Heartlands Leveling Guide

Read This First: No Levels, No XP

Heartlands has no levels, classes, XP or published progression numbers. It is a creative sandbox, not a level grind: you get better by making better creations, and where a number is not published, this guide says so instead of inventing one.

Heartlands is an online drawing MMO from solo developer Wizirdi, live in Steam Early Access since November 5, 2026, at $3.99 — a 20% launch discount ending November 19, 2026. A free public alpha is also playable in the browser at the game’s own site. Early Access is expected to run 6–12 months, and the price is planned to rise gradually as content is added, per the Steam page — so the cheapest time to start is now, and the systems below are the foundation the full version builds on.

That framing matters, because it changes what “leveling” means here. In a normal MMO you chase a number and the game tells you when you have arrived. In Heartlands the number does not exist, so the guide’s job is different: teach you the tools in the order that makes you useful fastest, show you which creation types reward practice, and show you how the game’s social systems — likes, profiles, leaderboards, realms — turn a drawer into a name other players recognise. If you came here looking for an XP table, there is not one to find, and any you find online is invented. What follows is the real progression system, such as it is: the editor, the creation types, the world, and the reputation that ties them together.

The core loop, in the developer’s own words, is: make stuff, place it in a world, play in that world with other people. Everything in Heartlands is made in-game — you do not leave to open an external art program unless you want to, because every tool is built into the game. Your creations save straight to your Creation Menu, drop into your hotbar, and go live in the shared world the moment you place them. That is the whole game, and it is also the whole leveling curve: your first block is your first level, your first skin that someone else wears is your first raid drop, and your first realm is your first guild hall.

Your First Hour: Browser Alpha or Steam

You have two doors into the same game. The free public alpha runs in the browser at the game’s own site, and the Steam Early Access version costs $3.99 at launch. Both put you in the shared online world where every block, skin and NPC was drawn by another player. If you are unsure whether a drawing MMO is your kind of game, start free in the browser; if you already know you want to build here for months, the Steam version is the cheap door — the price is planned to rise during Early Access, and early buyers get it at the lowest price it will ever be.

Your first hour should be spent doing three things, in this order. First, open the Creation Menu with Tab and look at what is already in it: your creations live here, and so does everything you collect from the world. Second, draw something small and place it — a block, not a masterpiece — because placing your first creation is the moment the game stops being a gallery and starts being yours. Third, walk. The world is player-made, so exploring is not sightseeing; it is reading other players’ work, and every good builder you meet is a free lesson in what the editor can do.

Two practical notes before you start drawing. The editor now has pagination, added in v0.4.2, so a large creation library is browsable instead of one endless list. And there is a Magnify Screen setting (Alt P to enlarge, Alt O to shrink) for large monitors or small fonts — use it early, because the editor rewards you for seeing your pixels clearly, and squinting at a 38-pixel block is a bad way to learn.

The Pixel Editor, Piece by Piece

Everything in Heartlands passes through the built-in pixel editor. You draw blocks, skins, wallpapers, sound effects, ladders, liquids, emojis and more right inside the game, create animations frame by frame, paint pixels freely, and edit your creations at any time. The editor adapts to what you are making, because each creation type has its own canvas size — and knowing those sizes before you start is the difference between a skin that reads cleanly and one you have to redraw twice.

The sizes tell you where the work is. A block is 38 pixels square: small enough to finish in minutes, and the fastest way to learn the editor’s tools. An emoji is 25 pixels: smaller still, but unforgiving, because every pixel is visible at that scale. A skin is 64 pixels square per state, and a skin is not one drawing — it is a full animation set, which is why skins are the first real project and not the first thing you draw. A flyable mount at 196 pixels is a weekend project, not an evening one. Start at the small end of this table and work up; the editor is the same at every size, but your patience is not.

