The June newsletter from the Shards Online development team was published earlier this month, and can be read in full here. Derek Brinkmann’s opening letter more or less sums up everything:

Yet another month has gone by and what an exciting month it was for us here at Citadel Studios. Our worldbuilders recently wrapped up the first pass on the Catacombs and we have lots of awesomely dark and creepy screenshots to show you. On the content side, we’ve packed the ruins full of crazy cultists for our next playtest, and Logrus has a prototype of the animal taming system up and running.

Of course I’ve been dying to talk about the stuff we’ve been working on for player run servers. We said we’d have them ready for our Pre-Alpha Admins by the end of the month. While we didn’t quite meet that deadline, we are really close! So close that we have scheduled our first Pre-Alpha Admin Roundtable. If you are a member of the Pre-Alpha Admin program, keep an eye on your inboxes this week for all the details on this event…. (the first of many!)

We know how important it is that Shards Online has awesome player run servers with active admins, custom rules and custom content. That is why we are committed to working very closely with our admins to make sure they are equipped to do exactly that. We’ve already recorded 3 tutorial videos for our toolkit and we will be running weekly live streaming events to answer questions and offer tips and tricks.

What does that mean for everyone else? Well, once our Pre-Alpha Admins are listing their servers on the main server list, our Founders (Pre-Alpha Playtesters) will be able to play Shards Online on these servers any time they want. Your heard right! 24/7 access to Shards Online by the end of July! Even though things have a long ways to go, modders will already have total control over the rules and content. I don’t think it will be long before we see hardcore PvP servers and zombie invasion servers and whatever else these crazy admins can cook up.

You can click through to read more about everything discussed above, and to find more screenshots of the game (and, in particular, the new Catacombs area, which is pictured above). But this is a good summary.

More recently, Citadel kicked off the Pre-Alpha 2 release of Shards Online, which is focused on the game’s modding tools:

Today marks a huge step forward for Shards Online. The Shard Server is now in the hands of our Pre-Alpha Admins ($200+ tiers). This means they are running their own servers and learning the modding system.

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What does this mean for Pre-Alpha Playtesters?

As these admins get comfortable with their servers, they can choose to post the login details on the Pre-Alpha Playtesters forum. To connect to one of these shards, just put the address they post in the “Address” field and click connect. In the next build (0.1.15), they will be given the option to list their server on the main server list. This will make it even easier to try out these player run servers.

Access to Pre-Alpha 2 requires a pledge of $75 or more. Pre-Alpha 3, however, will be open to those who pledged at the $40 tier.