Morterra 2 goes live
- It replaced the old game at morterra.com
- Old accounts came over with their names, titles and friends lists
- A weekly shop of cosmetics bought with Crowns, and a membership. None of it makes you stronger
History
Morterra, 2011 to now
From the first idea to today, with screenshots from the time. The updates we posted each have their own page.
Part 8 · 2026
Morterra 2
A rewrite from scratch in three.js. This is the game on morterra.com now.
Testing in the dev world
- On October 10 we opened a dev world with boats, biomes and 3D building, and asked players to help test it
- 15 skills that carry over every wipe, and item quality from Crude to Legendary
- Guilds, the bounty board, trading stalls, fishing, and shovels that dig the ground
Starting over in three.js
- Work began on a full rewrite, with a three.js client and a new server split into a hub and separate worlds
- New binary netcode, and proximity voice chat that never shares your IP with other players
- The old game's island, items, characters and rules carried over, then checked rule by rule
- Touch controls for phones and full controller support from the start
Part 7 · 2025 to 2026
Back to the 2019 game
We dropped Unity and went back to the 3D browser game from 2019, built on Babylon.js. Morterra 2 replaced it in 2026.
Signs, terrain and swimming
- Terrain that changes, oceans and swimming
- Signs, wells, stone tools, and saddles so horses stay put
- Automatic wipes, with dynamite everywhere for the last 30 minutes
- Season highscores saved for each server
- Looting downed and sleeping players
Previews of the big update
- Smoother physics with much less lag
- Seeded terrain with oceans, ponds and mountains
- Saddles, wells, stone tools and swimming
Big technical changes
- Collision detection at least 1,250 times faster
- Groundwork for a bigger map, more players and better physics
- In July the community voted 55% to keep 30-day wipes
Unity dropped
- The Unity rebuild was dropped after Unity changed its terms of service
- Work went back into the 2019 Babylon.js game, with new tools that made the job easier
- Moon took on big code projects to make the game faster and lighter
Part 6 · 2021 to 2024
The Unity detour
We started a rebuild in Unity and kept the live game running while we worked on it.
Keeping the worlds running
- Maps wiped about every 30 days
- The PvP server was fixed in September 2024, and Rysiu22 earned the Bug Finder title
- In October 2024 players voted 77% to lower the sulfur drop rate
Christmas update
- A Christmas event every December
- Downing players before they die
- Timers on doors, and crowns limited to one gem perk at a time
- Months of engine work underneath
- The OG title now covers every account from 2020 or earlier
Fourth Distinguished Player
Lady Ariadne
For her many contributions over the years. She is still a big part of our community.
In-game chat comes to Discord
- A bot posts chat from every world to Discord
- Account recovery fixed, and a limit on private messages
- No more looting foundries through walls
A new logo
- The crowned Morterra logo and a new game icon
- Updates kept coming to the live game while the Unity version was built
The Community world
- A world with PvP and raiding off, one zone per player
- Later that month menta earned the Bug Finder title for reporting our expired SSL certificate
- World 2 came back for survival in April
First look at Unity Morterra
- A video preview of the Unity version
- A sneak peek of its building system in April
A rebuild in Unity, announced
- Planned as a downloadable client with better performance, still playable in the browser
- Multiplayer, cooking, smelting, an island map and most of the UI were already working
- Work started in late September, on the core: PvP, base building, gathering and raiding
Part 5 · 2020 to 2021
Growing the game
An active player base grew on its own, and updates came every few weeks.
Crouching, sneaking and chat commands
- Crouching hides your map icon and the sound of your steps
- King became Monarch
- Chat commands (type !help) and an Influencer title
- The public dev server became a PvP server two days later
Bears and farming
- Bears in the wild, and crops to plant and grow
- Bears leave you alone until you attack them, and then they are deadly
- Bear headdresses, sleeping bags, backpacks and quivers
- Pots for trees, bushes and plants, bamboo blowpipes and nightshade poison
- Karma auras a few days later, so bad players are easy to spot
Grass, particles and optimizations
- About 50% more frames per second
- Grass and particle effects, both in settings
- No more falling through the ground or slipping through walls
World 1 wiped
- Players had claimed the whole map and walled in the last zone, so we wiped World 1
Third Distinguished Player
Terraplayz
For dedication to the game, and for being the first player to mine over 100,000 boulders
Faster on weak laptops
- Big optimizations for low-end laptops and Chromebooks
- On a weak laptop inside last wipe's biggest base, the frame rate went from about 10 to 24
- Most of our players are on weak laptops and Chromebooks
OG, Bug Finder and Distinguished titles
- Titles in game for early players, bug hunters and Distinguished Players
- A bandage cooldown, and auto-scaling for low-end devices
Jumping, headshots and bandages
- World 2, in US East
- Jumping, arrow drop and headshots for double damage
- Bandages that heal 20
- A field of view setting and the first controller support
Mobile, highscores and titles
- A PvP rating that works like chess Elo
- A 30-second respawn timer on sleeping bags
- New highscores, and a title in chat for every #1
- The king shows up on the map
Playable on phones
- Automatic fullscreen, a settings page with tabs, a fog toggle and terrain shading
- Your weapon and shield now show in first person
- Faster tool raiding, stronger armor, and backpacks that no longer break in PvP
Friends list and character customization
- Gender, skin, hair and beards
- Friends and ignore lists
- Days twice as long as nights
- Crossbows at the anvil
- Before the wipe we put a ton of dynamite in chests across the map
Crowns, jewelry and crossbows
- Gold, ruby, diamond and emerald necklaces, each with its own perk
- Crowns you can craft
- Crossbows, and stronger bows
- Hit markers and a screen that shows who killed you
- A public test server for PvP
- The first player to craft and wear a crown would be first on a future Hall of Fame page
New player models
- A new player model with about half the polygons
- Room for crossbows, jewelry and character options later
- The next goals: 60 FPS on an ordinary laptop, then controls for phones
Private messages and a world map
- Private messaging, a world map and the list of players online
- A better minimap and tutorial
Part 4 · 2018 to 2020
Moving on: 3D
We rebuilt the game in 3D with Babylon.js. A longtime friend, new to 3D modeling, made the models and later redid the sprites and UI.
