Mark the date. The Stellarch closed alpha begins 24 July 2026, 16:00 UTC.
That is the moment the airlock opens. Pilots on the waitlist get in, we stress the systems together, and we tune the game with real hands on the controls before anything goes wide. This post is the honest map of how the closed alpha works: what you keep, what gets wiped, and what you can earn while the gates are open. No fine print buried at the bottom.
First, watch it actually move
We are not asking you to take our word for it. Here is real combat, running through the exact deterministic engine that ships in production.
Every match resolves from a seed. Same teams, same seed, same result, every single time, for every viewer. You can drag the scrubber, change the speed, and step through every event. A replay is not a highlight reel. It is the whole truth of the match, and you can check it yourself.
Same teams plus the same seed equal a byte-identical replay. Verify any battle you want.
One battle per league. Seeded, settled, replayed.
The landing page already lets you switch between four real matches, one from each league, and play them back at your own pace.
You draft a 7-card team, six monsters and a commander, across 8 affinities. The engine reads the mana cap, the allowed affinities, and the active rules, then it resolves the whole thing. No hidden dice, no server you have to trust.
This is the core loop the closed alpha puts in your hands. Draft. Battle. Climb.
What the closed alpha is
Stellarch is a deterministic trading-card game on Hive. The closed alpha is the first time a group larger than the dev circle plays it live.
It stays small on purpose. A tighter group lets us watch bot difficulty, balance, and the economy under real pressure and fix what breaks before we scale up. You are not a spectator here. You are the stress test, and the tuning pass runs on your matches.
The economy is frozen while we test
During the closed alpha there are no deposits and no withdrawals of any in-game currency. Balances stay inside the game.
This is deliberate. We are testing the economy, not running it live. Freezing the money rails lets us watch how rewards flow and where the pressure points are, without real value moving in or out while the numbers are still moving.
What resets, and what comes back
When the closed alpha ends, the game resets. The one thing that gets wiped is the currency you EARN in-game during the test. Those earned balances do not carry over, which keeps the economy and the leaderboard clean when the real game starts.
Almost everything else follows you to launch:
Every pack and every cosmetic you earn or buy during the alpha is granted to you again afterwards. That includes presale packs. Your KRED store credit is not reset.
So if you open packs in the alpha, you get those packs back. There will also be a presale, and those presale packs come back too. Cosmetics come back. Your KRED, the store credit you paid for, stays exactly where it is. The only thing that resets is the currency you earned in-play. Everything you actually bought or collected follows you over.
A sale and earn leaderboard, with rewards
The alpha will run its own sale and earn leaderboard, separate from the ranked ladder, with its own rewards. It tracks activity across the alpha, and the pilots at the top get paid for it.
Full detail on how it scores and what it pays comes closer to launch. For now: it is coming, it is separate from ranked, and it will be worth playing for.
Guilds keep what they build
Here is the exception to the reset that guild players will care about most. Guild progress is not wiped. It carries through to the live game.
On top of that, the guilds already active in the community, the Go guilds you already run, get to carry over some of their progress as a head start. Let me be clear about what that is and what it is not. It is a modest leg up for showing up early, not a power gap. It does not hand those guilds the ladder. A fresh guild formed at launch competes on the same terms. Early guilds get a small nod for being early, and that is the whole size of it.
Alpha-only titles and cosmetics
The closed alpha carries rewards that only exist during the closed alpha: unique alpha-only titles and cosmetics you can earn while the gates are open. These sit on top of the free gold Genesis promo card, The First Pilot, that every confirmed waitlist pilot already receives.
Miss the window and these do not come back. They are the mark of having been here first. I will announce the full list closer to launch.
Where Stellarch stands on money
While we are on the economy, here is the line we hold. Stellarch is fair, not free. Cards cost money and a stronger collection is a real edge. What we will not do is sell you a guaranteed win.
Spending grows your collection faster. It does not buy the match. A sharp small collection can outrank a wallet that bought one of everything, because knowing which cards matter beats raw spend. That is the game we are testing in this alpha, and the reset rules above exist to protect it while we tune it.
You can browse the full card catalog and read how it all works right now:
Two quiet ways to stay close to the build while you wait: the Discord is where the day-to-day happens, and our Product Hunt page is where launch day gets announced.
- Join the Discord → https://discord.gg/K3geA9hD28
- Follow our Product Hunt page (get notified the moment we launch) → https://www.producthunt.com/products/stellarch
Honest word on the date
I want to be straight with you about the timeline, because a date is a promise and I would rather under-promise than break one.
- The date might move backwards if I cannot move as fast as I want to.
- What I still have to build would have been roughly 6 months of work without AI, so estimating a date honestly is hard.
- I will keep you posted on the timeline as it firms up.
- I will try my best to polish performance as much as possible before launch, but there might still be hiccups when the gates open.
None of that changes the plan. It just means the plan has a real person behind it, not a marketing countdown. The rest of the detail, the exact leaderboard scoring, the head-start numbers, the full cosmetic list, gets announced closer to the launch.
Claim your spot before the airlock opens
The countdown is live on the front page, and the waitlist is the only way in for the closed alpha. Confirmed pilots get The First Pilot promo card and the chance to earn everything above.
Watch the countdown and enlist → https://stellarch.io/en/#waitlist
Draft. Battle. Climb. See you at the airlock on July 24.
Enlist & stay in the loop
- Join the closed-alpha waitlist → https://stellarch.io/en/#waitlist
- Follow
@stellarch on Hive → @stellarch
- Join the Discord → https://discord.gg/K3geA9hD28
Latest dispatches from Stellarch
- Giveaway: 100+ Packs and 10,000+ STEL for the First Pilots to Enlist
- We Said We'd Market Stellarch. The Push Has Started.
- Guilds and Brawls, Without the Spreadsheets
Latest updates from Stellarch
- Patch 0.12.0: House Rules
- Patch v0.11.4: Battle Lab, the Grand Vault, Staking, and Loyalty
- Patch 0.11.3: Make Your Mark
Stellarch is a deterministic trading-card game on Hive: draft a 7-card team, outplay your opponent, climb the ranked ladder. Browse the cards · Read the docs · See the leaderboard