The Backpack Comes Online

Introduction

The Forum invaded the city. It's time to take it back. The backpack lands as a full open-world system: with loot on your shoulders, every Shard and stack of MILD logs the moment you pick it up. MILD is server-side test currency, the way we run and tune the full gameplay loop offchain before the game goes fully onchain. It lets us stress every system, looting, carrying, banking, extraction, with real stakes and no real assets on the line. Everything in this release points at one thing. The loot you fight for is yours to carry and manage in your backpack.

The Backpack Lands

The backpack is live. This is the system the Open World loop hangs on and one step closer to a full extraction loop inside Wiami. One place to manage your loadout and everything you scavenge as you move through the city. Pick something up and it enters your backpack immediately.

Items stack by quantity now. Before, you were capped by what fit in your active item slots. Now they stack, and your bag holds far more of them. That turns your consumables into a real gameplay decision: how many stims, how much ammo, what you sacrifice to carry more of what keeps you alive on a deep run. Split stacks, merge them across your backpack, and move consumables freely between equipment and backpack. Ammo got smarter too. Ammo boxes live in your backpack and burn automatically when your equipped weapon runs dry.

Your Loadout, On Display

Loadout slots show your equipped gear. Equip an item and it drops into its matching slot while the rest of the stack stays in your backpack. Each slot reads the most recent item of its category, so a glance tells you what you're walking into the Breach with.

Drag-and-drop is smart. While you're dragging, only the slots that can take the item stay open. Everything invalid locks itself, then unlocks the moment you make a successful drop. Equipment slots sync and persist correctly. Weapons, attachments, and avatar equipment all fire proper equip-state events, and weapon customization icons map by NFT category. Avatar equipment is in the drag-and-drop system too.

Forum Drones

The Forum brought a new face to the fight. Forum Drones are a new enemy archetype now sweeping the city, and they change how a Breach reads when they show up. Enemy targeting got sharper too. Agents and Drones pick their targets more intelligently when they've got multiple Wilders to choose from, so getting caught in the open costs more than it used to.

Directional Hit Indicator

A new directional hit indicator has been added to the HUD, showing on your screen the direction you're taking fire from. Front, left, right, or behind, one glance tells you where the threat is so you can turn, take cover, or push back instead of spinning blind.

MILD Hits the Streets

There's a new pickable currency in the city. MILD drops in the world for you to scavenge as you run your routes. Grab it, carry it, build your stack. It's a server-side test currency, here so we can stress the economy and tune the faucets and sinks before anything touches the chain. The first taste of the economy coming online, piece by piece. More on this below.

Agora Alley

All roads lead back to Agora Alley. Across the street from the Trenches and the first interactive hub in the game. This is where a run ends or doesn't. The extraction point sits here, so every deep haul comes down to the same trip: fight your way back through the city to the Alley with a backpack full of MILD and Shards, knowing the walk home is the part that kills you. It's also where you spend what you survived with. The Satin Passage runs through the Alley, home to the Black Market. It's in the world now, with full p2p trading coming online soon: turning banked MILD into gear, consumables, and whatever another Wilder is willing to sell.

The destinations standing in the Alley now:

• Meridian Financial (the Bank)
• EZK Neural Station (Extraction Shop)
• City Storage (Storage Facility)
• Satin Passage (Black Market)
• Remedy (Pharmacy)

Hero Locations

More of Wiami's key destinations are starting to take shape. A full set of hero locations are now in the level, the spaces that will anchor the extraction loop and give each district its landmarks.

What's in now:

• Air Wild (Clothing Store)
• Kin Market (Food Court)
• Relay 24 (Convenience Store)
• Wiami Police Department (Police Station)
• NEXUS Medical Center (Hospital)
• Switch Depot (Pawn Shop)
• WcDonalds (Restaurant)
• Neon Pistons (Repair Shop)
• The Armoury (Gear Shop)

Deeper functionality and art polish come online in the passes ahead, but these key destinations now exist in the world.

City Polish

New HLOD updates are in across the level, refreshing the city background visuals. Wiami reads cleaner at distance whether you drop into neon or daylight.

Bugs

Fixed This Build

We ship fast and we ship in public, and that means we fix in public too. Here's what got squashed this release:

• FPS no longer caps at 30 when you open the scoreboard inside a vehicle
• Dragging an item out of a loadout slot no longer leaves a stale duplicate behind
• Equipment drops are no longer wrongly rejected
• Fixed agent animation issues when grabbing a weapon
• Picked-up items now save correctly in the backpack
• Destructible bollards no longer get blown apart by gunfire
• The minimap now shows your route after you respawn
• Late-joining players no longer see holes where destructibles should be
• Lowered the volume of the low-shield audio cue
• Fixed the get-in-vehicle animation
• Fixed a weapon pickup issue
• Agents now detect different player characters entering battles
• Fixed female NPC audio
• Fixed Breach music
• Player perspective now holds when entering and exiting a vehicle
• Fixed zoom and rotation in the avatar section of the main menu

Known Issues

Shipping in public means owning what's still broken. These are the main ones we're tracking, fixes incoming:

• Some attachments aren't working on weapons inside the backpack
• Weapons can duplicate when moved from loadout to backpack
• Weapon attributes (like color) can change when swapping loadout to backpack to loadout
• In certain cases, the weapon you spawn with in-game can differ from the one in your loadout
• In certain cases, a weapon equipped in your loadout may not appear on your character
• In certain cases, attachments stay equipped when moving from loadout to backpack
• Shards read by quantity and not rarity
• Some missing/broken signage on hero locations

What's Next: Season Zero: The Invasion

Targeting release the week of June 15th: the full v1 gameplay loop. This is subject to development timelines, but when Season Zero officially starts. Season Zero turns Wiami into a live extraction city where the cargo in your backpack is at risk until you get it out. You drop into an open-world multiplayer instance, push through Breaches seeded across the map, and fill your backpack with MILD and Shards torn off the agents you put down.

None of it is yours yet. Cargo only becomes permanent once you bank your MILD at the ATM, extract your Shards at the Neural Station for a small MILD fee, then lock it away in City Storage. The first extraction point is in Agora Alley, so a run is long and dangerous. Die before you finish and the backpack is gone.

We will also introduce leveling and XP in the Open World. You earn it whether you live or die, banked the moment it's logged, so even a run that ends face-down in an alley still moves you up the ladder. Your loadout stays with you too, so you can run again immediately. XP is the one thing the Forum can't take off your body, and it's what climbs you from Bronze to WILD across the season, rank built run by run.

Meet another Wilder in a Breach and you choose: shake hands or take their cargo, knowing a kill makes you richer and a bigger target in the same breath. Trade your hauls at the player-run Black Market in the Satin Passage.

Season Zero runs entirely off-chain on test currency and test assets. A clean closed loop to stress every system before the real economy comes onchain. The onchain items you already own come along for the ride, but they're at risk like everything else. Lose one in a run and it's removed from the game for the rest of the season, gone from your stash the same way cargo dies on your body. Your actual onchain asset never leaves your wallet and comes back into play when Season Zero ends. That gap, real ownership held safe while the in-game copy is fully exposed, is exactly what we're testing: how players handle risk when the thing on the line feels like theirs.

Everything runs off-chain for Season Zero so we can push the systems harder than a live economy would allow. What we learn here shapes the long-term loop. The goal is to come out of Season Zero with a clear answer for how the base loop works, then bring every system onchain with real items and a real economy you earn by playing in the world. Full details in the next ZINE.

Get in the city. Carry more than you should. Get it out alive.

The city is awake. Make some noise.

With blessings,

The Wilders