The First World, 295 days: a history

PlaneSim's first world ran 295 game days with 52 carriers and closed in August 2026. Its complete record is public. This is the short version of what happened in it, and what it taught us.

Every persistent game has a first world, and most of them are forgotten. Ours is on a shelf where anyone can read it.

The First World opened as PlaneSim's pre-alpha proving ground and ran 295 game days, from the 5th of January to the 27th of October by its own calendar, before it was sealed in August 2026. Fifty two carriers flew in it: beta testers who found us early, and the AI airlines that competed alongside them. The archive note we chose for it is one sentence: "PlaneSim's first world, run during pre-alpha. Balance and history reflect a game still being built."

That sentence is doing real work, so it deserves an explanation.

A world run on moving ground

The First World lived through more engine change than any world after it ever will. Features arrived while it ran. The scheduler was rebuilt under it. The AI carriers got new doctrine mid-season, learned to confine regional carriers to their home country, learned to cut routes on margin rather than raw load factor. Economy tuning that later worlds inherit as defaults was discovered here, sometimes by watching this world do something wrong.

Some of its history reflects that. There are stretches where AI carriers hoarded aircraft types they had no business flying, and a mid-game insolvency chain that traces to behavior we later corrected. We left every bit of it in the record. A history that only kept the flattering parts would be a brochure.

What the record actually contains

A sealed PlaneSim world is not a screenshot of the final leaderboard. The archive holds the final standings, the full cast of carriers, and each airline's books: routes, fleets, and finances across the whole run. During a world's life, fog of war hides your rivals' internals. A closed world is entirely unfogged; the game is over, and the history belongs to everyone who was in it.

The machinery behind this is the same machinery that runs the game. Every action in a PlaneSim world is a journaled command, and a world replays from its journal deterministically. The archive is the world's own record, not an export somebody curated.

Sealing this particular world was harder than designing the feature. The First World's journal was large enough to break our first attempt at hashing its final state, and old enough that early rows predated conventions the modern engine takes for granted. We rebuilt the verification tooling twice before the seal went on. Worlds born after it get sealed by machinery The First World forced us to write.

What it settled

Three design arguments ended during this world's run.

Persistence needed a shape. An open-ended pre-alpha world drifts; nobody plays an endgame that never comes. The First World's closure is why every world since carries a posted season on its tile, most of two, six, or twelve months, known from day one. World 2 EU closes on 30 November 2026 and has said so since the day it opened; World 3, the global world, opened in August 2026 and closes a year later.

The AI had to live under player rules. Early on it was tempting to give struggling AI carriers quiet advantages. Watching this world convinced us otherwise: the moment a rival's success is unexplainable, the economy stops being interesting. The AI here went bankrupt honestly, and the archive shows exactly which ones did.

And endings had to mean publication. The first close was the test of whether we would actually keep the promise on the front page. The shelf at data.theplanesim.com is the answer, with The First World as generation one.

Generation two is running now

World 2 EU is a region-locked world, 706 European airports, currently mid-season with its close posted for the 30th of November 2026. Everything it does right traces to something The First World did first, usually the hard way. When its season ends, it goes on the shelf next to its ancestor, and its players will be able to point at their airline's whole story.

The First World's record is open to any signed-in account. Start with the final standings, then look up whichever carrier interests you and read its books backward. The interesting parts are rarely at the top of the table.