Fallen Earth Servers

Hi everyone,

I want to give you a real, behind-the-scenes look at where we are on bringing Fallen Earth back, because a lot of you have asked, and because the honest answer is more complicated than “we’re working on it.”

Many of you have lived through more Fallen Earth downtime than any of us have ever wanted. There was the hosting crisis that knocked us offline in early 2025, and then, on April 1, 2026 - unfortunately, not an April Fools’ joke - the game servers began spiraling out of control and taking down the hardware hosting Fallen Earth. We rebooted and started troubleshooting, but the issue returned immediately. That was followed by a separate incident at our EU data center involving a power surge and a small fire. No data was lost, but it delayed our ability to investigate the underlying server problem.

That second shutdown wasn’t only about hosting. It exposed a deeper problem with the software itself.

Why we couldn’t just turn it back on

Fallen Earth first launched in 2009. The backend running the game world isn’t one program, it’s more than a dozen specialized types of server processes working together. They simulate the world and its NPCs, handle login and character selection, keep the cluster synchronized, and communicate with the database.

All of that was written more than fifteen years ago for tools and operating environments that are now long out of support. Every year, the code becomes harder to build, run, and fix.

We have kept the servers online via duct-tape and hope as long as we could.

So to bring things back, we had to rewrite everything.

What does that look like

Many of you are aware that we had already started this effort several years ago. But the code base spans more than 300,000 lines of code, and it was only partially done.

Since we took the game down in April, we picked up that stalled effort to rebuild the backend on a modern, actively supported platform—moving the server cluster away from its original 2009-era code and onto something we can maintain in 2026 and beyond.

The goal is simple to say and very hard to accomplish: the same Fallen Earth, running on a foundation we can keep alive.

Same wasteland, same combat, same crafting, same mutations, and the same NPCs.

Rebuilding without changing the game

Fallen Earth’s rules aren’t written down in a neat design document. How damage is calculated, how loot rolls, how skills and mutations stack, and how NPCs move through the world all live inside the original software.

Players would notice immediately if those behaviors changed.

For this effort our number one rule has been to match the original exactly, quirks and all.

We enforce this through parity testing. For each rebuilt system, we run the original and new versions side by side using the same inputs. We then confirm that they produce identical results - often thousands of times - before trusting the new version.

Where we find a genuine, provable bug in the original code, we fix it. Everywhere else, we deliberately preserve the original behavior.

We also test with crowds of simulated players logging in, entering the world, moving around, and disconnecting simultaneously. That controlled chaos exposes problems a single tester would never find.

Where we are now

The rebuilt backend can now start the full server cluster and bring the world online.

Zones load. Thousands of NPCs spawn and begin running their AI. A player can log in, choose a character, and enter the wasteland on the rebuilt servers.

Getting here required fixing a long list of rebuild issues, along with a major pass on memory management that dramatically reduced server stalls.

One recent problem is a good example of how this work actually goes.

A traffic jam, a wrong turn, and a fix

The game world constantly answers questions like: How high is the ground here? If an NPC fires, does it hit a wall first?

Every player and NPC asks questions like these many times each second.

In the original design, the system could answer only one question at a time. Everyone else waited in line. When thousands of NPCs began asking at once, that line became a traffic jam and the server slowed down.

Most of these questions only read information. They don’t change the world, so many should be able to run simultaneously while operations that make changes continue taking turns.

Our first attempt at fixing this made things worse.

Under a real crowd, the system seized up and prevented players from entering the world. We ran a stress test with a couple dozen simulated logins, watched every one of them fail, and pulled the change that same day.

So we stopped guessing and started measuring.

We compared several different approaches and identified why our first attempt failed. We built a lighter solution, proved it in testing, and placed it back into the server.

This time, the same crowd of simulated players entered the world reliably under the same load that had caused a complete failure the day before.

Same test. Same load. Night-and-day result.

What’s next

The parallel-reads work is currently operating for ground-height checks. Next, we’ll extend the same approach to collision and line-of-sight checks, which are heavily used by active, fighting, and pathing NPCs.

After that comes more hardening, longer and heavier stress tests, and a continued system-by-system bug sweep until the rebuilt backend is reliable.

I’m not going to give you a date today. Backend timelines are easy promises to break, and getting this right matters more than getting it fast.

What I can tell you is that this is no longer a research project. It’s a running server cluster that starts the world, loads its zones and NPCs, and lets players enter the wasteland.

Fallen Earth deserves a foundation that lasts. That’s what we’re building.

Thanks for sticking with the apocalypse while we do.

Thanks, Matt

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