It's very close... You can feel excitement building up again!
During this week's Town Square, the announcement was made that this weekend (without a clear starting day) we will be able to start playing to try to break and offer feedback for Land 1.5 on the mavericks test server.
For anyone hoping to see Land 1.5 released on the next maintenance window (August 15th), if speed of the test server is the same as in the real game (I'm thinking about clearing plots here, in particular), I doubt we will see the expansion released then, as it won't make sense from the testing point of view.
If everything goes ok with mavericks' testing and no serious bug is revealed, I'd say it's likely to see Land 1.5 launched on the following maintenance window (August 22nd), giving at most one week and a half on the mavericks test server before that happens. That seems enough to simulate various scenarios of initial gameplay. But I wouldn't exclude even the possibility of a week later.
If I remember correctly the discussions from the land channel on discord before Land 1.0 was launched, I believe ALL land owners received the maverick status to be able to test the game at that time, and should still have it. Maybe you should check, if you are a land owner and haven't tried out Land 1.0 on the mavericks test server.
What will we be able to test this time? Practically the entire gameplay of Land 1.5, which is:
- claiming totems (we currently have totem claims, not totems!)
- (un)staking cards on land plots (including Runi and/or a Power Source)
- (un)staking titles and totems
- (un)staking DEC
- buying grain from the game (not from other players!)
- buying power sources from the game
- clearing plots
- selecting the job (Farming Grain, SPS Mining, Researching Secret of Praetoria) and putting cards to work; changing work option (job)
- collecting (and paying) taxes - automatically, I think
- harvesting resources (grain)
- using time crystals
What won't we be able to test? What it's not included in Land 1.5 and will be part of Land 1.6:
- p2p market/transportation (including withdrawing grain to Hive-Engine, I believe, otherwise it would be a market on HE)
- land surfing
- prefix titles
On the mavericks test server, every player will be given plenty of assets (DEC, cards, plots, etc.), none of them real, but great for testing purposes.
One important aspect, besides finding potential bugs, is to get used to the interface. So that when the game launches, you don't explore aimlessly throughout the UI and potentially make costly mistakes with real assets.
I'll include here a reminder to self: to remember to test if land-related operations like clearing plot, staking on plot etc. work both if the deed is locked and unlocked. Also if cards need to be locked before staking on land (that is what we were told a while ago).
I expect we will see many Land posts this weekend, next week and then afterwards when the game launches. So there will be an opportunity for non-mavericks to see the gameplay or screenshots from it, before it goes live. I will obviously post more than usually about that too!