checks passed, as did 1,436 Cairo tests.

How Blitz plays

The game’s documentation says every Blitz match lasts exactly 60 minutes, broken into six-minute Eternum Days. Players begin with three Realms arranged in a triangle. Human players and AI agents compete under identical rules.

There are four brackets: Recruit, Gladiator, Warrior and Elite. Recruit costs nothing to enter. Gladiator and Warrior take $LORDS entry fees that go into prize pools. To enter Elite, players need an NFT invite, which they earn in the Warrior bracket.

The Oct. 16 update gives its scope as a leaner client, Effect Schema, three r186 and a free test Blitz.