A real Earth
The Alps are the Alps and the Tyrrhenian is the Tyrrhenian. Every ridge, bay and river is the real one, shrunk down until you can walk it.
Alpha in development · real-time strategy MMO on a real Earth at 1:500
A real Earth, shrunk five hundred times — that's where the name comes from. See the whole planet turn from orbit, then come down, without a single loading screen, and settle wherever you like: your village grows out of whatever that place happens to have.
There is no tech tree here to save you. There is a river to ford, a harvest going bad, and a neighbour holding the iron you don't have. Trade with them, ally with them, or take it.
Terra 500 is an alpha still being built: pieces are missing, things change from one week to the next, and the whole thing happens in the open on our Discord. Leave your email and the invite arrives in your inbox.
the invite link and nothing else|no account, no password|free while in alpha
One world, no seams
The planet isn't cut into maps. Pull back and the whole Earth turns beneath you; lean in and you're standing between your own houses. Nothing loads, nothing stops, and anywhere you can see is somewhere you can go.
This matters more than it sounds. When the distance between two villages is the real distance between two real hills, strategy stops being a number in a table and becomes geography: who sits upstream, who holds the ford, who has the forest at their back and who has the sea in front.
So the first decision of the game is where to stop walking. A river mouth, a pine ridge, a clay plain, a stretch of steppe: each biome gives you a different village, because it gives you different things to work with — and leaves you short of everything else.
The planet turns below you. Anywhere you can see down there is somewhere you can go, in one continuous fall.
The world makes the rules
None of it is set dressing. The land, the weather and the seasons run the same way for every player, at the same moment, whether anyone is watching or not.
The Alps are the Alps and the Tyrrhenian is the Tyrrhenian. Every ridge, bay and river is the real one, shrunk down until you can walk it.
A river waters your crops, gives you clay and fish, and decides where a cart can cross. Choose the wrong ford and the load goes downstream without you.
A round world under a real sun: night falls where the light doesn't reach, summer days stretch long in the north, and winter comes for your fields on time.
The same storm crosses the same valley for every player at once. Rain feeds the crops, frost halts them, and a bad sea keeps the boats tied up.
Clay along the rivers, iron on the bare ridges, stone where the slope turns sharp, gold almost nowhere. Nothing was placed by hand — the land decides.
The tree you fell stays felled, the field you break stays broken, the road you wear in stays there — for you, and for whoever passes through next year.
Pillars
The whole game sits on four ideas. Everything else — trades, caravans, sieges — falls out of them.
Moving goods costs time, carts and an escort. What a thing is worth depends on where it is: grain in the silo and grain on the road are not the same grain.
One player can't master every trade. Be a metallurgist, a great farmer or a master shipwright — never all three. Trade isn't a bonus, it's how you eat.
Day and night, seasons and weather set the pace of your work, your spoilage and your campaigns. Food left unpreserved rots in a matter of days.
Cut a road, burn a bridge, put a toll on a crossing. You choke an enemy long before you ever have to face them in the open.
Choose a trade
Mastery is limited and permanent. Specialising isn't a perk — it's a dependency. Whatever you don't make, you buy. Or you take.
grain · oil · wine
Irrigation cut from the river, groves that take months of real care. You feed everyone else — and the morale of their soldiers.
iron · clay · stone
Ore sits in a few fixed places and nowhere else. Hold a vein and you hold everyone's tools — and the points of their spears.
rafts · barges · bridges
Rafts on the rivers, bridges over the fords, a toll on anyone who uses them. You move what others make, and you name the price.
Nothing keeps by itself. Meat has to be salted, grain dried in clay silos, wine and oil sealed in jars and buried in the cool. Every way of keeping food is a trade of its own — and every trade is somebody else.
Seasons
A world doesn't run forever. Every season has a goal announced at the start — and when someone reaches it the season is over, the standings are written down, and the map is wiped clean for the next one.
Survive
Food, firewood, a roof and enough hands to keep all three coming. Most of a season is spent making sure the village is still there next month.
Dominate
Hold the fords, the veins and the roads other people need. Power here isn't a rank: it's how much of the map has to go through you.
Reset
Each season sets its own end-game goal. Someone reaches it, the season closes, and the whole world starts over — same Earth, new game, everyone level.
The goal changes from season to season — a monument raised, a capital held, a trade route run end to end. Nothing carries over but what you learned, so there is no old account you can never catch up with.
Realms
Every realm is a whole Earth of its own, with its own founding sites and its own history already under way. Look at the map before you pick a spot — and at who is already living next door.
Devlog
Terra 500 is being built in the open. The world itself is up and walkable; the long economy is what we're building now.
In the alpha you can
Alpha in development
The world is being built in the open, week by week, and the Discord is where it happens: devlogs, playtests and the people making it. Leave your email and we'll send you the invite.
We email you the invite link and nothing else. No account, no password.
Free while it's in alpha.