If you haven’t already read/seen the previous announcement about the changes coming to empires, I recommend reading that first.

We are very excited to bring these changes to you all, but we believe it only makes sense to make changes with some form of wipe to give empires a clean slate. In this blog I want to lay out the plans going forward and what that means for the current and future versions of BitCraft.

Upcoming Wipe

We have decided that on February 26, BitCraft will have some form of wipe, however, the nature of that wipe will be up to the community to decide. Please read through this blog to the end to find out how you can participate in the future direction of BitCraft.

With this wipe, we will be making the major changes to the Empire system as well as several other changes which require or benefit from having a new world. Over the last several months of Steam Early Access, we have learned an enormous amount about how BitCraft behaves as a live, persistent, single-world MMO, and what we need to do to set it up for the long term.

Wipes have been a core part of BitCraft’s development so far, especially throughout Pre-Alpha, into Alpha and eventually Early Access, the game has been wiped around 15 times since it was first available for players to try. Wipes allowed us to iterate on early progression, rebalance systems that were still in flux, and fix foundational issues that simply cannot be solved cleanly once a world has matured such as world generation, onboarding, or xp rates.

Price Changes

With this wipe, we are looking to take the next major step towards making BitCraft more accessible to more players.

Keeping BitCraft paid for now gives us important advantages that we are not ready to give up yet. It keeps our incentives focused on making a solid game rather than needing to push monetization to players early through the in-game shop. It also helps us combat bots, spammers, and other rule-breaking accounts by attaching a real cost to abuse, which in turn allows us to justify dedicating more resources to stopping it.

That said, we understand that some players were waiting specifically for BitCraft to become free-to-play before giving it a shot. To help reduce the barrier to entry while maintaining the benefits of a paid game, we are lowering the price of BitCraft from $29.99 to $15.99 USD while removing the inclusion of hexite shards from the initial purchase.

The game was previously priced to include an offering of 10,000 shards (~20$) of premium currency which will no longer be included. You can think of this price change as us removing the forced inclusion of this additional currency in the box price of the game, which will give more freedom for players to choose if/how they engage with additional premium cosmetics.

Alongside the wipe, we will also be running a wipe sale at 50% off, bringing the price to around $7.99 USD. This will be the lowest price BitCraft has ever been available at. We can confirm that the 50% bonus shards for in game purchases will stay until the end of early access.

Wipe Logistics

Here we will go over some of the details and logistics of how we plan for the wipe to take place so you have all of the important information needed to give us your opinion.

We will have 24hours of downtime between the current version of the game going offline forever and the new fresh world/servers being available for login. The downtime will begin on Feb 25th at noon eastern time, and the servers will open again on Feb 26th at noon eastern time.

All players who own BitCraft on steam will be able to login at that time. We will be prepared to support a new upper limit of players, but will be letting players in slowly to monitor stability. If you have previously played during the previous early access, you will be able to login with your existing email account which is tied to your steam account.

What will wipe and what will persist?

As mentioned we are looking to put the nature of the wipe in the hands of the players and with that we see 3 possible routes. I will also outline what is shared between all these options.

1. World Wipe (Only Character EXP is carried over)
2. Full Wipe (Everything is reset including Character EXP)
3. Full Final Wipe (This is the same as 2, but it would be the last time BitCraft ever wipes)

For both option 1 and 2, the final wipe would remain scheduled for when BitCraft leaves EA and reaches 1.0. Additionally we don’t anticipate any further wipes would happen before the final wipe for option 1 and 2. Option 3 would mean that there would not be a wipe when leaving early access. While this is not in line with what we previously said, we have heard enough people in the community asking for this, that we wanted to represent it as an option.

In all of these options, the world would be totally new and fresh, all items and things built in the world would be wiped. The only exception to this is that all collectibles held in your BitCraft HUB (Website not your vault) will be granted to your new character on creation. Any outstanding premium currency you had previously received with the game purchase or bought after the fact, as well as any premium purchases, or other awarded collectibles will be found there and granted to your character post-wipe.

This includes:

• All unspent shards which were purchased during Early Access
• All Shards donated to Empires since the beginning of Early Access
• All premium items purchased in game
• Any event / code activated rewards such as star stones or origin/alpha/beta cubes
• Any twitch drop rewards

You can see all things which will be granted to you by logging into your HUB inventory here

Name Reservation

It’s been clear to us that the community cares strongly about having a chance to reserve their names when we do a wipe and so we’ve implemented a system to allow you to keep your name from the current world into the new wiped world without someone snagging it.

The way this will work is:

• All players will have their current name reserved in the new world (at the time the servers come down on Feb 25th)
• When you log-in for the first time after the wipe you will have a chance to use your previous name or choose new one
• Nobody can take your reserved name while it is reserved
• If you choose a different name or after 1 month, the reserved names will be opened up for anyone to use.

We hope this gives a fair chance for everyone to keep their current name into the new world, while also allowing inactive names to eventually be freed up.

Wipe lead up rewards / Event

In the lead up to the wipe we will be doing a few things to send off this world with a bang

We have added several new achievements which will reward titles which can be carried over to the next world if you claim them before the servers go down on Feb 25th. At that time you will be credited with items on the website account HUB, so don’t be concerned if they are not showing up in your HUB immediately after completing them in game.

These titles are our way of recognizing some of the players who went to great lengths during this world.

The titles are:

• Reawakened [Profession name] (for getting lvl 100 in each profession)
• Reawakened [Skill name] (for getting lvl 100 in each skill)
• Reawakened World Explorer (for exploring the entire map)

There will also be a title which anyone should be able to unlock with a small amount of gameplay in the lead up to the wipe. This can be earned by hunting down hexite meteors which have begun to fall across the world of Starfell. Find these fallen meteors and extinguish them to be able to mine them. Bring your friends to speed up the process and help scout them faster!

These end of wipe rewards will not be available after the wipe happens, however there will likely be another pre-wipe event before the final wipe.

Choosing the Path forward

As mentioned above we want the community of BitCraft to decide how we move forward with this wipe.

We will be running a poll on our website where you all can vote to decide which version of wiping we will do.

You can vote in the poll by signing into your BitCraft account and going to this link if you are:

• An owner of BitCraft on Steam
• Have an existing account that is older than 7 days (This would mostly apply to people who have been following BitCraft for a long time or who participated in Pre-alpha or Alpha testing)

We have a lot more exciting stuff to share with you over the coming weeks including an updated 2026 roadmap which I can’t wait to share with you all.

As always, thank you for being part of this journey and for helping us shape BitCraft into what it can become.

Minch, and the BitCraft Team