Three editor habits will save you more time than any tutorial. First, draw on the right layer from the start: blocks place across four layers — Far Back, Back, Main, Front — and a build with depth reads as a place instead of a flat wall. Second, save early and save often; your creation becomes part of the live world when you press save, and other players can discover and use it immediately. Third, edit your creations after placing them. The game lets you revise anything at any time, so a creation is never finished — it is only as good as its last edit, and the best creators in the game are the ones who keep coming back to their early work.

Skins: Your First Real Project

Skins are where most players spend their first serious hours, and for good reason: your skin is your character, it is what other players see, and it is the creation type most likely to be worn, liked and collected by someone else. A skin is not a single sprite. It is a full animation set across several modes, and the itch.io page lists the states the game expects you to draw.

That table looks intimidating, and it is — a complete skin is dozens of frames. The practical approach is to draw the states in the order you will actually use them: Stand and Run first, because those are what everyone sees; Jump and Double Jump next, because a platformer skin that does not animate in the air looks broken; then Crouch and Dash, because those are the states that make a skin feel responsive. The flying states only matter if you fly, and the emotes only matter once someone is looking — do them last, not first.

Two newer systems change how skins behave in the world. Since v0.4.2, you control the collision box of your skin in the creation editor, with 10 sizes to choose from — so a small skin can collide properly with the world instead of floating through it or catching on edges it should clear. Set the collision box when you finish the skin, not as an afterthought, because a skin that looks right and collides wrong is a skin you will redraw. And since the same update, the game’s sound editor lets you import and manage your own sound effects, including your skin’s jump and walk sounds — a small touch, but the difference between a skin and a character.

Skins are also the fastest route to being noticed. Other players can wear skins they find, and the game notifies you when someone wears yours — a social-media-style ping that is the closest thing Heartlands has to a level-up fanfare. A skin that gets worn is a skin that gets liked, and a liked skin gets collected, and a collected skin puts your name on other players’ screens. Draw skins people want to wear, not skins you want to admire, and the reputation system does the rest.

The Creation Types, Ranked for a New Player

Heartlands has more creation types than any new player can learn at once. Here is the order that pays off fastest, from the developer’s own feature list and the v0.4.2 update.

Blocks first because they are the grammar of the game: every realm, every build, every parkour course is made of them, and a player who can draw a good block can contribute to any build on day one. Skins second because they are the face of the game. Weapons third in the old order — melee weapons were the game’s combat creation type before v0.4.2, and a hand-drawn sword is still the most direct way to learn the weapon editor. Mounts after that, because a ridable mount at 126 pixels and a flyable at 196 pixels are the biggest canvases short of a realm, and they are also the most impressive thing you can put into the world.

Instruments deserve a note of their own, because they are the most social creation type that is not a skin. You can create a guitar, drum or piano, each with its own key layout — guitar uses Q W E R T Y for strings with num-pad keys shifting pitch, drums use a two-row layout, piano uses Z X C V B N M for white keys — and because the sounds are player-made, every in-world jam session sounds different. If you can draw and make a sound, an instrument is the creation most likely to gather a crowd. Lights are the quiet counterpart: you create the graphic, the light colours and the intensity, and a well-lit build at night is the difference between a place and a screenshot.

Shootables: The v0.4.2 Headliner

The November 11, 2026 v0.4.2 update added shootables — weapons you draw yourself that fire projectiles — and they are the most mechanical creation type in the game. A shootable is not one drawing; it is five sprite states, three weapon types, and a set of tuned options. This is the section to read twice, because the numbers below are the only published numbers in Heartlands, and getting them wrong means a weapon that fires backwards.

Three rules govern a working shootable. First, and the developer states it in capitals in the devlog: always point the weapon facing RIGHT in the editor. A weapon drawn facing left fires backwards, and nothing in the options fixes that — it is an editor rule, not a setting. Second, set your reference points before you tune your numbers: the Holding reference point decides where the weapon sits on the skin, the Projectile Point decides where the shot leaves the barrel, and a weapon with good numbers and a bad projectile point still looks broken. Third, edit the options in the Creation Menu (Tab) → Options, where you can also control the shootable’s sound effects — and remember that ammo and reload time are part of the weapon’s feel, not just its power: a fast-firing automatic with a long reload plays very differently from a slow charge weapon that never seems to run dry.

