LivingPW devlog (en)

Gui Mu, and the rest of the board

2026-10-29T00:00:00Z

On the dungeon scoreboard one line has been embarrassing for days: Gui Mu, about fifty deaths a run. On 29 October we went through it properly. This is what Gui Mu asks of a party, why our test parties kept failing it, and what else changed on the board that we have not written about yet.

As always: these are test parties, characters raised to the right level and geared for the job on the old shared realm before the fresh start.

What Gui Mu asks of you

Gui Mu is a defence. Your party stands at the God's Eye and protects the Widow's spirit while waves come in, about twenty monsters at a time, every couple of minutes. Each gate ends with a boss, and once a boss is engaged a fifteen-minute timer runs. Lose the spirit or run out the clock, and the run fails.

The waves are level 150. You do not beat them with your own skills. You beat them with auras: you earn Celebeans during the run, buy auras with them, five hundred beans an aura, and the God's Eye with its area hits does the heavy killing. Gui Mu is an economy as much as a fight.

Forty-five runs, zero good ones

On 29 October the test parties ran Gui Mu 45 times. The median run cost 48 deaths. Not one run stayed at three or fewer. Every member died about ten times.

The deaths looked like a combat problem. After dying, a member came back exactly where the wave was standing by then, and died again within five seconds, with 18 to 39 monsters within ten metres of the tank. Rallying back together did not help: five or six characters against thirty or forty level-150 monsters is not a fight.

But the real question was why the waves were still there. The answer: our parties bought no aura at all, or one, and late.

Why there were no beans

Two things, both invisible from inside a fight.

The big bean quests were closed to everyone. The best source of beans is a bonus quest you take for a Bean Sprout: 360, 520, 680 or 880 beans depending on the tier, up to four per party. In the game data we run, the first three tiers' bonus quests require level 150. Every member got "Insufficient Level", and the party went into the waves without its bean income. The owner agreed to open them; the change is already applied on our test realm, and the main realms get it with a later update, together with a small client fix, because the client checks the level too.

The valley was empty when our runner arrived. The valley monsters that drop beans, and the Garden's NPC, appear only five minutes after the waves start. Our bean runner went there two or three minutes in, found nothing, and came back. Since 28 October almost no run killed a single valley monster. Now the runner goes at the right time; the first run with the fix killed 8 of them, brought back 193 beans and found the Garden.

Earlier the same day two smaller things went too: in the higher tiers the party could stand for up to 48 minutes waiting for a boss it did not recognise as one, and the lure that is supposed to pull a waiting monster walked past them without pulling anything.

Where Gui Mu stands

Still not a single run at three deaths or fewer. What changed is that the parties can now earn the beans the instance is built around. Buying auras in time, and a better place to come back after a death, are next. That is days of work, not hours.

The rest of the board

Things that moved and were not in a diary yet:

Dungeon	What happened
51: Secret Frostcover Grounds	20 of 23 deaths in one batch came from one boss's 15-metre area hit, and the Cleric was standing at 14 metres. Healers now keep out of a boss's reach.
79	First clear, at levels 80–84, with no deaths.
Cave of Sadistic Glee (80–95)	Both bosses killed in four runs, no deaths.
99: Seat of Torment and Abaddon	The first door opens only when one particular guard dies; the parties now know which. A healer fell four hundred metres when a pull ignored a member on another level; fixed. The party now reaches the last boss and wipes to its adds.
Twilight Temple, acts II and III	You do not enter an act through a portal: you claim a quest standing in a box in the corridor. Earlier parties did the whole chain and then nobody walked into the box. On 29 October a party entered act III on the first try, all five, and started clearing with 12 kills and no deaths.
Lunar Glade (95+)	Entry, team quest and teleport work for all six. The first fights went badly, six deaths in 93 seconds, healer first: the members walked in with the health they had when they logged in. Now the leader tops everyone up before each pull.

None of this is finished, and some of it will look worse before it looks better: a dungeon nobody could enter has no deaths on the board. The target stays the same everywhere: three deaths or fewer.

A faction with room for you

2026-10-29T00:00:00Z

On the old shared realm the AI residents did something we had hoped for: they founded factions on their own, picked names and mottos, recruited and handed out ranks through the game's own faction system. By the end there were 14 of them with 639 members.

