Charter

Valdrys is in open testing: one realm, independently run, bought once on Steam. This page is the deal, written down before you spend either the money or the evening — including the question every online game dodges until it hurts.

Will my characters survive? — the wipe answer

Your characters persist through the whole open test. There are no casual resets: nothing gets wiped for a patch, a balance pass or a bad week.

One wipe is reserved, and only one: if Valdrys ever has a commercial 1.0 launch, the realm starts fresh so nobody buys into a world with two-year-old economies. If that day comes it will be announced at least two weeks ahead — in game, on this site and on Discord — and open-test veterans will carry something forward as a mark of having been here first. What that is will be decided with the community before the wipe, not after.

A wipe for any other reason would mean something went badly wrong (data corruption, a duplication exploit that poisoned the economy). If it ever happens, the reason gets published the same day.

What the test promises you

• Honest numbers. The standings page shows how many people are in the realm right now — never a padded total.
• A named play window. The realm is online around the clock, but the crowd gathers at announced times on Discord — that is when the world is worth walking into.
• Bugs get read. /bug in-game files a report with the recent context attached. Every report is read; the fixed ones get called out in the news.
• Moderation with evidence. /report snapshots what was said, and moderators act on that snapshot rather than on hearsay. Bans stick to accounts, not names, and can be timed rather than permanent.

What it asks of you

• This is one small rented server, not a fleet: brief restarts happen, and if the realm is full you may be asked to try again in a few minutes — the cap exists so the players already inside keep a smooth game.
• Chat is recorded for moderation (details in the privacy notice). Treat public chat as public.
• Found an exploit? /bug it rather than farming it. Economy-poisoning exploits are the one thing that could ever force an unplanned wipe — protect your own progress.

What this is not

It is not a game that sells you power. Valdrys is $14.99 on Steam and that is the whole cost: no subscription, no currency sold for money, no cosmetics store, and no shop of any kind inside the game. Every item in the world is one somebody went and killed something for.

It is also not a finished game being sold as one. What you are buying is the open test — the game growing up in public, rough edges and all — and the one reserved wipe above is the honest price of arriving this early. If the cost of the game ever changes, that gets announced here and on Discord before it happens, not slipped into a patch.

What changed on 9 September 2026

This page went up while the open test was a free download, and it said so — including a line promising the test would stay free right up until a commercial launch. That is not what happened: Valdrys went on sale partway through the test instead. The line is struck rather than quietly reworded, because a charter edited into being right was never worth reading. Everything above about wipes is unchanged and still binding: going on sale was not the 1.0 launch, nothing was wiped, and the two weeks of notice still stand.