Dear Community, 

while we are all busy with the Winterinvasion and the defence of our kingdom, as well as with the Memoryflies, we at S.T. have our hands full with the construction of the New World, in addition to the invasion and Real Life. In the course of the last two months, a few things have come to light that we would like to inform you about in trusting transparency, and we hope for your understanding.

We will not have S.T. ready for launch by the Darkest Days.

Originally, the current Belletristica was supposed to close its doors for good in December with the Darkest Days (around Christmas), only a minimal version was supposed to remain so that we wouldn't lose contact completely from one day to the next; so far our expectation. However, real life often makes for a change of plans, and since we agreed from day 1 of our project that RL and, above all, the health of everyone involved would take precedence, we didn't get as far as we had hoped and planned.

 But! We got an extension until the end of March.

Ben has kindly agreed to keep the current Belletristica open until the end of March. This means that our developers will have more time and peace to continue the rebuild and we'll see each other on the current Belle for a while longer.  How long we will need in the end remains to be seen – the sooner we can move, the better so that Ben is relieved as quickly as possible and the wait for the new Belle is over. However, this will only be possible once we have a stable version that we can expand over time.

 To guarantee this, we are hoping for a beta version in the spring!

Unfortunately, we can't give you a more precise timetable; the final version is being created in the background after the PoC (proof of concept) version that we presented to you in the video. There, it's all about the details: Things that take longer now, but save a lot of time (and nerves) in the long run (for example, sorting all the different data on a programming level). To ensure that the new world is robust enough for the migration, it must be tested beforehand. As soon as there is an opportunity to do so, we will let you know – and hopefully, together we will not only gradually get to know the New World in advance, but also get a good look at its robustness! 

We can understand that, with almost a month to go before Belletristica's original end date, this is too short of notice for some. And we fully understand that! Most recently we had really tried to stick to our original plans, but as a new team, we are also in a period of learning and hope that honest communication will benefit us all in the long run. Otherwise, we hope that the extension will make the postponed farewell to our current Belletristica a little easier (especially if the beta takes place beforehand).

As always, if you have any questions, you can ask them at the Infopoint, and we will do our best to answer them in a timely manner. Also: If a question has already been answered and someone knows the answer, please help each other!

 Your S.T.-Team