They also did something we had not thought through. Every faction filled itself up with residents, to the last seat. A person who wanted to join one would have found a full roster and a lot of very polite AI. A faction full of AI is not a faction you can belong to.

So for the new realms we rewrote the faction rules from scratch. The English and the Russian realm run the same rules; only the words differ.

Built and tested

These parts are written, covered by tests and go to the realms with their first days:

Fewer, more different factions. The number grows with the population, about one for every 22 residents online, between 4 and 18 per realm. At their founding, some factions also pick what they want to be: a big faction that aims for the top, a mid-sized one, or a small circle of friends. Not every resident has to join one; loners are allowed.
Seats held for people. Every faction stops recruiting AI residents before it is full and keeps at least six seats, or 15 % of its size, for people.
Officers with jobs. Officers are no longer just the oldest members. A faction names a raid leader, a diplomat, a recruiter and a quartermaster by what they actually did: runs led, coins given, people brought in, members defended. When someone is promoted, the announcement says why.
Words that fit the realm. Names, mottos, titles and the way recruiters talk are written separately for each language: the Russian realm sounds like a Russian server from 2009, the English realm like PWI.
Money stays in the faction. Coins from a faction's fund never go to a person. Nobody can make AI residents pay for their faction and walk away with the fund.

Designed, next

Joining is easy, spam is not. To join, whisper inv or + to an officer; the invitation comes when you are both online. Uninvited invitations are limited to one per person per faction per day, and two per person per day across all factions.
People can lead. A person in an AI faction can call it to help with a boss and lead its residents. AI residents never take a faction away from a person who leads it.
Faction evenings. Programmes for faction members happen in each realm's prime time: on the Russian realm 20:00–24:00 Moscow time, on the English realm 19:00–23:00 UTC.
No Territory War in the first month. A new realm needs factions with history before they fight over land. We will test the war on a separate test realm, with AI residents only, before it opens.
A faction directory on this site. Name, level, members, open seats, level range and what the faction is about, without any character names.

What we will watch

Whether people actually get in. If the first person who whispers inv waits three evenings for an answer, the rules have failed, however good they look here. Tell us: max@livingpw.com, or the community.

Sixteen of sixteen

2026-10-29T00:00:00Z

Not everything in a living world is a dungeon. Some of the best memories of a classic server are small scheduled things: the race, the quiz, the evening someone shouts that an event is starting. If AI residents only grind and quest, the world feels like a factory. So on 29 October we gave them a race.

The race

The Snake Isle race runs twice a day by server time. From level 40 you take Take the Race while the entry is open, get sent to Snake Isle and have 30 minutes to run three laps around it, past every checkpoint. Finish, and you get the Dungeon Race Award and some experience: 12.5k at our quest rate of ×2.5.

It is a solo event, so it tests something different from a dungeon squad: can a resident find its own way around an island it has never seen, under a clock, without getting stuck on a rock?

The start line that led nowhere

Sixteen residents took the race at the entry. The quest accepted, the teleport went through, and nobody moved.

The island was asleep. On our realms some event and dungeon maps start only when they are needed and stop again when they have been empty for a while, so they cost nothing when nobody plays there. Snake Isle had been started earlier that day, stood empty for twelve minutes and was switched off. When the race opened, the teleport to it completed with no island to arrive on.

For this run we put the sixteen racers on the island ourselves. The lasting fix wakes the island a minute and a half before the entry opens, and checks again just before the start, so the next start line leads somewhere.

The race itself

Then they ran, and every one of them finished:

16 of 16 completed three laps and got the Dungeon Race Award;
the fastest took 11 minutes 46 seconds, the slowest 16 minutes 58 seconds, well inside the 30;
every checkpoint of every lap was confirmed by the server, not just by the racers' own accounts.

Sixteen different times is the part we like most. A race where everyone arrives in the same second would look like a script. These looked like sixteen people who each took a slightly different line.

What is still rough

The winner is supposed to get a note for the ride home afterwards; that step did not answer yet. It changes nothing about the reward, but it is on the list. And a race is only fun with someone to race: when people join the realms, residents should line up next to you, not instead of you.

Other events are next: the ones that need a group, the ones that need a quiz answer, and the ones that are just an excuse to stand in one place with a hundred others. The roadmap keeps the honest labels.

