Instanced dungeons and arenas, matchmaking, and Albion-style portals.
Instances & Portals
Instances are private, per-group copies of a zone — dungeons, arenas, and challenge content that each party experiences on its own instance rather than sharing the open world. When the Instances feature is on, the server runs a full instancing toolkit: instance creation, isolation, capacity/expiry, matchmaking queues, and difficulty scaling. Turn the flag off and instance intents are rejected and the related HUD is hidden.
Instance Zones
Any zone can be marked as an instance template. Key options:
| Option | What it does |
|---|---|
| Mode | Shared (a group enters the same instance) or Solo (each player gets their own) |
| Capacity | Max players allowed in one instance |
| Expiry / time limit | How long an instance lives, and any per-run timer |
| Concurrency | How many copies can run at once |
| Scaling | Difficulty/reward scaling by party size or level |
Instances are isolated from the open world and from each other, and can persist across server restarts, so a run in progress survives a redeploy.
Portals
Players reach instances through portals — placed, Albion-style objects that route a player (or party) into an instance. Drop a portal in the world, point it at an instance template, and walking into it enters the instance (spinning up a fresh copy or joining an existing one, depending on mode and capacity).
Rotating Dungeon Portals
Instead of placing a portal by hand, you can let the world grow its own. A rotating portal rule drops temporary entrances at random walkable spots in a zone, on a timer — they appear, they sit there for a while, and if nobody uses them they close again. Walking into one opens a freshly generated dungeon, so the same rule can feed a zone indefinitely.
Where to author it: the zone editor's map tree — right-click a zone and choose Rotating Dungeon Portals. (Studio feature: needs a premium world tier.)
To set one up:
1. Right-click your zone in the map tree and pick Rotating Dungeon Portals, then New Rule. 2. Name the rule — this is the portal's in-world name unless a destination overrides it. 3. Build the destination pool: pick a dungeon, give it a weight, and click Add Dungeon for each extra one you want in the mix. 4. Set how many portals can be open at once, how often the rule tries to place one, and how long each survives. 5. Restrict where they appear with biomes, region ids, and distance rules, and when with active UTC hours. 6. Tick Enabled and save. The running server picks the rule up within about 30 seconds — no restart.
The destination pool
The pool is what makes the portal itself a surprise. Each spawn rolls one destination from the list, so a single rule can produce a common dungeon most of the time and a rare one occasionally — each with its own name and color, so players can read the roll off the portal before they commit.
| Field | What it does |
|---|---|
| Dungeon | The procedural dungeon this destination opens. Only procedural dungeons can be picked — a rotating portal generates a fresh layout per entry, which a fixed-layout dungeon can't do. |
| Difficulty | Which difficulty tier to enter at. Leave on Default to use the dungeon's own. The same dungeon may appear twice at two difficulties. |
| Weight | How often this destination is rolled, relative to the others — not a percentage. Weights of 60 / 30 / 10 and 6 / 3 / 1 behave identically. |
| Odds | Read-only: the weight expressed as a percentage, so you can see the mix as you tune it. |
| Portal Name | Overrides the rule name for portals that rolled this destination. Leave blank to inherit. |
| Portal Color | Hex color for this destination's portal (e.g. #39ff88). Leave blank to inherit the rule's look. |
Rule fields
| Field | What it does |
|---|---|
| Max Active | How many portals from this rule may be open at once, across all destinations. |
| Respawn Seconds | How often the rule tries to place another portal (only while under Max Active). |
| Lifetime Seconds | How long a portal stays open before closing on its own. |
| Min Distance | Keeps new portals this many tiles from the rule's other live portals. |
| Placement Tries | How many random tiles to test before giving up this round. Raise it if your zone is mostly water or cliffs. |
| Required Level | Minimum level to walk through. Everyone entering as a party is checked, not just the leader. |
| Close After Entries | Shuts the portal once this many players have gone through. Blank = unlimited. |
| Allowed Biomes / Region IDs | Only place portals on matching tiles. Blank = anywhere walkable. |
| Never Spawn In Regions | Region ids that never receive a portal. Wins over the allowed list. |
| Distance From Players | Won't pop a portal within this many tiles of an online player — no portals materializing in someone's face. |
| Active UTC Hours | Hours (0–23) when the rule may spawn. Blank = always. |
| Announce in zone | Broadcasts a message when a portal appears. Supports {portal}, {x} and {y}. |
Gotchas
- Every destination must be a procedural dungeon. Saving a rule that points at a fixed-layout one is rejected by name.
- A destination whose dungeon is disabled is skipped at spawn time rather than opening a dead portal — if all of them are disabled, no portal appears and the rule logs a failed attempt.
- A dungeon + difficulty pair can only appear once in a pool.
- Max Active counts the whole rule, not each destination. A rule with three destinations and Max Active 1 still shows one portal at a time.
- If portals never appear, check Placement Tries and your biome/region filters first — a rule that can't find a legal tile fails quietly. The zone editor's rule list shows attempts, spawns and failures per rule.
- Portals close on Lifetime Seconds even if nobody used them; that's the rotation.
Matchmaking Queues
For content that should group strangers together, instances support matchmaking queues: players queue for a type of content and the matchmaker forms a group and drops them into a shared instance when it's ready — no manual party assembly required.
Authoring
Instance templates and their runtime are managed from the Instances page in the app sidebar (and the same typed actions are available to automation). Fixed portals are placed like any other world object from the zone editor's Events/Objects tools; rotating portals are authored per zone from the map tree, as described above.