Project Astral – First Alpha Finished Successfully
Hey everyone,
the first Project Astral Alpha test is now finished and honestly, I'm extremely happy with how it went.
This was the first real test with players outside of my own solo testing, and the feedback was way more positive than I expected. A lot of people tested the custom systems, tried different builds, pushed the Astral Tree, played around with Astral Gems, ran dungeons, joined raid testing, reported bugs, and gave actual useful feedback instead of just saying “good” or “bad”.
That helped so much!!!
but before I talk about the Alpha itself, I want to quickly explain what Project Astral actually is, because I realized my last posts were a bit too focused on development progress and not enough on the core idea of the server.
Project Astral is a custom WotLK 3.3.5a server focused on long-term account-wide progression, group PvE, raiding, custom builds, and systems that expand the normal WotLK experience without turning it into a completely different game.
You still play normal classes. It is not classless.
But on top of your normal class, talents and gear, there are several custom systems that let your account grow over time.
The main features are:
- Astral Tree with over 1000 skillable nodes
- Astral Gems with class and boss ability procs
- Prestige System
- Prestige Store
- Flex Raids
- Mythic Raids
- Raid ID resets through tokens
- Account-wide Reagent Bank
- Account-wide mounts, pets, titles, achievements and riding skills
- Custom launcher with automatic patching
- Website with a armory, roadmap and bug reports
The whole idea is that your time investment should matter across your whole account, not just on one character.
The Astral Tree is the main progression system of Project Astral.
Think of it like a huge extra skill tree next to your normal class progression. It currently has over 1000 nodes, and you unlock them with tokens.
You earn tokens through things like:
- Leveling up
- Prestiging
- Killing dungeon bosses
- Killing raid bosses
- Progressing through content
The current focus of the tree is mostly character power and long-term progression. Many nodes give stats, survivability, damage bonuses, profession bonuses, quality-of-life unlocks and other useful effects.
There are also QoL features inside the tree, like:
- AoE Loot
- Hearthstone cooldown reduction
- Reduced fall damage
- Water walking
- Water breathing
- Movement speed
- Mounted movement speed
- Flight speed
- Instant Flight
- Resurrection sickness reduction
- Profession bonuses
- Bonus EXP
- Bonus reputation
- Bonus honor
- Account-wide Reagent Bank
This is not something you finish in a few days.
The Astral Tree is meant to be long-term progression.
You choose a path, build your account over time, and if you want to try something else, you can respec for free. There are no reset costs.
Astral Gems are another big part of the server.
While leveling, killing dungeon bosses, killing raid bosses and progressing through the game, you can find Astral Gems and scrolls.
Astral Gems can contain custom effects based on class abilities or boss abilities. For example, a gem could proc something like Chain Lightning or another spell effect during combat.
You can add sockets to your gear with an Astral Socket Scroll, put Astral Gems into those sockets, and remove them again with a Scroll of Removal.
The procs do not interrupt your normal casts or abilities. They happen on top of your gameplay.
Gems can also be upgraded by combining them, increasing things like:
- proc chance
- damage
- effect strength
Mythic raids can also drop special Mythic Astral Gems, which can have boss abilities or stronger versions of class spell effects.
So between your class, gear, Astral Tree and Astral Gems, there are a lot of possible builds and combinations.
The feedback on the custom systems was very positive
The biggest thing people seemed to enjoy was the amount of possible builds and combinations.
And honestly, even I do not fully know how many builds are possible at this point. With the Astral Tree, Astral Gems, class spells, proc effects and gear, all interacting with each other, there are so many combinations that some things are hard to predict before players actually test them.
Some players went more into raw damage, some tested survivability, some played around with gems, some tried weird combinations, and some just pushed progression as far as they could during the Alpha.
Seeing people already theorycrafting during such an early test was really cool. Like really Fcking cool!
A lot of feedback and suggestions were collected
During the Alpha, the community reported bugs, suggested changes, talked about balance, and gave feedback on what felt good and what did not.