The city that would not open

2026-10-29T00:00:00Z

Frostcovered City is the top of the 1.3.9 world: a frozen city at level 88 and up, walked through gate by gate, with bosses of 700,000 to 1.5 million health. If AI residents are ever going to take you there, they have to learn it first. On 28 and 29 October a test squad of six went in. These were test characters raised to level 95 and dressed for the job on the old shared realm, not residents of the new realms, who start at level 1.

This is what happened, in order.

A city that waits

The first squad walked in and found nothing. No guards, no monsters, no first gatekeeper. Frostcovered City does not start by itself: someone has to take the quest Open the Gate from Lin Yan at the entrance. The leader takes it, and every teammate gets a quest of their own.

On our realm the teammates' half came back "Insufficient Level" for everyone. The cause was ours. When we cut the world back to 1.3.9, the filter that closes later content had locked the team half of some quests and left the leader's half open. It was not only this one: 52 quests that need a team had the same split. That night the filter learned to keep a quest's team half with it, and the city has started every time since.

Gates you cannot see

The city is a chain of halls separated by gates, and each gate opens when its Glacial Shade dies. From the inside, a closed gate is just an invisible wall. The residents' route planning saw only walls, looked for another way, and found one: down. In one run five of the six fell into a 33-metre pit under the first Shade.

Now a gate counts as open once its Shade is dead, and the squad walks through it like a player would.

A tank that was too thin

The next wall was real. In the second Shade's hall the squad lost five members in 40 seconds, the tank first. The tank had 7,637 health at level 90 against guards of level 88. Our own minimum for a tank in this city is 14,000, almost twice that.

So the squad was rebuilt for the city: level 95, gold gear from Twilight Temple, a tank with enough health to hold. With that, all four Shades of the first stage went down without a single death, three runs in a row.

A boss that drops a bomb

Behind the four Shades waits the first boss, Thunderclaw, with 689,000 health. Every so often it drops a soul orb on the squad. The orb cannot be attacked, charges for two seconds and burns everyone within 35 metres for about 5,000.

Without dodging, the result was always the same: five dead three or four seconds after each orb. Two runs ended with 18 and 21 deaths.

Then the residents learned to step 20 metres away when an orb appears. The next run killed Thunderclaw after a fight of about 14 minutes, with four deaths in the whole city. Two of those four ran straight off the edge of the floor while dodging, so now they pick the best of eight directions on level ground. A few runs later the squad cleared all four Shades and Thunderclaw with no deaths at all.

Where it stands

Part	State
Starting the city	works every time
Stage 1: four Glacial Shades	no deaths
Thunderclaw	killed seven times, the best run with no deaths
Stage 2: the High Priestess and three more Shades	two Shades down, six deaths on the way to the third
Stages 3 to 10	not reached yet

Our target for every dungeon is three deaths or fewer per run (why). The first stage of Frostcovered City meets it. The rest of the city does not yet, and the residents of the new realms will need a long time to get there anyway. When they do, they should know the way.

Two thousand first evenings

2026-10-29T00:00:00Z

On 29 October the English realm got its population: 2,000 new AI residents, each with a name, a personality and an evening of its own, all at level 1. The first arrived in the early afternoon; by the evening every one of them had logged in at least once.

Then we watched an hour of it, from 16:07 to 17:07 UTC, with about 460 of them online.

One hour in numbers

2,987 level-ups, 10,849 quests handed in, 25,636 monsters killed.
22 deaths. The worst killers were Courageous Undines (9 deaths), Foxwing Supremes (6) and Mutant Cactopods (2).
Level 12 was the highest anyone had reached after about three and a half hours; half of those on the map were at level 6 or below.

That is the pace of a fresh server's first evening: fast levels, plenty of quests, very few deaths, everybody still in the starting zones.

Where they crowded

Everyone starts in the same few places, so they meet on the same first quests. Within 200 metres of one another we counted:

79 residents of levels 1 to 9 on Offering Help;
66 on Arcane Remedy;
60 on First Time to the City.

If you played on launch day of any server, you know the picture: a crowd around the quest monsters and a queue for every kill. Arrivals spread over hours help; a crowd on the first quests is still what a new realm looks like.

Who fell behind

The classes did not level at the same speed. In levels per hour:

Class	Levels per hour
Barbarian	7.4
Blademaster	7.3
Wizard	7.0
Cleric	5.5
Venomancer	5.5
Archer	5.1

The slowest group, archers at levels 1 to 9, levelled at 68 % of the best one. Every class should keep up with the others, so that every class is around at every level when you look for a group. That is one of the things we check before the beta opens.

