EliteNoob Posted 5 hours ago Posted 5 hours ago Play it: https://www.grimspur.com Back in March I posted GrimSpur here as a work-in-progress: a persistent browser MMO set in the 1880s American frontier, Torn-like in shape, with a core loop built and a long list of "coming soon." Most of that list is done. A few things changed on the way, and one of them didn't happen at all, I'll be straight about which. The headline: GrimSpur opened to the public on 15 May 2026. No more invite codes. The alpha was wiped in a one-shot reset, the launch gate flipped itself on a timestamp, and registration has been open ever since. It's live, it's populated, and there's an active Discord arguing about balance daily, a good chunk of what shipped below started as a player message. What actually shipped since March The crime loop got rebuilt properly. Crimes 2.0 replaced the placeholder system: 10 crime types, 42 subcrimes, each with its own skill that levels independently and unlocks harder jobs. Success chance is stat-driven and hard-capped at 95%, you never get a sure thing. Chains give multipliers. Good Deeds 2.0 is the mirror system for anyone playing lawful. Gangs shipped as Posses, and went further than planned, treasury vault, ranked wars, raids, an armoury, custom rank permissions, hideouts with per-town perks, six upgrade trees, and organised crime runs with real planning. Player-owned businesses are in. Seven trade types, each with Reputation, Operations and Heat as running metrics. You hire NPC or player staff, install permanent upgrades, climb tiers, and take income into a vault nightly. Let Heat run high and you draw an inspection or a raid, and you choose whether to bribe, stand your ground, or lie low. Businesses can be sold outright between players. Travel across 8 towns, not the 12 I promised, because eight with real identities beat twelve with none. Each has its own law strength, climate, crime modifiers, an exclusive vendor and its own commodity prices. Blackwater fences better than anywhere; Ironveil's rail yard runs strict. A commodity exchange with a live price engine, mean-reverting prices on a 15-minute tick with OHLC candles, plus per-town price spreads so buying cheap in one town and hauling to another is a real trade route. Housing across 11 tiers, tent to Outlaw Stronghold, with staff, vaults, item storage and gameplay perks. Not the 14 I listed — the top three were padding. Jobs with rank ladders. The Trades, an apprenticeship system that replaced the original education idea entirely, because "pay money, wait, get stat" was boring. Now you rank up through lessons tied to what you actually do in-game. Gambling: multiplayer blackjack at a shared table, PvP poker, Dead Man's Hand, a daily wheel. Horse racing. Bounties and wanted posters. Mounts. Livestock ranching — breed, feed, and lose animals to neglect if you vanish for a week. The Homestead, a fully isolated idle game bolted on the side with 19 skill tracks, for when you want to click something gentle. A seasonal battle pass (The Bounty Trail), now in its second season, with a free and a paid track. Collectible Legends, Merits, Callings, weekly challenges, missions, player-run forums and a proposal/vote board where players formally pitch changes. The Frontier Gazette is a daily in-game newspaper generated from the previous day's real events, who got hospitalized, which posse took what, what the market did. What I got wrong Worth saying plainly, since half of you are building your own: The AI crime vignettes never shipped. The plan was a unique Claude-written 2–4 sentence story on every crime outcome. In practice it added latency to the most-repeated action in the game, cost real money per click, and players skim that text after the tenth time anyway. The idea moved somewhere it earns its keep: the Gazette, which is generated once a day and actually gets read. 12 towns became 8, and 14 housing tiers became 11. Both were numbers I'd picked because they sounded substantial. Cutting them made each one matter more. "Never pay-to-win" survived contact with monetization, which I was not certain it would. Spurs buy convenience, cosmetics and a battle-pass track. No stat is for sale. What it's like now You land in Dustfall with $500 and nothing else. Energy bars refill in real time whether you're logged in or not. Pull hustles for cash, train, and pick a direction — nobody makes you choose a class, and there's no win condition. Ride with a posse and you're into wars, raids and organized runs. Go lawful and you're collecting bounties. Go merchant and you're reading price spreads across eight towns and hauling goods. Go quiet and you're building a business and a ranch and letting them compound. Rivals can hit you while you're offline. Your businesses earn while you sleep. The frontier keeps moving. Tech, for the devs Backend is Node/Express on PostgreSQL with Prisma, Redis for caching and energy regeneration, Socket.io for realtime, JWT auth. Frontend is React + Vite, Tailwind, Zustand, PWA — mobile-first, no download. Runs on a VPS behind nginx, PM2 in a 4-worker cluster, Cloudflare in front, GitHub CI/CD. Two things I'd tell past-me: Denormalise carefully or not at all. I had a live bug for months where two towns silently traded at unmodified global prices because one service string-munged a display name into a lookup key while another used the real slug. The UI advertised a spread the trade wouldn't honor. Nobody reported it, it just quietly made a system pointless. Audit what your nav links actually resolve to. I shipped two sidebar entries pointing at routes that didn't exist. Blank pages, for weeks, until a player mentioned it in passing. Neither was hard to fix. Both were invisible without someone deliberately looking. Still looking for people Solo build, and the door is open: Players — genuinely the most useful thing. It's live, free, and the Discord is where balance gets decided. Testers — the game has a lot of surface area and I cannot click all of it. Frontend / backend devs — React/Tailwind or Node/Postgres. Clean codebase, no spaghetti. Writers — crime descriptions, town lore, Gazette voice. Artists — UI polish, icons, Western aesthetic. https://discord.gg/cj65RGpvev https://www.grimspur.com — ride in with nothing. Quote
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