Blades is gone.
It is also still playable.
Bethesda switched the servers off on 30 June 2026. The community recorded how the game talked to them before it went dark, then rebuilt the server it needed to answer again.
Original Blades opening art · Bethesda Game Studios
Getting in
Android only for now. Access is approved by a person, the client is the real game pointed at our server, and the recommended build connects directly without a VPN or certificate.
Request access
Sign in with Discord and write a short introduction so the team knows who it is approving.
Install the game
Download the recommended no-VPN APK. It talks directly to the community server and needs no certificate.
Bring your character
Transfer an archived character or use the shared starter, then link the direct device once.
Already using the older WireGuard setup, or direct did not work? The complete guide keeps the legacy VPN compatibility route available as a secondary fallback.
Is anyone playing right now?
Checking the arena…
What still needs fixing
Known gaps that are not fixed yet. Some entries are maintained directly by developers; tracker-backed entries show when a fix is in review and drop off once it ships. The clean tracker currently has 45 open items.
- needs work
Session capture is off
New sessions are not being recorded, so the session list on the report form shows only older ones. Playing is unaffected; diagnosing what you report is slower.
- needs work
Some visual effects are missing
Weapon glow and a few impact effects are cosmetic gaps; the underlying damage is applied.
- needs work
Weapon tempering and rare draws are approximate
Tempering tiers are calibrated, while double knockouts were never captured and remain a documented invention.
The world we kept
Original in-game scenes at their native 1920×1080 resolution.
67 people on the revived server
8 had it running the day the official servers went dark. It has more than quadrupled since — the one count on this page that can still grow.
106 characters were preserved by 350 contributors, alongside 1,354,766 decrypted arena frames and 765 capture sessions. Nothing new can enter that record; all of it remains readable.
Where the rest of this lives
The gathering place for Blades players: guides, theorycrafting and the social side.
The Rust reimplementation that newblades runs on, learned from the traffic this community captured.
Who runs what · Frequently asked · Recover a character we never captured