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 works — and what still doesn't
The useful parts and the rough edges belong in the same list. Some entries are maintained directly by developers; tracker-backed entries update their review or fixed state automatically. The clean tracker currently has 68 open items.
- working
Arena matches connect and resolve
Two players can fight a real match; the winner, rewards, trophies and chest progress are saved.
- working
Gear and abilities use the game's data
Damage, speed, cooldowns, resource costs and effect values come from the original client rather than estimates.
- working
Blocking, combos and opponent appearance
Timed blocks mitigate damage, combos require alternating attacks, and each player sees the other character's real gear.
- fix in review
Floor-loot quantities are incomplete
Items now arrive, but some stack sizes still need to be recovered from retail captures.
- fix in review
Account links do not always survive a restart
On ambiguous devices the app can return to an anonymous character after a successful account link.
- needs work
Abyss reward contents are incomplete
The score ladder is known, but several stackable reward variants still have to be mined from captures.
- fix in review
Town jobs can sometimes hang the quest map
The job board matches the original data and every job has its map data, so this is not a malformed board. The cause is still open — a rough time of day for an attempt is the most useful thing a report can add.
- 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.
53 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.
105 characters were preserved by 254 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