Realms opens public playtest with Frontier and Blitz on one site

In Brief:

• The Realms playtest opened Oct. 21 on play.realms.party, with the Frontier and Blitz modes running together on one site.
• Developer djizus said the Loot Realms team has been rebuilding the game since August and posted a breakdown of that work alongside the launch.
• Public commits to the BibliothecaDAO/eternum repository show a new Frontier economy, new contracts and a reworked client merged in the weeks before launch.

The Realms playtest went live Oct. 21 at play.realms.party. Frontier and Blitz are both available on the site.

Developer djizus announced the opening in a post on X titled “Rebuilding @LootRealms, from August to the playtest.”

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

“Time to dive a bit into the last couple months, and shine some light about the work behind the scenes,” djizus said.

One app for every mode

The team has folded its separate game clients into a single Play app. The old /blitz, /frontier, /eternum and /dominion paths now permanently redirect there, according to the project’s GitHub repository.

An open issue in the repo plans one in-game HUD shared by every mode, with each mode adding its own panels. Under that plan, Blitz plays as an RTS, Frontier as a roguelite and Eternum as a 4X.

The team hasn’t finished that piece. A pull request merged Oct. 16 says the developers tried a HUD redesign and went back to the classic sidebar HUD for now.

Frontier gets a new economy

Most of the visible rebuild work centers on Frontier. A pull request dated Oct. 7 records an “owner ruling” that changes the mode’s economy: production takes no inputs, buildings produce indefinitely and wheat is spent only when players raise and move armies.

A follow-up change updated the client and the test bots to match. Army creation, reinforcement and guard recruitment now show the wheat cost and disable the action when a player doesn’t have enough.

The redesigned Frontier contracts shipped in release shard-v0.6.0. Because they changed the stored data format, the old shard couldn’t be upgraded in place, so the team stood up a fresh staging chain on Oct. 8.

A separate Oct. 9 change lets players sign their own actions. Its notes say Blitz keeps the contract’s 24-player roster limit, while Frontier can hold all 96 players in a single season.

Load tests and a Blitz playtest

The team ran a Blitz playtest Oct. 13. Follow-up fixes merged that day moved production and stamina from tick-based timing to elapsed seconds. Blitz stamina now settles at one point every two seconds and Eternum at one point every three, with production keeping two-second blocks.

A larger pass on Frontier and Blitz merged Oct. 16. Blitz now waits for its full roster before starting and keeps its five-minute freeze. Frontier limits players to one cancellable next order, and exploration costs went up.

That same change reported load-test results. The system processed 2,000 seats across 84 games in 54.9 seconds, with serial state-root work named as the bottleneck. Median outcome visibility in the Herald indexer dropped from 9.4 seconds to 1.5 seconds, and p95 fell from 11.3 seconds to 2.8 seconds.

Contract execution improved 8.2% to 8.9% on measured 24-seat games. All 24 CI checks passed, along with 1,436 Cairo tests.

How Blitz works

Blitz matches run exactly 60 minutes, split into six-minute Eternum Days, according to the game’s documentation. Each player starts with three Realms set in a triangle, and human and AI agent players compete under the same rules.

Matches are sorted into four brackets: Recruit, Gladiator, Warrior and Elite. Recruit is free. Gladiator and Warrior charge $LORDS entry fees that feed prize pools, and Elite requires an NFT invite earned in the Warrior bracket.

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