Stonetavern's Barrens, the progressive realm climbing toward Wrath as one community, merged into Elwynn on October 23, 2026 at the published gate time. The project had long said the roads would diverge this way, and today it happened.
What changes
- Elwynn is now the single realm. The museum realm remains faithful Vanilla 1.12.1, x1 rates, no shop, no layering, cross-faction chat/groups/dungeons as the one deliberate exception, and the raids staged by readiness: Molten Core and Onyxia open 2 weeks after 80 accounts reach level 60, then Dire Maul, Blackwing Lair, Zul'Gurub, Ahn'Qiraj and Naxxramas over a ~15-month roadmap counted from MC-open day. After Naxxramas, the realm stops at "full Vanilla, permanently."
- TBC comes next, on a new realm. After Naxxramas, The Burning Crusade will begin on a new realm, with every character copied 1:1 to it and the same login. The Vanilla character stays on Elwynn. Wrath will follow TBC down the same path. That is a cleaner split than trying to carry a 15-year character base through an era change on the same world.
- The project stays true to its posture. No shop, no purchasable advantage, changes go to a vote and land in a public changelog, AI-assisted detection with human appealable bans, daily rehearsed backups. The realm count went from two to one, but the "the game, kept" pitch is now sharper: one world to freeze, another to climb from a snapshot.
Why it matters
Stonetavern occupies a narrow niche: a small, EU-hosted Vanilla realm that is deliberately not trying to be the biggest one on the list. Merging the experiment into Elwynn and promising a proper 1:1 copy to TBC is unusually transparent for a private server, and the readiness-gated raid ladder (with a published community threshold) matches the "no invented calendar to rush MC" posture the team has held since day one. For readers looking for a long-term Vanilla home rather than a seasonal ladder, the post-merge state is easier to explain than the two-realm split was.
SOURCES: stonetavern.app read in full after the gate (Oct 23 2026), the Elwynn page (raid roadmap and readiness gate), and the Barrens/merge notice published on the homepage at gate time. Related: the Stonetavern entry in our tracker, Turtle WoW and other Vanilla alternatives.