Two announcements this week, and the smaller one is a patch. Eclesiar arrives on Steam on 1 October 2026 — the day the game turns two years old. Everything else below is what changed between 23 and 29 August, headlined by the update that quietly removed the language barrier from chat and from the newspaper.

Eclesiar launches on Steam — 1 October 2026

We finally have a date. Eclesiar releases on Steam on 1 October 2026, exactly two years after the world opened. Same world, same account, same countries and the same wars — just a front door on the largest games platform there is, and a wave of new citizens walking through it.

There is one thing you can do right now that genuinely matters, and it takes ten seconds.

Wishlist Eclesiar on Steam. Wishlists are what decide whether Steam shows the game to anyone on launch day. Every single one is another player who might end up in your country, your military unit, or on the wrong end of your rifle. Open the Eclesiar Steam page and wishlist it here.

Then send the link to someone. A country is only as strong as the people in it, and on 1 October we would all rather be recruiting than defending.

The language update

This is the big one. Eclesiar is played in dozens of countries and the game already speaks 37 languages — but the things players wrote to each other were still locked behind whatever language they happened to write in. That ended this week.

Chat now arrives in your language

Messages written in another language now appear in yours, across public, country, group and private conversations. Each translated line carries a small Show original link, so the author's exact words are always one click away.

  • Your own words are never rewritten. If you write in a language other than your interface language, your message used to quietly rewrite itself into machine phrasing seconds after you sent it. Your messages now always appear exactly as you typed them — in public channels and in private messages alike.

  • Nothing is held back waiting for a translator. Messages are delivered instantly. If the game has never seen a phrase before, the line lands in the original and then rewrites itself in place a second later when the translation catches up. No refresh, no delay.

  • Switching language pre-loads your history. Save a new language and the game quietly re-fetches your public channels, group channels and open private conversations in the background, so chat is already translated by the time you open it.

Newspaper articles translate themselves

Open an article written in a language that isn't yours and it simply appears in your own. There is nothing to press. The headline, the subhead, the body and every letter and reply are swapped in together, and a small bar above the article tells you what it was translated from, with a button to flip back to the author's original words at any time.

  • Headlines are translated in the feeds too. The dashboard Articles panel and the newspaper window's article list show headlines in your language. If a translation finishes seconds after the cards are already on screen, the headline swaps itself in without a refresh.

  • Shared article links read in the visitor's language. The public article pages you paste into Discord now serve the translation for that language, so the person clicking your link reads it in theirs.

  • Changing your language refreshes the article feed on the spot, instead of leaving yesterday's language sitting on the dashboard.

  • The archive is deliberately left alone. Translation applies to newer articles only; older pieces open in the language they were written in, exactly as before.

Prefer the original? One switch turns it all off

Settings → Interface → Language has a new toggle: Always Show Original Text. Turn it on and chat messages and articles stay exactly as their author wrote them — the translation is still one click away whenever you want it. It is off by default, saved per browser, synced across your open tabs, and included in your interface presets.

Also fixed

  • Articles that could get permanently stuck — an image-only article losing its translated headline, a brief outage branding an article as "language unidentifiable" for a month, or a genuinely failed translation making you sit through the full retry wait every time you opened it.

  • Readers whose language is a regional variant (pt-BR, es-MX, zh-TW and friends) no longer see "still translating" on articles already written in their language.

  • The global Hot articles feed could simply fail to load. It was ranking every article ever written to pick the top 25. It now loads.

  • Hindi has been added to the public site, the pages search engines show, and every automated email — signup, validation reminders, password recovery, email change, newsletter and support replies.

War

The Battle Report was crediting the wrong hero

The Battle Report's MVP cards sat under a "War total" heading while actually reading a single round's ranking. In a nine-round war that credited the MVP with roughly a ninth of their real damage — and it could name the wrong player entirely, because the leader of the final round is not always the leader of the war. The MVP cards and the fighter counts beside them now sum every round of the war. The per-round ranking lists below them are unchanged: they still show one round at a time, and still crown that round's Battle Hero.

Battles now remember which side you chose

Wars where the side is yours to pick always reopened on the attacker. Close a training war or a pirate battle you were defending, come back, and you had been silently moved across the field. Your pick is now remembered per battle and restored when you reopen it — on the full battle screen and in a detached battle window — and refreshing mid-fight no longer yanks you off the side you chose. Where the server locks you to a side, that still wins.

