What happens when a world ends

Most persistent games delete their history when a server closes. PlaneSim seals it, publishes it, and keeps it readable forever. Here is the machinery behind that promise, and the first world that already went through it.

Persistent multiplayer games have a quiet problem: they end. A server reaches its end date, the plug gets pulled, and three years of someone's airline vanishes along with everything their rivals built around it. The genre mostly treats this as unavoidable. We think it is a design failure, and PlaneSim was built around a different answer.

Seasons, posted in advance

Most PlaneSim worlds run a posted season: two, six, or twelve months, then the world closes. Some worlds run open ended. The close date is not a surprise announcement; it sits on the world's tile in the hub from the start. World 2 EU closes on 30 November 2026, and World 3, the global world, closes on 16 August 2027. Both say so where you pick them.

A posted season changes how a world plays. Worlds set their own clocks, some running at real time and some accelerated, but within a world everyone works against the same one: a late entry knows how much runway is left, and the endgame is a real phase instead of a slow bleed of departing players.

Closing is publication, not deletion

When a world reaches its close, the last save is final and the world is sealed: the full journal, the final standings, and a permanent record for every airline that flew. That seal is published on the archive, where any signed-in account can read it. Not a screenshot of a leaderboard. The actual books: routes, fleets, finances, the whole cast of carriers, with a day by day account of the run.

During a world's life, fog of war hides your rivals' loads and finances, because a real airline does not get to read a competitor's ledger. A closed world drops the fog entirely. The game is over; the history belongs to everyone who was in it.

Why you can trust an archive

The archive is not a marketing export. It falls out of how the engine works.

Every state change in a PlaneSim world is a journaled command. The world can be replayed from its journal byte for byte, and the engine's test suite enforces this on every build. So when a world is sealed, what gets published is not a summary somebody wrote; it is the world's own record, the same one the engine would use to reconstruct the entire run from day zero. If the archive said something the journal did not support, the replay would catch it.

This is also why we can promise the archive is permanent. It is a static, sealed artifact, stored redundantly, with nothing left running that could corrupt it.

The First World is already on the shelf

This is not a roadmap item. PlaneSim's first world ran 295 game days with 52 carriers and was sealed and published in August 2026. Its archive note reads, verbatim: "PlaneSim's first world, run during pre-alpha. Balance and history reflect a game still being built."

We kept that sentence deliberately. The First World's economy has rough edges, some of its AI carriers made strange decisions, and one bankruptcy chain in the mid game traces back to a bug we fixed months later. All of that is in the record, because that is what actually happened. An archive that only kept the flattering parts would not be worth keeping.

What this means for your airline

If you found an airline in World 2 EU today, here is the contract: the world runs to 30 November 2026, nothing about your airline is wiped or rebalanced under you while it runs, and when it closes, your airline's full story becomes part of a permanent public record. Your best route, your worst quarter, the week you cornered the Oslo slots. It outlives the world it was built in.

The wiki's reference articles cover the underlying systems in detail, all written from the engine's code: wiki.theplanesim.com. And the shelf itself is open at data.theplanesim.com, whether or not you ever fly here.