What the chat sounded like

4,639 lines from 1,044 residents in that hour. Nobody repeated the same line more than three times. Not every line was a good one, though: in the crowds many residents said nearly the same thing at once, and more than a quarter of all lines were the kind we count as defects. Talking like a player is about the work on that.

A rehearsal

This afternoon was a rehearsal: the realm starts over before testers arrive, residents included, so everyone begins together. What it showed stays with us: the first quests get crowded, barbarians and blademasters run ahead, and archers, venomancers and clerics need help catching up. The live numbers for the English realm are on the living world page.

Map data out of phase

2026-10-29T00:00:00Z

On 29 October we logged in to both realms with the new client packs, the ones testers will download, from an ordinary Windows PC. The character loaded, the town was there, the residents were chatting. And in chat, every time:

Map data out of phase with the server's

A message like that is the last thing you want a new player to see at their first login. It sounds as if the world is about to fall apart.

What the client is checking

The client and the server each keep a copy of the world's regions: the named areas of the map, their borders and the safe zones. When you log in, the server tells the client which version of that file it uses, and the client compares it with its own. If they differ, it warns you.

The "version" is simply the date the file was made:

our 1.3.9 client packs carry region data dated 19 May 2008;
the server announced region data dated 18 February 2013, the date of the 1.4.6 file.

Why they differed

When we moved the world back to the 1.3.9 map, we cut the server's regions down to the 1.3.9 ones: the southern lands of later versions are closed. The contents matched the client. But the file kept the date it had before, from 1.4.6, so the server kept announcing 2013 to a client from 2008.

Nothing was actually broken. The areas and borders you play in were already the 1.3.9 ones. Only the label was wrong.

Why it took a person to notice

Only the game client checks this date and prints the warning. The AI residents had been playing on the 1.3.9 map for a day without seeing it; the line only appeared when a real client logged in with the new packs.

That is the reason for the test logins from a real PC before anyone is invited, and the reason we will keep asking testers to report anything odd, even a harmless-looking chat line.

The fix

The server now announces the same date as the client. On the English realm the warning was gone at the next login. The Russian realm takes the fix with its next restart. Our map tool now carries the client's date over by itself, so the next map change cannot bring the old one back.

If you ever see this line on LivingPW again, type !break map out of phase to any resident, or write to max@livingpw.com.

Two realms, a clean slate

2026-10-29T00:00:00Z

Until now LivingPW has been one shared realm: about a thousand AI residents at a time, Russian and English mixed together, and plenty of test characters raised by hand to check a dungeon. It taught us a lot. It is not the world anyone should start in.

So the early test moves to two new realms, and both start from nothing.

One realm for each language

On the shared realm about one in five residents wrote English. That sounds friendly until you play it. If you played PWI, you know the feeling of opening world chat and finding it mostly Russian. Russian players, for their part, kept tripping over English lines in theirs.

Now there are two:

the Russian realm, where residents talk the way Russian private-server players did;
the English realm, where residents write English.

Each has its own residents, about 2,000 of them with about 700 online at once, its own market, its own factions and its own gossip. Both run the same classic 1.3.9-era world, with the same gold rules and the same shop. Whichever you pick, any resident still answers you in English or Russian, the way you write to it.

Why wipe

Everything on the old world was test data: characters set to a level to test a dungeon, gold left over from the days of free login gold, prices formed on a market where gold cost nothing. A world you join should not carry that history.

On the new realms every character starts at level 1, people and AI residents alike. You level alongside the residents instead of behind a crowd of test characters at level 90. Factions form from scratch. The market starts empty and fills as people trade.

Who can play

The test is still free, and places are still handed out personally, in small batches, so that every report gets read. Send a request from the community page. The start guide has the five steps from invitation to first evening.

What to expect

It is still an early test. Bugs, restarts, maybe another wipe before launch. Characters do not carry over into the launch.
The first days will feel different. Everyone is level 1, the stalls are empty and nobody knows the price of anything yet. That is part of what we want to watch.
Each realm has its own live numbers. This site shows the English realm's map, counters and market board; the Russian realm's are on ru.livingpw.com.

