WIBO March Newsletter 2026

Welcome to March's Newsletter!

We ran a bit behind for March's newsletter due to the holidays, but we’ve got some exciting new updates to share with you this month!

As a reminder, we are still very early in development, and everything shown is currently a work in progress. All features, designs, and visuals are subject to change as we continue refining and building the foundation of Wildborne.

We truly appreciate your patience, support, and enthusiasm as we grow this project from the ground up. Now, let’s dive in!

Hi again everybody! This month was a major focus on performance improvements, back-end infrastructure, UI/UX improvements and game mechanics.

Items, Rarities & Player Inventories

A lot of work has been put into our online features lately, especially how we handle items and inventories. We're still brainstorming what kinds of items we'd like to have, and what role they may play in the game and their interactions.

Items that you find will have various interactions depending on what they are. Eating, drinking, examining and destroying items are supported right now. We're also thinking of ways to handle player storage and we'll eventually tie this into our den building mechanic/player housing so you have a place to store your items. For clans, we've considered using a "clan chest" where players in the same clan can deposit their items for other clan members to use (we've also talked about clan progression being it's own thing, like leveling and XP for clans, and quests that they have to complete collaboratively, but we'll share more about that in future newsletters).

As we add more items to the game we'll also be thinking about our item economy. Items will have rarities like other RPGs so you can easily distinguish rare items from common items. This will follow the RPG color convention for rarities (white for common, green for uncommon, yellow for rare, etc.).

What are items used for? Many things! As you explore, you'll find items all over the place. Items can be used for trading with other players, completing quests, sold for in-game currency and crafted for other items. Finding a brand new item isn't the end of it. When you discover an item for the first time, it'll unlock other areas of progression. Extra decorations for your Home Den, decorations for your Player Bio Card, and other unlocks.

Steam Achievements

We've been working on some basic achievements, just to get that system put into place! For now we have 8 achievements for things like reporting bugs, exploring, playing for a certain amount, visiting a point of interest, and others. If you have suggestions for fun and creative achievements, please let us know in the "Suggestions" thread in our Discord.

Performance Improvements & Additions

We're always focused on performance improvements and ways we can make Wildborne run as well as possible. As we keep going forward with development we'll continue to test on varied PC specifications to see areas where we can improve.

• We'll be including some upscaling technology in our project, such as DLSS, FSR and XeSS. With DLSS already being in the project, and it will be included in our next closed alpha test. (It's important to note that these are not band-aid performance fixes for us, making sure the core game runs as well as possible is ideal, and upscalers are just a way to squeeze out a little more performance).

• We've been discussing upgrading our engine version from 5.5 to 5.6, but we're still weighing the pros and cons of this since it would be great change for us. However, other game development teams have claimed that upgrading engine versions can sometimes boost performance significantly, so we've been considering this. The new features that 5.6 offers are very enticing as well.

• We've added a benchmark system to the game. When Wildborne is launched for the first time, it'll quickly go over your specs, run a short test, and set the graphics quality according to that. Minimum, Maximum and Average FPS is also recorded in the settings menu, so you can see how your computer is performing while in the game.

Character Creator

I've been working on the character creator some more as well!

One new addition is glowing eyes, you can set this to whatever color you like and also adjust the intensity of the glow. As we go forward too, we'll add in texture options for eyes so you have more customization over just the default eye texture. Adjusting eye size, and pupil size is already supported.

Character Creator Limitations: Previously, players could technically add as many markings to their character as they like, but as we continued working on this, we discovered some limitations with this system. For now, Markings will be allocated to slots, and there will be a total of 6 marking slots. We may increase this as we continue testing, but this will be the current limit for markings. We've also added a limit for characters, which is at 12 for right now. This will also potentially be increased in the future.

In-game Bug Reports

I've added an in-game bug reporter to the pause menu, so you can quickly report a bug to staff within the game itself. Bug reports immediately get sent to our moderation server for the development team to look at, and moderators notified. This gives us player information such as: Your character name, Discord Username (in case we need to contact you for more details, and this is completely optional), the current map, coordinates, a description of the bug and your hardware/graphics info.

Bug reports will also tie into our Player Mail system. If you file a report, and actions are taken by the development team, you will receive in-game mail following up and letting you know that it was fixed. We love to reward good player behavior, so successful bug reports will sometimes come with a special item or other things as a gift in your mail.

I'm excited to share more things about the game for April's newsletter. Until then, there's still plenty of work to do! Thank you all for supporting us and keeping up with the game!

This month, Zeph is showcasing some of the game’s weather features for you all to scroll through, along with scenes from the in-progress canyon map they’ve been working on. We’re incredibly excited to be making use of Unreal Engine 5 and the features it provides, the possibilities feel endless as we continue striving to make Wildborne as immersive as possible!

Asil Badlands WIP - YouTube

Auccultist has stepped into the Tundra, taking on its development and beginning work on NPC preset skins. With each addition, Wildborne is steadily coming to life, one piece at a time.

Zio’s handcrafted root system is taking shape, with intricate details woven throughout. Hidden within are crystals (WIP) tied deeply to our lore. Small touches with big meaning. This is no small task, as they work to model and bring the Mother Tree in our lobby map to life in a truly powerful way.

March seemed to fly by, but now that the holiday has passed, we’re getting back into the rhythm of development, better late than never! Despite the holidays and a few staff absences, we’ve seen some exciting progress across multiple areas of the project. We’re also happy to welcome several new team members into our 90-day program, where they’ll have the opportunity to step into larger roles and grow with the project as we continue moving forward.

As always, we want to remain transparent with our community. At this time, there are a few roles that are still going unworked due to limited funding, and as a result, certain areas of development are progressing more slowly than we would ideally like. With additional support, we know these areas could move forward much more efficiently.

Because of this, we’ve created a questionnaire for you, our community, to share your thoughts, feedback, and preferences. Your input plays a huge role in helping us determine the best direction forward, and we’d truly appreciate you taking the time to participate and be a part of that process.

Wildborne Questionnaire 2.0

On my end, it’s been a quieter month in terms of public facing updates, as much of my time has been dedicated to backend operations, staff coordination, and the more administrative side of development. While these efforts aren’t always visible, they’re incredibly important in keeping everything running smoothly and setting us up for long term success.

There’s a lot happening behind the scenes that we’re not quite ready to reveal just yet, but we’ve brought on several incredibly talented individuals. Step by step, piece by piece, everything is coming together as we continue working to bring the world of Wildborne to life.

Stay Wild!