Better 3D models and raiding
- Dynamite hits 1000 in a small blast, bombs 500 in a wide one
- Raiding with tools is slow but cheap
- Spikes twice as strong, chests half as strong
- New oak and maple trees
Accounts and 3D terrain
- Account registration, respawning and a Play Now button
- Play Now gives you a throwaway account that is deleted when you die
- The terrain became 3D (along with a chicken apocalypse)
- Hundreds of chickens fleeing players at once lagged the server, so now there are about five times fewer
Second Distinguished Player
aritianfanalfirin
For his dedication to the game, and for being friendly and helpful to new players
A TikTok and a traffic spike
- A TikTok by Levfo got 27,000 views and brought 450 visitors in a day
- To keep up we split the game and web servers, moved files to a CDN and minified the code
Smoother walking and Players vs Devs
- Walking without teleporting, even at 300+ ping, and the first Players vs Devs wipe event
- An in-game tutorial
- Our plans for 2020, nearly all of which shipped: quick play, accounts, sleeping bags, farming and mobile
First Distinguished Player
jbaker96
For his dedication to the game, everything he had achieved in it, and his friendliness to other players
Explosive raiding
- Sulfur, gunpowder and nitroglycerin
- Bombs and dynamite from the alchemy table
- Day and night, shadows and a bigger map
- Kilns for glass, clay and charcoal
- Raiding with a pickaxe takes much longer now
Voice chat, a new UI and the foundry
- Hold V to talk to players near you
- A completely new interface
- Foundries for making alloys
- Eleven metals, each about as rare as it is in the Earth’s crust
- Large and medium ores made rarer, and accounts with under 30 minutes played now decay, which cuts lag
The foundry update
- Tin, tungsten, titanium and their alloys
- The workbench and anvils
- Metal spikes, doors and chests
- Shared zones, so friends can build together
- Stronger metals hit harder and protect more, but weigh more and slow you down
- Gold locks need no key, and iron makes the standard keys and locks
New metals and alloys
- New metal types and alloys
- A foundry for collecting and smelting ore
- Metal walls, doors and other building pieces
Now in 3D
- Low-poly 3D that runs on most computers, even without a strong graphics card
- On July 15 our first Discord announcement fixed a plant bug that dropped frame rates, and an item duplication bug
The 3D alpha opens
- A very early 3D version, opened for testing
- The player model was rigged, with equipment showing on it
Locks and a player model
- Object locks and a basic player model
- Two hired modelers left the player model unfinished, so we finished it ourselves
The first 3D renders
- The world drawn in 3D with Babylon.js, white spheres standing in for models
- Then the first object, animal, tree and building models, a new UI and fire
Part 3 · 2015 to 2017
The break, and the browser rebuild
With Java applets on their way out, we stopped for a while, then rewrote the game for the browser.
Now in your browser
- Rewritten from Java to JavaScript in six months, after browsers dropped Java applets
- Nothing to download and no sign-up
- Highscores, a minimap and music
- Still online as Classic Morterra, though it no longer gets updates
The browser rebuild
- Rewritten with Node.js and WebSockets, drawn on an HTML canvas
- Rendering, sleeping, collisions and equipment, then inventory, zones and combat
Alpha 1.6 and bow hunting
- A 1 MB Java download
- A video of hunting with a bow
Land of Death
- The first trailer
- Wake up in the wilderness, build log spikes and find somewhere safe to sleep
A long pause
- Development mostly stopped, but the server kept running
- Java applets were dying in browsers, which held the game back
- By 2017 we knew Node.js and some HTML, CSS and JavaScript, so we started over for the browser
Part 2 · 2011 to 2015
The Java years
A Java game, built mostly during summer and winter breaks from school.
The Java game goes live
- Karma, an inventory, growing plants, animations, collisions, and keys for doors and chests
- A first website with a download link, since browsers were dropping Java applets
- Horses and bases by the end of the month
A name: Morterra
- Items, equipment, health, hunger and thirst, and zones to build in
- A flag to claim a zone, boulders to mine, an anvil for smithing and plants for food
- Every sprite drawn by hand in MS Paint and GIMP
- Morte means death and terra means land
- We waited a year for morterra.com to come free
Multiplayer, sprites and a stress test
- Pictures on screen and multiplayer partly working
- A player sprite, a chat box and a login screen
- A ton of fake players online at once
- The game changed names several times before it became Morterra
The first code
- A Java 2D application meant to run as a browser applet
- In the earliest screenshot, from November 13, 2011, the mouse turns the picture and the arrow keys move it
- Our only coding before this was running RuneScape private servers in middle school
- A login screen and the first connections to a server
Part 1 · 2005 to 2010
The idea
Years before any code was written.
A world with no rules
- Anyone can fight anyone, which makes every action exciting
- Like RuneScape's Wilderness everywhere, with the building of Age of Empires and Minecraft
- Played in the browser, so anyone could join from anywhere
- We learned to program so we could build it
See where it's at now
Play free