One expansion at a time — where DriftwoodXI is going

Thank you for being here. DriftwoodXI is a small server, and everyone who spends an evening on it picked us over somewhere with a bigger population and a longer history. That is not something we take for granted. Your time is the one thing we can't hand back to you, so here is the honest picture: what is open, what isn't yet, and how the rest of it gets here.

Open today

The base game and Rise of the Zilart, at level cap 99. Three nations of missions through to Rank 10, the Zilart storyline and Sky with its gods at the top of it, Dynamis, Garrison, Magian Trials, Voidwalker NMs, Fields and Grounds of Valor, and everything DriftwoodXI adds on top — squads of your own characters, the mercenary board, shared account inventory, reworked caskets. The Content unlocked post on this page has the full list with the numbers attached.

The other expansions are not included in this version yet. Their maps and storylines are closed rather than half-working, and character select shows you exactly what's in.

Why they open one at a time

We could switch every expansion on this evening. We're not going to, and the reason is the same one that brought you here instead of retail: this server is heavily customised.

Squads, gambit rule sets, the mercenary board, one inventory across your whole account, rebalanced enmity, reworked skill-ups, caskets, rates and drops — every one of those reaches into systems that an expansion's content was never written to expect. Opening one isn't flipping a switch. It's playing the thing through here, with those changes in place, finding what falls over, and fixing it before anyone else has to walk into it.

So that is what we do: one expansion, played through on this server, patched, and only then handed to everyone. Over the next few years the rest of Vana'diel opens that way — deliberately, one at a time, each one in a state we're happy to put our name on. Chains of Promathia is next in line.

Why there are no dates

Because we'd rather surprise you than disappoint you.

We don't yet know how long any of this takes, and a date we announce is a promise we'd be making with information we don't have. If we named one and the expansion wasn't ready, we'd either ship something rough to hit it or miss it in public — and neither of those is fair to people who cleared their calendar. So there are no dates. When an expansion is ready it goes live, you'll read about it here first, and it will arrive whole.

What will not change

DriftwoodXI is free to play, and it always will be.

There is no cash shop. There will never be a cash shop — not for gear, not for gil, not for convenience, not for cosmetics. Nothing that touches your character will ever be for sale, and there is no version of this server where paying someone gets you ahead of the person next to you. Everything here is earned in game or it isn't ours to hand out. No pay-to-win, no subscriptions, no wipes.

That's the whole deal, and it isn't going to quietly change later.

Come and say hello

The fastest way to reach us is our officially partnered Discord — discord.gg/DriftwoodGaming, the same place the Discord button in the top right of this launcher takes you.

Zatara, Drifty and Michael are all the same person, and that person reads it. Bug reports, questions, "is this supposed to work like this?", ideas for what we build next — all of it lands in the same place, and it's a short line. Plenty of what's live on this server started as somebody in there saying wouldn't it be better if…

Thank you for playing on DriftwoodXI. Genuinely — we're glad you're here.