The closed alpha has been live for a week. Here's an honest read on the first seven days - what the numbers say, what they don't, and what I'm watching.
First, the caveat that makes the rest readable: this is a small, invite-only test. Twenty-one people joined in week one. At that size a single player swings a whole percentage point, so treat the headline rates as direction, not gospel. The week was never about volume - it was about whether the core loop brings people back.
Who showed up
Twenty-one founders joined across the week - eleven on launch day, then a steady trickle. Daily actives sat between eleven and fifteen, peaking at fifteen on the 9th. Nobody fell off a cliff. For a build-raid-return loop you're meant to dip into rather than grind, a flat, holding DAU is exactly what I wanted to see.
Did they come back
This is the one number the alpha exists to answer, and it's the one I'm happiest with. Of the eleven who joined on launch day, ten came back the next day, and five were still playing a week later. Call it 45% week-one retention on the launch cohort - on a bare loop, with no streaks, no login rewards and no art pass to lean on. Those props are switched off on purpose so they can't flatter the figure. Five of eleven came back because the loop itself pulled them, or they didn't.
What they did
Across the week, players trained roughly 10,900 units and launched 329 raids. Training ramped hard - 260 builds on day one, over 2,500 by mid-week - which says people are settling into the rhythm of queueing things and checking back. Most of those raids landed on bots, by design: the playerbase is still too small for everyone to find live targets, so rating-matched stand-ins fill the gaps. That's working as intended for now.
The one number that bugs me
Everyone got raided at least once. Almost nobody hit back - one retaliation, all week. That isn't players being passive; it's me not surfacing retaliation well enough. When you get hit, the path from "I was raided" to "my army is on its way back" isn't obvious or satisfying enough yet. A design note, not a player failing, and it's near the top of the list.
What I'm watching next
Retaliation. Make getting raided feel like the start of something, not just a loss notification.
The week-two curve. The launch cohort's seven-day hold is promising. Now I want to see whether week two keeps it, or whether the bare loop runs thin without the depth that's still switched off.
Real targets over bots. As more founders join, more raids should land on actual people. That shift is the one I'm most curious to read.
Landing in a few days: the new spy system
The next thing to ship is the second half of espionage, and it's the one I'm most excited about. Scouting today is one-directional - you look at a target before you hit it. The new system turns it into an arms race: counter-intelligence to catch someone scouting you, forged intel so you can feed a raider a lie about your defences, and reading whether a target's army is home or away before you commit. It changes raiding from "pick a target off a list" to a game of who knows what about whom. It's days out, not weeks - watch this space.
One ask: bring someone in
I'd like us to be 50 strong by the time open alpha lands, and the quickest way there is you. Check your dashboard - you've got invite codes sitting there. If you know someone who'd click with a build-and-raid game you can dip in and out of, send them a code and bring them in. More real players is the single best thing for the game right now - more live targets, fewer bots, and more of the back-and-forth this whole thing is built around. The early crew sets the tone, so bring the people you'd actually want to scrap with.
Thanks for being here in the scaffolding-and-bots phase. The early numbers say the loop has something. Now we find out whether it has legs.
- The Dev
Play: play.breachlands.com · The world, if you want it: breachlands.com/lore