What to know
In 1995, the world wide web was still new. Companies such as Origin Systems or Electronic Arts had no websites, and even having the concept of having an online account with a company that wasn't just an email and local BBS (Bulletin Board Service) Provider such as AOL was new.
A shard is game server instance.
Origins
In 1995, the world wide web was still new. Companies such as Origin Systems or Electronic Arts had no websites, and even having the concept of having an online account with a company that wasn't just an email and local BBS (Bulletin Board Service) Provider such as AOL was new.
Back at Origin Systems when Ultima Online was made in 1997, 30 000 players were expected. As the beta was too large to download, it was sent by mail at a cost of $5, yet 15 000 people signed up within a week, making Origin realize they might need more servers. Origin Systems had to use rental space all around the world and travel to set up servers. For the sake of immersion, a fictional construct was created to describe them.
In Ultima One, there was a Gem of immortality created by the wizard Mondain, who had captured a world within. The gem of Immortality is shattered by the player at the end of the game to defeat the wizard, and when it was shattered, it created a multiverse of all the different shards.
Star Citizen
Most MMO structures have a fragmentation of the player base between shards. A player might not have room to join a friend on his world instance leading to both players having to join another shard else they can't play together.
Star Citizen aims to have a single persistent universe server that everyone exists on. So the player will never be separated from his friends. Nevertheless due to the fidelity of the dogfighting and physics simulation and the rendering of great amounts of spaceships it's not possible to handle thousands of players in the same area of space. Instead, Star Citizen uses Battle Instances.
On April 10th 2024, Cloud Imperium Games (CIG) held its own First Jump Day celebration on Star Citizens Tech Preview Channel. For this test of the progress on Server Meshing and Replication layer technology, CIG opened its first functioning Jump Gates, and allowed players to test travelling between two systems for the first time. Players were able to travel between Stanton and Pyro via wormholes, with each system streaming in and out seamlessly. During the test, Star Citizen also achieved 350 concurrent players in a single shard.
In 2026, Chris Roberts said that Star Citizen shards were running 700 to 800 people and would probably break a thousand that same year, maybe up to 2000, with the long term goal to have 10 000+ players in a shard.
Source: StarCitizen.tools. This article includes adapted Star Citizen Wiki content shared under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license. The Impound has added formatting, navigation, summaries, related links, and shopping links.