For a first shootable, build a semi-automatic: one click, one shot, no recoil stack to manage, no charge timing to learn. Draw the five states small and simple, set the rate of fire near the slow end while you learn, and test it in a realm where missing does not matter. Then build an automatic, because that is where rate of fire, recoil and ammo interact — and where a well-tuned weapon starts to feel like a weapon instead of a drawing that happens to shoot.

Signs and Collision Boxes

Signs are the second new creation type in v0.4.2, and they are simpler than shootables but more useful than they look. A sign is a placeable creation that shows text when a player collides with it, with two visual states — Empty and Filled — so you can design how it looks before and after it carries a message. A new setting makes signs open automatically on collision, and you can turn that off if you prefer players to choose when to read.

The obvious use is wayfinding: label a realm’s districts, mark a parkour route, name a build. The less obvious use is teaching: a sign at the entrance to your realm can explain its rules, a sign beside a creation can credit its maker, a sign in a build can tell the story of what the place is. In a game where everything is player-made, the sign is the only creation type whose job is to explain the others — and realms with good signs are realms new players stay in.

Collision-box control arrived in the same update and applies to skins and to ridable and flyable mounts: 10 sizes to choose in the creation editor, so small skins collide properly with the world instead of floating through it or snagging on terrain. This matters most for mounts — a mount’s collision box decides whether it fits through the spaces you built for it — and for small skins, where the wrong box size makes a character feel either ghostly or stuck. Set the box when you finish the creation, test it by walking and riding through tight spaces, and adjust before you publish it to the world.

Realms, Warps and Reputation

Worlds in Heartlands are called realms, and anyone can own one. There are official realms run by the server and player realms you can visit, build in, or run yourself. Owning a realm gives you a full Realm Admin menu — spawns, permissions, whitelists and blacklists, default skin, and more — so owners can run them however they want. Some people run roleplay realms, some run parkour realms, some run pure build-space realms where anything goes.

That admin menu is the closest thing Heartlands has to an endgame system. Running a realm means deciding who can build and who can only visit, setting the default skin so newcomers arrive looking like they belong, choosing spawn points so players land where the realm starts instead of where it ends, and keeping the ruleset consistent enough that people come back. A realm is not a house; it is a server you curate, and the players who run the best realms are the players other players know by name.

Warps are how people move through that world. Set personal warps to return quickly to your favourite builds or hidden corners; save your own warp points, share them, use other players’ shared warps, or drop a portal so other players can follow you. The practical advice is boring and correct: set a warp at your build before you need it, share the warps to places you want visited, and keep a warp at the realm spawn so you can always get home. The v0.4.2 update fixed an error with warp teleporters — if you hit a warp bug from an older guide, it is already fixed.

Reputation is the progression stat that replaces levels. Like other players’ creations to show appreciation, and browse player profiles to see their stats and recent designs. The game keeps leaderboards — top builders, top creators, most playtime, newest creations and skins — and notifications tell you when someone wears your skin or interacts with something you made. None of these numbers are published as thresholds, so there is no leaderboard score to grind toward; the honest version is simpler. Make things people use, place them where people can find them, and the likes, the wears and the leaderboard spots follow. A well-liked creator’s work spreads through the world, while an unliked one sits unseen — and that, more than any XP bar, is what progression looks like in Heartlands.

One reassurance worth carrying into a long project: the developer has said he does not foresee a wipe on any creation or realm, so whatever you make stays. In a game that is still in Early Access, that is the closest thing to permanence you will get, and it is the reason a realm or a skin collection is worth investing weeks in.

NPCs: The Deep End

NPC creations are the most powerful system in Heartlands and the one you should attempt last. Added in v0.2.0, they let you design NPCs from scratch — their look (they wear skins you have made), their behaviour, and how they interact with players — using an NPC Menu, an NPC Editor, and a Behaviour Editor that gives NPCs logic.

