The timer had gone off, the message had disappeared, and nothing happened. Nothing at all. She figured that something was supposed to happen when the timer went off. But there were no adventurers or players, that she could tell at least.

“Hey Nyx, was something supposed to happen?”

“Something did happen.” Nyx had a grin on her face as she flew higher into the air. “Come with me.” Amara’s spirit body followed after her and headed higher into the sky. As she did, she was able to look at the terrain within the square area. But there was one part of the terrain that was different. The original greyed-out starter area was not greyed out anymore. Amara could tell that this was what Nyx was trying to show her. But it was not.

Nyx tugged at Amara and pointed in the distance towards the ocean. In the distance, moving on the surface of the ocean, there seemed to be a … train? Yes, train, moving across train tracks that seemed to automatically appear in front of it. But it was strange. There was only the locomotive, the front of the train, and no coach cars following it.

After a couple of minutes of studying the approaching locomotive, Amara spotted new figures that appeared in the distance. They looked to be coach cars that would usually be connected to the front of the train, the locomotive. The coach cars zoomed towards the locomotive and attached to its back, making the train look like an actual train again.

“The train is how players who were designated to this starting area are first sent here. Each coach car holds one of the many options that players can choose to play as, and they are separated by the type of race. For example, one car would contain players who chose elves as their race, while the other might contain players who chose the human race.” As the train came closer, Amara could see that it kind of looked like the train from the old harry potter movies.

After that, Nyx explained what the players and adventurers were doing while Amara was setting up her dungeon. “For the first 63 hours, players have been creating their characters and choosing their characters’ race. During this time, they also learned about their race lore, choose their class, learn about the world, and gain some general information about the dungeon that they would experience. For the last 9 hours, the players have been travelling to their starting area through the train. Throughout all of this time, they would have spent time preparing themselves, practicing their class, as well as learning to use the skills and abilities they received at level one.”

“Wait, so I spent 78 hours building the dungeon?” Amara was quite surprised at the amount of time she had spent. The timer previously only showed 40 hours, not 78.

“Yes, time flew by faster when you were in the darkroom, as well as talking to the Ghost World employee.”

“But, back to the incoming players, how were they placed and ferried into the starting area where my dungeon is?” Amara had been wondering about this for a while. In some games, players were locked by country or just generally placed in a random starting area. Still, she did not know how CMS was going to distribute the players to the starting areas.

Nyx snapped her fingers, and a screen popped up showing something like an infographic. The infographic showed brightly coloured countries of the world and some statistics and numbers to go along with it.

Nyx pointed to the countries and said, “There are about 11 billion people that populate the outside world. There are currently 5% of the world playing Core Microsystem, with that number suspected to increase as time goes on. 5% of 11 billion is about 550,000,000, which is too much for a dungeon to handle at once. So the developers made it so that players who were playing the game would be grouped in two ways. The first is by language. If a player, for example, could speak English, Spanish, and Russian, they would be able to choose a starting area where the main language was one of those. But most players were grouped in starting areas by the languages they speak.”

As Nyx spoke, the infographic changed to help describe what she was saying. Statistics about language and population popped up, and little animations about how players were grouped.

“The second way is by country and city. Cities and towns within countries all have population differences. The developers would take players and group them into groups of about 10,000 players within a starting area. So, they would split areas into grids. If one player was from a large city, then there would be multiple, sometimes even more than a hundred different starting areas. For example, the city of Toronto, Canada, has about 6 million people living within it. So if 3 million residences of Toronto played CMS, then there could be around three hundred different starting areas. This is to create a sort of joint economic possibilities and cooperation between communities.” With that, the infographic screen disappeared, and the explanation left Amara reeling.

This kind of blew Amara’s mind. To think that there would be so many starting areas created for a set amount of people. But that made a couple of questions pop up that she would have to ask Nyx about, as she had time to kill before the players reached the mainland.

“I have two questions.”

“Go ahead, Anaphiel.”

“First, do all starter areas have player’s controlling the dungeons? And second, are players of this starting area locked within the borders of this square area?”

“To answer your first question, no. There is a mix between game-generated dungeon cores and player dungeon cores. Your second question is the most important so far that requires a bit of explaining. Like many MMORPGs, players are stuck in a starting area before they could go out and explore the rest of the game. But in CMS, the way this works is that the majority of the players have to reach a certain level before the rest of the players within a starting area can leave. The level that they have to reach is level 60. Once a majority of the population of players within the starting area have reached this, they are then allowed to explore different parts of the game that will be added. The new parts will be added by a patch update.”

As soon as Nyx finished answering her questions, they heard a whistle blow. The train carrying the players had reached the mainland. It had stopped at a train station within the previously greyed-out area, one that Amara had never seen before, so it was probably added while she was asking Nyx questions. The players have arrived, and Amara anticipated watching and making notes about their reactions when they found her dungeon.