Share a battle

There was no way to link somebody to a battle from inside the game. Every war card in the Wars panel now has a share button, and so does the battle screen itself — top-right on desktop, bottom-left thumb rail on phones. It opens your device's share sheet where there is one, otherwise it copies the link and flips to Link copied. Shared links are language-free on purpose, so whoever opens it reads the battle in their own language, not yours.

Fixed in battle

  • A captcha crash that took down the war screen. If the anti-bot challenge fired before its script had finished loading, the entire page died behind the crash panel — while travelling and while fighting, and on the password-reset page, which meant people who then could not get back in at all. Fixed on both, with the reset form now giving up gracefully after 15 seconds instead of spinning forever.

  • The emoticon picker in the war and building HUDs grew upward off the top of the screen and slid under the scoreboard once you owned enough emoticons. It is now measured against the space actually available and scrolls inside itself.

Politics

The message of the day is now a government power, not a law

Setting your country's message of the day used to require tabling a bill in congress and waiting for a vote. It is now an instant government action.

  • The president, vice president or minister of public relations can publish it directly — a megaphone button sits beside the message box in the Country chat channel, on desktop and mobile.

  • The editor opens pre-filled with the current message, with a 255-character limit and counter, and a Publish now button. It goes live immediately and is pushed to every connected citizen in real time.

  • It is free. No gold cost and no proposal.

  • One announcement per country every 2 hours. The limit belongs to the country, not the officer, so the president, vice president and PR minister all share the same timer — and the editor shows a live countdown while it runs. Each published message stays active for 24 hours.

  • The old Country MOTD congress proposal has been retired on both clients. Bills tabled before the change still show up, still get voted on and still apply.

  • The announcement card that shows the message to citizens now also appears on bare war and construction scenes, and is shown from level 5 upward so newer players are not interrupted by it.

Party presidents can finally recruit

The Party Office panel gains a new first command: Invite member — Recruit a citizen of your country. Search citizens by name, see each candidate's avatar and level, and press Invite. Players already in your party are marked Member, ones you just invited flip to Invited, and tapping a result opens their profile. Your party needs an ideology chosen first.

  • Pending invitations are now visible from the parties list. If a party has invited you and you have none, the Political Parties screen shows a banner at the top with the count and a link to your invitations, where you can accept or decline. Previously an invitation was only reachable from its notification — miss the toast and you never found it.

  • "Invite to Party" explains itself instead of vanishing. The profile menu entry used to disappear entirely when your party had no ideology set. It now stays visible with the reason underneath it.

  • Winning a party presidency no longer needs a reload. Win an election mid-session and every president-only control used to stay hidden until you fully reloaded the game. Opening the party page now refreshes your role immediately.

Impeachment works again

Filing a President Impeachment bill from the new Congress screen failed every time — the bill has no field to fill in, so no target was ever sent, and the server rejects an impeachment with no target. The bill now names the sitting president automatically and shows them in a read-only row on the review panel. If the office is vacant it cannot be drafted at all, and says so. Impeachment remains free.

Markets, contracts and new players

Guest accounts — the instant-play accounts that let someone try Eclesiar before registering — now have clear economic limits, enforced on the server as well as in the interface. Full accounts are completely unaffected.

  • Market: a guest can browse the whole order book but may only buy the cheapest offer of an item. If several sellers tie at the best price, all of them stay buyable. Selling and listing are untouched.

  • Monetary market: a guest can see every price but cannot pick a specific order. The simple exchange, which always takes the best available rate, stays open to them.

  • Contracts: a guest can read contracts but not create or accept them. Rejecting and cancelling stay available on purpose, so a guest can always clear their contract inbox.

Registration itself got safer and clearer. Turning a guest account into a real one now finishes with a password you choose: username and email in-game, then set the password on the page your confirmation email links to, with live requirements and show/hide toggles. Along the way we fixed a guest at the level 7 wall being shown that same wall on top of the password page they had just been sent to, a dead or expired confirmation link logging you out of a perfectly good session, and — for everyone, not just guests — finishing registration in one tab signing you out in another.

Elsewhere in the economy: country and currency pickers are now sorted alphabetically instead of by creation order, in the monetary market and in a country's new-law form.

