Who forked whom: a DAoC server family tree

A question on Reddit this week: there are new seasons, a new freeshard, Offline DAoC and a pile of other projects, and it is hard to tell what's what. Is there a central list?

We didn't find one, so here is a first version: the open-source server projects and how they relate.

Updated 8 November 2026. bm01, who worked on OpenDAoC from the start, replied with the part we couldn't see from GitHub: the closed-source freeshards and how they descend from DOL. The diagram now includes them, and the database and New Frontiers entries are corrected. Thank you!

Caveat: this is a notional sketch, and it is likely incomplete and partly wrong. It shows only what public searches turn up. Much of what connects these teams, such as people moving between them, help given and code shared, doesn't show up there.

How to read it

• Blue projects are server cores, the emulators everything else runs on.
• Green projects are single-player (offline) games: you run the server on your own PC, usually with bots to fill the world.
• Purple projects are meant for more than one player: a co-op overlay and multi-player forks.
• Amber boxes are databases: the world content (mobs, items, quests) that a server loads.
• Grey dashed boxes have no public code. For the closed freeshards we rely on bm01's account; we can't check it against code.
• A solid arrow means "built on" or "forked from". A dashed arrow is a link we inferred from a project's description, not one it states or one nobody is sure of. A dotted amber arrow means one project borrows code or data from another. A dotted grey arrow means people or ideas moved between projects, but not usable code.

The short version

1. Dawn of Light (DOL) is the original open-source DAoC emulator, with over 20 years of history. Every project here goes back to it, and far more projects started from DOL than from OpenDAoC.
2. The longest-running freeshard line is closed source: DOL → Origins/Genesis → Phoenix (about half Origins/Genesis staff, half new people) → Celestius (started by developers who left Phoenix) → Eden (possibly after a merge with another team).
3. Uthgard is a separate DOL-based line: Uthgard 1, then Uthgard 2. How Uthgard started, and whether it shares anything with the Eden line, isn't known. Uthgard open-sourced some of its code, and OpenDAoC's navmesh builder (OpenDAoC-BuildNav) comes from Uthgard's pathing code. It's a tool, not part of the server, but it's still a link.
4. In 2021 the Atlas freeshard forked DOL as AtlasCore. A Phoenix developer helped, and some very early leaked Phoenix code, not usable as it was, shaped Atlas's architecture. That is why OpenDAoC has many classes named ECS-something although it isn't really an ECS. Atlas's database started from DOL's public database (db-public).
5. That code became OpenDAoC (2022). OpenDAoC targets classic DAoC (patch 1.65 era) and reworked the core for performance. Its git history still contains DOL's 2006 commits and AtlasCore's merges. The Blackthorn freeshard runs on OpenDAoC, and one of Blackthorn's developers also made Faith.
6. There are other, smaller DOL shards, such as BrotherLand 2, that we know little about.
7. In September 2026, Offline DAoC put OpenDAoC on your own PC with bots, as a single-player game. It is now on hold, but it set off most of this autumn's projects: over 20 forks in about two months, most of them written with AI coding tools (the projects say so themselves).
8. The bigger branches off Offline DAoC are Divided Realms (the current 1.130 client, every class, expansion content), Living Server (an add-on: bot raids, bot guilds and chat), and True 1.65 (a 1.65 rebuild checked against period sources).

The projects

Project	Built on	What it is
Dawn of Light	n/a	The original emulator. Supports clients up to 1.128.
db-public	DOL	DOL's public (vanilla) database. Atlas's database, and so OpenDAoC's, started from it. Later projects take expansion data from it.
AtlasCore	DOL	The Atlas freeshard's server code (2021–2022).
OpenDAoC + database	AtlasCore (database: db-public)	Classic-era server. The base of Blackthorn and of everything below it in the diagram.
Gaheris	OpenDAoC	A co-op overlay of scripts and database changes on top of unmodified OpenDAoC. It re-enables the Catacombs and Labyrinth classes and the later races, and adds artifacts, Master Levels and Champion Levels.
Offline DAoC	OpenDAoC	Single-player 1.65 with bots. On hold.
Divided Realms	Offline DAoC	Single-player on the 1.130 client: all classes, mounts, bots that raid and siege, hosting for friends. Credits Living Server, stefanrows, HearthDAoC and db-public.
Living Server	Offline DAoC	An add-on: bots raid, form guilds and talk.
stefanrows' fork	Offline DAoC	Co-op over Tailscale.
HearthDAoC	Offline DAoC	Multi-player with bots (archived).
True 1.65	Offline DAoC	1.65 as of November 2003, with item stats checked against period sources. It starts from the OpenDAoC database. It needs its own client.
True 1.65 Living Server	True 1.65	Living Server for True 1.65.
BotRealm	True 1.65 (probably)	Bots for every part of the game.
DOLSharpSolo	DOL	A DOL fork by the Divided Realms author.
ToA Sandbox 0.9	Offline DAoC + Divided Realms	Single-player Trials of Atlantis content. Release notes only, with no public code that we could find.

Closed-source freeshards (grey dashed in the diagram): Origins/Genesis, Phoenix, Celestius, Eden, Uthgard 1 and 2, Blackthorn, Faith, BrotherLand 2. Their places come from bm01's account, not from code.

We've dropped New Frontiers (a repository adding relic temples and towers to OpenDAoC). As far as bm01 knows, it isn't an actual project, just an experiment to see how easy the idea would be.

What's not here

• Official servers, including the new seasons, run Broadsword's own code.
• Most of 20 years of freeshards. Many more shards started from DOL than are shown here. Their history lives with the people who ran and played them, not on GitHub, Reddit or Wikipedia.
• How many people play each one. GitHub stars and commits show activity, not players.
• Clients. Almost everything here uses the retail client. True 1.65 ships its own client, and we are writing one too (progress).

Help wanted

This is a snapshot from 7 November 2026, updated on 8 November. It is built from GitHub's fork records, each project's README and credits, OpenDAoC's git history and, for the closed shards, bm01's account. If you were there and know a missing shard or a wrong arrow, tell us and we'll update it.

As bm01 points out, now that AI tools let one person build in days what used to take a team months, expect many more projects, and this chart may soon be unreadable. We'll keep the 20-year backbone readable and group the newest forks where we have to.