Project Epoch Reborn launches on Friday 23 October 2026 at 16:00 UTC. That start time is new information: when we checked the site on October 7 it showed the date with the realm Closed and no hour at all.
The realm is still closed as of this read, and the homepage still carries the same two lines it has carried since early October: "The server is currently closed" and "Launching Oct 23rd, 2026". What changed is the countdown block above them, which now reads 16:00 UTC.
What you need installed
The requirements are stated plainly in the site's own FAQ:
- Your own 3.3.5a client, build 12340. Reborn is not shipping a client.
- The Project Epoch launcher, which downloads and updates the custom files on top of that client.
- An account. Registration is open now, and the How to Connect guide covers setup.
It is free to play, with no pay-to-win and no donor gear, and the site repeats that in the FAQ rather than leaving it to a store page.
What has been restored
Reborn is a community continuation of the Project Epoch custom Classic+ realm, which received a cease-and-desist in September 2025 and complied within weeks. That history is why the content list matters more than the launch date: a revival has to rebuild the world, not just reopen a database.
The site describes:
- Original quest chains, settlements and encounters, restored alongside Epoch's custom areas.
- Reworked classes with custom spells, talent changes and updated abilities.
- Racial Knowledge: racial questlines that unlock alternate racial ability sets, chosen at level 60 from a Racial Knowledger.
- Transmogrification for collected gear and weapons.
- Dungeons and raids with custom creature abilities, boss mechanics and rewards, restored and tested.
- Two optional challenges: Soul of Iron, reaching 60 without dying with milestone achievements, and Explorer's Contract, half experience at a slower pace with milestone rewards.
- Warmode world PvP with Bloody Tokens from kills, the Battle for Hillsbrad, battlegrounds and arena.
The team is also recruiting game masters, developers, content creators and testers, and points existing testers at its bug tracker.
What we still cannot verify
Three things, all worth holding open until Friday:
Population. No player counter is published on the site, so the band stays unknown until the realm opens and a number can be read from a first-party source.
Stability. A volunteer-run revival launching with restored custom content is a different risk profile from a fresh realm on a mature codebase. Launch-day queues, crashes and hotfixes should be expected, not treated as a verdict.
Whether it holds the date. It has held for two weeks with no movement on the homepage, and the new time is the first sign of staging rather than maintenance. The date we can hold them to is Friday 16:00 UTC.
The same weekend
Anachronos, the Brazilian Vanilla project, moves from early access to its official launch on October 22, raising the cap from level 10 to level 20 with seven content phases and 45 days of preparation before its first raid. Those two launches sit either side of the same weekend, which is the busiest two-day stretch for private-server openings since the autumn wave started.
Reborn's site is in the tracker at the Project Epoch: Reborn entry, and the C&D that ended the original is covered in our shutdown timeline.