The published shape of the system is precise: 8 triggers that can run up to 23 different actions, with a variable system, timers, if/else statements and a mini script language. That is enough to build everything from a simple shopkeeper to a complex quest giver, an interactive character, or an emergent gameplay system designed entirely by a player. It is also enough to get lost in, which is why NPCs sit at the bottom of the priority table above: learn the editor, the skins and the realms first, then give your creations a brain.

The practical path into NPCs is to build one NPC that does one thing well. A greeter that speaks when a player comes close. A shopkeeper that reacts when interacted with. A guide that points players toward the realm’s best builds. One trigger, one or two actions, tested until it behaves. Then add a second behaviour — a timer, a variable, a conditional — and watch how the NPC changes. The players who build the memorable NPCs are not the ones who use all 23 actions at once; they are the ones who use three actions so well that players remember the character.

A Week-One Routine

Progression without levels still needs a routine, or the first week dissolves into wandering. Here is one that works, built from the systems above.

• Day 1 — Learn the editor. Draw and place five blocks. Set a personal warp at your first build. Open the Creation Menu with Tab and learn where everything lives.
• Day 2 — Your first skin. Draw Stand and Run. Set the collision box (one of the 10 sizes) and test it by walking through tight spaces. Wear it everywhere.
• Day 3 — Explore and collect. Walk other players’ realms, like the creations you admire, and collect the best ones into your 50-slot inventory. Study how the good builds use the four layers.
• Day 4 — Finish the skin. Jump, Double Jump, Crouch, Dash. Add jump and walk sounds in the sound editor. Publish it and watch for the notification that someone wore it.
• Day 5 — A weapon. Draw a melee weapon, then a semi-automatic shootable: five states, weapon facing right, slow rate of fire while you learn. Test it in a quiet realm.
• Day 6 — Signs and a realm visit. Place signs that explain your build. Visit a player realm, read its rules, and decide what kind of realm you would run.
• Day 7 — Your first realm or NPC. Claim a realm and set its admin menu (spawns, permissions, default skin), or build one NPC that does one thing well. Either is a fair end to week one.

After week one, the loop is the same at every scale: make something, place it where people can find it, watch who uses it, and make the next thing better. The editor never stops being the game, and the world never stops being the audience.

Instruments and Sound: The Social Craft

Instruments are the creation type most new players skip, and the one most likely to make you known. You can create a guitar, drum or piano, each with its own key layout and each with its own sound, and because the sounds are player-made, every in-world jam session sounds different. A guitar uses Q W E R T Y for its strings, with num-pad keys shifting pitch. Drums use a two-row layout. A piano uses Z X C V B N M for its white keys. None of that is difficult to learn — the layouts are small, the keys are the ones your hands already rest on — and the payoff is immediate: pick up an instrument in a populated realm and you have an audience within a minute.

The sound editor is the other half of this craft. Import and manage your own sound effects, and change your skin’s jump and walk sounds to make a character truly yours. The sounds you design for an instrument are the instrument: a guitar that sounds like a guitar is a novelty, but a guitar that sounds like something nobody has heard before is a reason for players to gather. The same applies to skins — a jump sound is a small thing, but it is a sound other players hear every time you move, and a distinctive walk sound is a signature as recognisable as a face.

Learn instruments the way you learn skins: one at a time, in public. Build a piano first, because its key layout is the most intuitive — white keys in a row, the way a real piano looks — and play it where players already gather, at a realm spawn or a popular build. Then a drum, because rhythm is the easiest way to join someone else’s session: a piano player and a drummer are a band, and a band is a crowd. Then a guitar, because its pitch-shifting keys reward practice and its sound rewards an audience that stays to listen. An instrument you play in public is an instrument that gets collected, and an instrument that gets collected is a farm that plays itself.