There were also active polls in the Discord, so players could vote on certain changes and help shape the next steps of development.
That is something I want to keep doing.
I do not want Project Astral to be designed in a vacuum. I have a clear direction for the server, but player feedback is extremely important, especially for systems like the tokens, Astral Tree costs, QoL , Astral Gems, and overall progression speed.
Server performance looked really good
One of the main goals of this Alpha was performance testing. An man did we got huge performance Logs!
The server was logging performance data in the background during the whole test, and the results were more then useful.
Even with large custom modules running, Astral Tree usage, Astral Gems, dungeon testing, and raid testing, performance stayed in a very good state overall. Not even a Single drop of Sweat!
That was honestly one of the things I was mostly Concerned about, because custom systems can look good on paper but still become a problem once real players start using them.
Luckily, the performance data was very positive.
There were 4 crashes in 54 hours
The full Alpha ran for around 54 hours in total.
During that time, there were 4 crashes.
All of them were triggered by the Prestige systems having a Conflict with the Astral Gem System. The good thing is that the issue was found, reproduced, and after the Alpha ended, the affected parts were already fixed.
The system now behaves the way it should.
Of course, crashes are never great, but in this case it was Great! Because finding these problems now is much better than finding them later during a larger test or release.
Dungeons and raids were stable
The dungeon and raid scripts were great during the test.
AzerothCore did a great job here, and the base content behaved much better than I honestly expected during the first public test.
There were also first raid tests in Molten Core, mainly to get a better feeling for the Flex Raid system and how scaling should be adjusted going forward.
Molten Core was not meant to be a full progression race during this Alpha, but it gave me useful data and a much better idea of what needs to be tuned.
There are still bugs to fix
There are still open bugreport of course.
Some were already fixed during or shortly after the Alpha. Others are still being worked on.
The important part is that the community reported a lot of them properly, which makes fixing things much easier. This is exactly the kind of Alpha feedback I was hoping for.
Some issues were small, some were more annoying. But i got this!
Overall, the test gave me a much clearer picture of what needs to be improved next.
The tester team has been expanded
After the Alpha, the tester team was expanded so work can continue on the dev realm.
This means testing does not stop completely between Alpha phases. The goal is to keep improving systems, fixing bugs, checking balance changes, and making sure the next test is already in a better state.
The Dev Realm will be used for continued testing and dev work before the next public Alpha test. Also the Live Realm is closed until next Alpha.
The community growth surprised me
This part honestly surprised me a lot.
There was not much advertising for the server before the Alpha.
I only made two Reddit posts that basically showed the project, not even advertising the test itself. Still, we ended up with over 1,000 visitors on the website.
After the Alpha started, it was only announced on the website and in Discord. Even with that, within 54 hours, around 50 accounts were registered, and about 40 of them actually logged into the game.
For such a short first test and a project that is still in Alpha, that honestly made me really happy and proud. It showed that people are interested enough not only to check it out, but to actually download the launcher, log in and test the server.
Next Alpha target: June 19!!!
The next Alpha test is currently planned for June 19.
That date is the current target, but as always with development, things can still change if something important comes up.
The focus until then will be:
- fixing reported bugs
- improving the Prestige systems
- polishing Astral Tree balance
- adjusting Astral Gem progression
- improving token gain
- tuning Flex Raid scaling
- continuing performance checks
- preparing the next test phase
Registrations are currently open on the website:
The Discord is also active with discussions, feedback, polls, and dev updates.
https://discord.com/invite/v68qPZZUEY
Final thoughts
Overall, the first Alpha was a success.
Not because everything was perfect, It was a success because players actually tested the systems, gave feedback, reported bugs, helped find problems, and showed that the core idea of Project Astral works and players really liked it.
There is still a lot to do, but after this Alpha I feel much more confident about the direction of the server.
Thanks again to everyone who joined, tested, broke things, reported bugs, gave feedback, or just followed the project and had a great Time there.
The next test should already be a much better version of Project Astral.