Recruitment rewards were frozen — and are unstuck

This one is worth reading if you have been inviting people. The hourly job that scores your recruits had jammed: it kept re-reading the same batch of oldest, long-dead referrals every hour and never reached newer ones. Recruits who had genuinely been playing for two and three weeks still counted as "not activated" — which meant recruiter milestone payouts stopped landing, the recruitment leaderboards and the monthly country objective counters read zero, and the metrics page showed no activations at all.

The queue now rotates properly and brand-new referrals are scored first. Milestones owed while it was stuck are paid retroactively as the backlog drains — nothing was lost, it was only stalled. We also made sure repairing the backlog does not fire thousands of "your recruit has gone quiet" nudges about people who left years ago.

Interface and mobile

  • Mentions are colour-coded by what they point at. Players blue, countries teal, military units rose, parties purple, holding companies green, NPCs grey — on the chip in a message, the chip in your composer as you type, and the suggestion list where you learn the code. Hovering a non-player mention now also names its kind in words, and the palette has a separate version for the light theme, where the dark inks were unreadable.

  • Links in chat are clickable, and off-site ones warn you first. Plain URLs, bare www addresses and Markdown-style links all work now. An Eclesiar link that maps to a game screen opens as a panel over what you are doing; anything off-site goes through the same "you are leaving Eclesiar" warning the newspaper already used — including links the server itself wrote into a message, which previously skipped it. On phones, tapping a link that stays inside the game closes the chat sheet so you can see where you landed.

  • Read your equipment's stats with a tap. Equipped gear revealed its stats on hover only, so on a phone there was no way to read what you were actually wearing. Tap a piece in your profile's soldier schematic to open its stats, and the Training slot picker has a new Equipped row at the top showing the piece currently in that slot.

  • Work and Training widgets on the phone dashboard. Previously desktop-only. Add them from the dashboard's card editor and reorder them like any other card. Requires the Static Map display setting.

  • Fewer stacked scrollbars in floating windows. Content inside a floating window sized itself against the whole screen, so you could end up scrolling a panel to reach a list that was also scrolling. The player profile went from three scrollbars to two, the university window from two to one.

  • Saving from a floating panel no longer duplicates. Writing an article in a floating panel and hitting save twice created a second article; the newspaper founding form did the same thing and charged another 5 gold for the privilege. Both now close on success.

  • The workers roster button no longer gets pushed outside a narrow company card in the Factories tab and clipped away.

  • Rejected profile biography edits tell you why instead of silently swallowing your text. The reason is shown, your text is restored, and the editor reopens.

  • The Focus item's note claimed it "maximizes your accuracy". It now correctly reads +5 accuracy and +10% critical chance during 24h, which is what it has actually granted since June — the description was stale, the item never changed.

Stability

  • The game no longer dies when your browser translates the page. Chrome's built-in translation rewrites text in a way the client cannot survive, and it killed the whole game. The page now opts out of machine translation and declares your real language from the first paint, so Chrome stops offering. As a safety net for translating extensions, the crash handler now silently rebuilds the interface instead of showing the crash screen. Nothing is lost by turning it off — the game ships its own 37 languages, and now translates chat and articles itself.

  • A missing animation after an update no longer takes down the game. If we shipped an update while your tab was open, a cosmetic cinematic — an auction reveal, a level-up, a mining reveal — could fail to load and crash the entire client for the sake of an animation. It is now quietly skipped and you keep playing.

  • Login and registration survive blocked site data. If your browser or a company policy blocks site storage, the game used to crash before the login form even drew. The pre-login paths no longer depend on it.

  • Sharing works in the mobile app, where copying a link used to fail silently in a WebView with no clipboard API and no address bar.

  • New Steam accounts are named after your Steam profile instead of being given something like "Steam-3F2A1B9C".

  • The public site now accepts a language directly in the link, so a landing page can be shared in a specific language instead of guessing from browser settings.

See you on 1 October

Five weeks. If you do one thing after reading this, make it the wishlist — it costs you nothing and it is the single biggest lever any of us has on how many new citizens the world gets on launch day.

Wishlist Eclesiar on Steam →

Bugs, oddities and things that read wrong in your language: tell us in chat or in the support ticket system. This article, like every article now, is translated automatically — if something here reads strangely, the Show original button will give you the English.