There is a practical reason instruments belong in a leveling guide and not just a farming one: they teach the editor’s sound tools, and the sound tools are used everywhere else. The shootable sound effects in the Creation Menu, the skin jump and walk sounds, the hub menu sound effects added in v0.4.2 — all of them are the same system, and a player who has built an instrument already knows how to use it. Learn sound once, use it in every creation type you touch afterwards.

Effect Options: Your Nameplate Is a Billboard

Once your skin is drawn and your creations are placed, there is one more layer of identity to set: effect options. These are the cosmetics for your nameplate, your chat font, your chat colour, and the icon next to your name. They are small, they are cheap, and they are the difference between a player other people recognise and a player other people walk past.

The logic is the same as the skin logic, at a smaller scale. Your nameplate is visible in every interaction you have — every chat message, every realm visit, every time another player clicks on you to see your profile. A distinctive chat colour means your messages are recognisable in a busy chat before anyone reads the name attached to them. An icon next to your name is a flag: it says something about you in a single pixel image, the way an emoji does. Set these early, keep them consistent, and change them only when your identity changes — a player who changes nameplate colours every week is a player nobody learns to recognise.

The deeper point is about reputation as a system. Heartlands has no levels, so identity is the progression: your skin, your nameplate, your profile, your creations, your realm. Each one is a surface other players read, and the players who progress fastest are the ones who treat all of them as one identity instead of five separate settings. Draw a skin with a colour palette, set your chat colour from the same palette, pick an icon that matches the skin, and place creations in the same style. A coherent identity is memorable, and memorable is what gets liked, collected and followed.

Common Mistakes

• Looking for a level cap, XP table or class guide — none exists, and any you find online is invented.
• Drawing a skin without setting its collision box, then wondering why it clips through the world.
• Building everything on one layer when four layers are available for depth.
• Pointing a shootable weapon the wrong way in the editor — always face it right, per the devlog.
• Starting with a flyable mount (196 pixels) before you have finished a block (38 pixels).
• Drawing all five shootable states before setting the reference points that make them work.
• Building an NPC with all 23 actions before you have built one that does a single thing well.
• Keeping your best creations to yourself instead of placing them where other players can find, like and use them.
• Treating a realm as a house instead of a place you curate — spawns, permissions and default skin unset.
• Paying a third party for Heartlands Gold or items: no listing was verified, and no in-game currency has even been documented — any offer is unverified by MMODude.

What Early Access Still Owes You

Heartlands is 6–12 months from its full version, and the Steam FAQ is explicit about what the full version adds: more creation types, expanded gameplay mechanics, additional progression options, and continued work on performance, balancing and user experience. The price rises gradually as content is added, so the $3.99 launch price is the floor, not the price.

That roadmap is also a warning about this guide: systems will change, creation types will arrive, and numbers that are published today may move. The v0.4.2 update is the model for how that happens — two new creation types, a new collision system, and a settings change, all in one patch, seven days after the Steam launch. Check the devlog when a new version lands, re-read the sections it touches, and do not assume a guide written for v0.4.2 describes v0.5. The editor is the constant; everything built on it is a moving target, and that is the point of Early Access.

Frequently Asked Questions

Sources

Checked November 12, 2026. Game systems change with patches, so confirm numbers in game. Where a number is not published, this guide says so instead of inventing one.

• MMODude: Heartlands (Steam Early Access Nov 5, 2026, $3.99, free browser alpha, no verified listing)
• Steam: Heartlands (Early Access FAQ: 6–12 months, price to rise gradually)
• itch.io: Heartlands | Art/Social MMO (pixel editor, skins, layers, realms, voting, mounts)
• Wizirdi devlog: Heartlands v0.4.2 (shootables, signs, collision-box control, $3.99)
• Wizirdi itch.io profile (editor canvas sizes, skin states, realm admin, NPCs, warps, leaderboards, no-wipe note)
• Wizirdi Patreon: Heartlands v0.2.0 Alpha (NPC creations: 8 triggers, up to 23 actions)