Stars Reach wants to revive the sandbox MMO with 40+ professions and player-built cities

Stars Reach is a new MMO from Raph Koster — one of the minds behind Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies — heading into early access sometime this summer. Koster describes it as a blend of SWG, RuneScape, Eve, and Ultima Online, built around procedurally generated planets that players can claim, govern, and reshape however they see fit.

The galactic map isn't static. Planets and space zones generate on the fly, wormholes open up new territories to explore and mine, and if players stop using a connection, it destabilizes and the zone gets discarded. That means a planet can be whatever its community decides — a full PvP warzone, a PvE trade hub, or anything in between. The terrain simulation runs surprisingly deep: rock can be melted into lava, eroded down through marble to limestone to chalk to sand, and that sand can then be heated into glass. During the demo, Koster carved a channel to drain a lake and watched the water erode the rock as it flowed into a valley — limited in scope, but apparently working as advertised.

The profession system is where Stars Reach gets genuinely interesting. There are over 40 separate XP tracks and more than 1,000 skills total. A character can multi-class into four professions at once and level all of them independently. Beyond the expected combat and crafting trees, there's botany and xenobiology — essentially Pokémon-style mini-games — a leadership track that rewards pro-social behavior like rescuing players under fire or running guild politics, and a journalism profession tied to an in-game news network where players can post articles or video links, earn XP from likes, charge money for content, and eventually unlock drone cameras.

What makes the ambition feel grounded is what playtesters are already doing with it. One of the largest guilds is an animal conservation union dedicated to preventing species extinction — pave over a habitat and those creatures are gone from the game permanently. Koster says players have invented steam power, built subways and elevators, formed governments, zoned public land for zoos and parks, and made music videos about their cities. Whether Stars Reach can deliver all of that at scale is an open question, but the sandbox MMO space has been barren long enough that it deserves a serious look.