The Research Tree

Safe hubs where adventurers gather, trade and rest between fights. Most of your world's activity starts here.

Bigger towns with services a town can't offer, including the auction house.

Adventurers bind it to an inn or city and teleport back once a day, which saves them the long walk home.

A place to rest. Adventurers who log off at an inn come back refreshed and ready to play.

Shops where adventurers sell their loot and buy what they need, which keeps gold moving through your economy.

Sell mounts in your towns. Adventurers buy one and cross the map much faster.

A late unlock that adds flying mounts to your stables, so adventurers can travel by air.

A market where adventurers trade with each other, with prices that rise and fall with demand.

A city bank where adventurers store gold and items, and pay for extra slots when their bags fill up.

Place named characters and landmarks anywhere, giving your world its people and points of interest.

Where fallen adventurers come back. Place them near danger so a death doesn't mean a long walk back.

Harbours and the boats between them, linking your islands so adventurers can reach every part of the world.

Flight routes between your hubs. Adventurers pay the fare and cross the map in moments.

Instanced dungeons where a party fights its way through for the best loot.

Stones outside a dungeon that summon party members to the entrance, so nobody has to walk there.

Monsters spot adventurers on sight and chase them, instead of waiting to be attacked.

Elite champions spawn among regular mobs: rarer, tougher and worth the extra fight.

Large instanced fights built for several parties at once. The biggest endgame an MMO can offer.

Up to five harder versions of any dungeon or raid for players at the level cap, each with its own name, colour, loot and a gear score at the door.

Adventurers team up to take on what none of them could solo. Parties keep a server social.

Adventurers form lasting guilds with a name and banner of their own, which gives them another reason to stay.

Bags and coin purses. Once adventurers can carry loot and gold, your economy starts moving.

The item editor, for everything that drops, sells or gets equipped in your world.

Weapons and armour for adventurers to equip, giving them a visible path to power beyond their level.

Trades to learn and resource nodes to gather from, which supply your markets with materials and crafted goods.

Give every adventurer a class, each with its own allowed weapons and armour.

Animal forms for your classes: cat, wolf, bear, bird and demon, used when a fight calls for one and dropped when it ends.

Design your classes' spells and skills, with their costs, cast times and effects, then watch adventurers use them.

Give your monsters spells of their own. Bosses telegraph burning circles on the ground, and adventurers learn to step out of the fire, sometimes too late.

Add objectives to your towns and NPCs. Adventurers take them, hunt the target and return for the reward, which sends players to the areas you want busy.

Daily and repeatable quests on their own cooldowns, giving adventurers a reason to keep logging back in.

Titles shown before or after a name, from Sir to the Brave, earned through quests. Adventurers show off the rarest one they have.

Groups adventurers earn standing with through quests and kills. They climb from Friendly to Exalted, and each rank can come with its own title.

Create your own achievements, from killing a hundred wolves to a first dungeon clear, with rewards like gold, gear, titles and mounts. Limit one to a single holder and it becomes a Realm First.

Turn on player-versus-player combat, across the whole server or zone by zone.

Build arenas with your own floors and walls. Teams sign up with a queue NPC, enter together and fight it out in front of a live scoreboard.

Team battles with an objective: deathmatch, king of the hill, capture the flag or point control, on a map you design.

Create new factions for your adventurers to join, and to fight against.

Let adventurers from rival factions group up and play together.

Place a capture point in a zone and let the factions fight over it. The winner holds the zone, towns and vendors included, until someone takes it back.

The harshest open-world PvP rule: fallen players keep only their most valued items, and the rest drops for the winner to take.

Combat roles (tank, healer, damage and support) that adventurers grow into as they level up, so parties fill with the roles they need.

Companions for your classes: wolves, bears and stranger beasts that fight beside their owners, hold an enemy's attention or heal the party.

One life only. A hardcore adventurer who dies starts again at level one, keeping nothing but their friends, and the whole server knows it.

Place shallow water. Adventurers can walk through it, but it slows them down.

Freeze your water into slippery ice. Needs Water researched first.

Place rivers of lava that burn careless adventurers and make the rest path around them.

Blighted ground, dead trees, gravestones and standing stones. Give a corner of your world a haunted look.

Meadow and mud terrain with garden details, for areas that feel calm and welcoming.

Torches, crates and barrels that make a town look lived in.

A centrepiece fountain for your town square, and a spot for adventurers to gather.

Statues, banners, sarcophagi, altars and glowing crystals that give each dungeon its own look.

Upgrade the hardware behind your world so more adventurers can play at once, before login queues drive them away.

Opens a Support page beside the Official Forum. Players file tickets when they are stuck, spot a bot, dispute a charge or appeal a ban, and how fast you answer moves your reputation.

Hire Game Masters on a weekly wage. They teleport in beside players with tickets, investigate the players you flag and sweep your world for bots.

Shows how suspicious each player looks, flags rigged Auction House sales and estimates what bots and gold sellers cost you. Needs GM Training.

Halves the time a Game Master spends on each visit, so the support queue clears before the forum notices. Needs GM Training and Support Tickets.

Named expansions that grow the area you can build on and raise the level cap, giving adventurers new places to go and new levels to reach.