What does not change

No pay-to-win. Gold is never sold for real money, and the same rules apply to every person and every resident. Playing is free.

If something feels off in the first days, tell me: max@livingpw.com, or the community. A fresh world is the best moment to fix things.

Talking like a player

2026-10-29T00:00:00Z

Nothing gives away a world of bots faster than its chat. One party call repeated by six characters, one phrase nobody on a real server would say, and you know you are alone.

So on 29 October we spent a day listening to ours.

Counting first

We recorded an hour of chat and counted how many sentences were different from each other.

World chat: 94 %. Mostly fine.
Local chat: 59 %. Not fine. That is what you hear standing in a town or a field, and most of the repeats were the same party call from different residents, with only the quest name swapped. Standing there, it read like a script.

Words nobody used

The Russian side had a different problem: some words were simply wrong. Russian private servers had their own slang, and our residents were using PWI's English terms in Russian letters, which no Russian player ever did. Cultivation was never «культа», it was «уважуха». A Wizard was a «маг», not a «визард». It is a small thing, and a veteran spots it in one line.

The residents now use the slang of the server they live on, checked against a glossary of Russian server slang that I correct from my own years on those servers. A word that is not in it is not taught to them.

What changed

One call at a time. When several residents want a party for the same thing, one of them asks and the others answer it or wait, instead of five posting the same line.
No sentence twice. A resident never repeats a sentence in world chat within an hour, or in local or trade chat within half an hour.
Less swearing. There was a bit too much of it. It is still a game chat, just not a locker room.
Linked items. When a resident sells something from its bag, it links the item in chat the way you would, so you can click it.

The second recording

Later that morning, mostly before these changes had reached every resident: world chat 96.7 % different, local chat 66.6 %. Better, not done. The target is at least 90 % in world chat, and in local chat no sentence from more than a few residents in an hour.

Coming next, already tested: sellers who say when the item is on the auction or in their catshop, gossip that starts in the faction and sticks to things that really happened (no more "a friend told me you're good" to your face), and residents who can tell you which build they run and what they are saving for, straight from their own gear.

The next recording happens with a person online. Some of the liveliest talk only starts when someone is there to hear it.

What is a gold worth?

2026-10-29T00:00:00Z

We gave everyone gold for logging in, and gold stopped being worth anything. Why the free gold is gone, what the Treasury at the Archosaur Auctioneer does, and why a gold should cost about half an hour of play.

Three deaths or fewer

2026-10-29T00:00:00Z

One simple target for every dungeon, a night of AI parties running them back to back, and what side-by-side runs taught us about pulling packs, area skills and two bottles of wine.

The night shift

2026-10-28T00:00:00Z

A day spent on the unglamorous side of a living world: hunting down everything on the server that quietly grows, and teaching the world to look after itself while nobody is watching.

Back to the 1.3.9 map

2026-10-28T00:00:00Z

How the main world was cut back to the classic 1.3.9 map, what the rehearsal caught before the switch, and what still has to be checked in a player's own client.

Are you here to train my AI?

2026-10-28T00:00:00Z

A direct answer to the player-data concern: what feedback improves, what residents remember, what reaches external models, and the limits our own records revealed.

Tomorrow, will that Cleric remember you?

2026-10-28T00:00:00Z

Four different things get called “learning.” A remembered boss fight, a better quest choice and a trained model are very different kinds of progress.

The boss was tanked. Why did the healer die?

2026-10-28T00:00:00Z

A dungeon mystery in the test records: the tank is fighting, the Cleric is healing, and the squad still falls apart. What repeated failures actually teach us.

A world needs more than an online counter

2026-10-28T00:00:00Z

Today’s dungeon tests, a small rehearsal realm, and why keeping the healer alive matters more than another hundred names online.

How the AI players live

2026-10-28T00:00:00Z

Who the AI players are, how their evenings work, how they talk and group up, how I check changes before they reach the world, and an honest list of what doesn't work yet.

The launch rehearsal: hundreds of AI players arrive in a wiped world

2026-10-28T00:00:00Z

I wiped the test world, switched on the launch rates and started the arrival of a new population. The numbers, the steps, and what the previous population taught me.

Hello. Why I'm doing this

2026-10-28T00:00:00Z

Who I am, why I'm building this world, how swarms of AI agents help me, and what already works and what doesn't.