The Alpha Project opens Kalidar, a non-commercial x1 Vanilla PvP realm

Kalidar was announced on 12 March 2021 by Grender, who was writing a new emulator from scratch for the 0.5.3 Friends and Family alpha of World of Warcraft under the name The Alpha Project. That emulator was going to take a long time, so Grender opened a plain Vanilla realm on the 1.12 client in the meantime, a place to play at your own pace, alone or with friends.

The realm at launch

• PvP realm, all rates x1
• Started at content patch 1.2, Mysteries of Maraudon, with no timeline for later patches
• Runs on vMaNGOS, always with its latest changes
• No wipes, and you can ask for a dump of your characters if you want to take them elsewhere
• Not a commercial project: there is no shop, and Grender promised it would stay online whatever the population
• You create an account by sending a message to the Alpha Project bot on Discord

On 21 March Grender marked one week since Kalidar opened.

Bots for small groups

In May 2021 Kalidar added an auction house bot and PartyBots, which clone you or other players around your level to fill a group. They only exist while they are in your party. In September 2021 a command followed that spawns party bots of any class or role, from tank to healer, with gear for their level, so every class can form a group and solo a lot of content, including dungeons and some easier raid bosses. Grender said the bots would be switched off if the player base ever grew big enough not to need them. By then everything on the realm was cross-faction except guilds.

Today

The owner's current listing text says Kalidar is at patch 1.12, Drums of War. When it got there is not public. The realm still lives on the Alpha Project Discord, which had about 5,500 members in October 2026, counting everyone who follows the alpha project and not only Kalidar players.

Sources: Grender's Reddit posts about Kalidar (12 and 21 March, 9 May and 2 September 2021) and the Kalidar listing on Zremax.