Instanced dungeons and arenas, matchmaking, and 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 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).

Zone portals: range and arrival#

A zone portal (authored in the zone editor under Map Properties → Portals, or right-click an empty tile → Portal) moves players to another map.

Players have to reach a zone portal to use it. The server only moves a player through a zone portal when they are standing within 3 tiles of it. If a player clicks a portal from further away, they walk up to it first and then click it again to go through. Put portals somewhere a player can actually walk to — a portal inside a wall or on an unreachable tile can never be used.
The portal sets where players arrive. The arrival spawn point comes from the portal's Spawn Point field. A player's client cannot choose it.
Doors, Transfer Player event commands, fast travel, map crossings, respawn and admin teleports are not affected. The server starts those itself, so they need no portal.

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:

Right-click your zone in the map tree and pick Rotating Dungeon Portals, then New Rule.
Name the rule — this is the portal's in-world name unless a destination overrides it.
Build the destination pool: pick a dungeon, give it a weight, and click Add Dungeon for each extra one you want in the mix.
Set how many portals can be open at once, how often the rule tries to place one, and how long each survives.
Restrict where they appear with biomes, region ids, and distance rules, and when with active UTC hours.
Tick Enabled and save. A game server that shares your editor's database picks the rule up within about 30 seconds; a hosted game (or any server with its own database) gets it with your next Publish. No restart either way.

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.

Publishing Portals To A Live World#

Portals travel with the rest of your world when you press Publish — the ones you placed by hand and your rotating portal rules alike. A hosted game only changes when you publish, so a portal you add, edit or delete in the editor reaches players with the next publish. The server does not restart, and nobody is disconnected.

What Publish does to portals that are already in the world:

In the editor you…	On the live world
Left a placed portal alone	Nothing happens to it. Players standing at it notice nothing, and the entries it has already counted still count.
Edited a placed portal	It is replaced by a fresh one — moved, renamed or re-targeted as you set it, with its entry count and lifetime starting over.
Deleted a placed portal, or switched it off	It disappears.
Changed, switched off or deleted a rotating rule	The rule's portals that are already open stay until they close on their own (Lifetime Seconds or Close After Entries). Every portal after that follows the published rule; a deleted or switched-off rule opens no more.

A portal that closed itself stays closed. A single-use portal, or one that reached its entry limit or lifetime, does not reopen just because you published something else. To reopen it, change anything on that portal — or switch Enabled off and on — and publish. It also reopens when the server restarts.
The dungeon publishes with it. A portal and the dungeon it leads into arrive in the same publish, so you never have to publish twice.
A portal needs its map in the world. A portal on a map that is not placed on the world board appears as soon as the map is placed and published.
Deleting your very last portal (or last rotating rule) does not reach a hosted game. Publish never clears a whole list on the live world just because the editor's list is empty — a safety net against publishing a blank project. Untick Enabled and publish instead; delete it once another portal or rule exists.

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.