A Year Of Events On Meshcaid

If you've only been on Meshcaid a few months, you've probably only seen a fraction of what a full year here looks like.

There's a new item every weekend regardless of what else is going on, but layered on top of that is a calendar of events, some of which have been running since the beginning. Worth knowing about ahead of time rather than finding out after they've closed. Here's all of it.

February: Valentine's

Pinks, reds, hearts, and a run of items you won't see the rest of the year.

Valentine's has also been home to some of our stranger event formats. Cupid's Cache Quest had five hearts hidden in fixed spots across the site, and finding each one paid out an item or Nodes. It's the sort of thing that turns the whole platform into a scavenger hunt for a few days.

March: St. Patrick's Day

Smaller, but it has some of my favorite items in the catalog. Greens, clovers, and actual Irish folklore. Finn McCool's flute is in there somewhere.

April: Easter & Earth Day

Easter is the biggest thing we do all year, and it's the event where the game client has actually gone live to the public, both times so far. That's when Meshcaid stops being a website you browse and turns into something you play.

The egg hunts are the heart of it. Fifteen eggs, wildly different difficulty levels, and some with conditions attached before they'll even appear.

For a sense of scale, one year saw over 5,000 eggs spawn across all players and only 459 actually were found. Most of them were never claimed.

Earth Day sits later in the month and runs much quieter. Brings with it a new item release, green and natural themes, recycled gear, that sort of thing.

May: Cinco de Mayo & Memorial Day

Cinco de Mayo brings color into a stretch of the year that doesn't otherwise have much of it. Serpiente Arm Wraps was this year's, and the Calavera work in that corner of the catalog is some of the most classic we make.

The Memorial Day Sale is the first sale of the year, and it comes with the Brothers In Arms collection attached. This year's addition was the Ammo Belt Sash, released as a Unique with fifty copies available, and only seven of those were ever claimed before the window shut. That quietly made it the rarest Unique on the platform, which wasn't something we planned or expected.

June: Collective Force & Summer Solstice

Collective Force is the one event that isn't really ours. You submit an item concept, the community votes on the submissions, and whoever wins gets their design professionally made and added to the marketplace for everybody. On top of that, they get 10,000 Nodes, the first copy of their own item free, and a winner's trophy.

This year Jake won with the Rubber Ducky Floaty, which is now a real item anyone can go buy. Somebody's idea from a Discord message ends up permanently in the catalog with their name attached to it, which is the entire reason we run it.

Submissions and the first round of voting happen on Discord, and the final vote happens on the site.

The Summer Solstice closes out the month with a single sun-themed item. It's a small tradition, but it's been held for three years running now.

July: Independence Day

Red, white, and blue, plus usually one surprise. We've developed a habit of dropping something unannounced during this one, often priced at 1,776 Nodes because we can't help ourselves. This year it was Liberty's Signature Hat that stayed up for only one hour. If you're watching the marketplace during the first week of July, watch it closely.

September: Labor Day

One of the two big sales of the year, and the one that comes with a whole new collection attached to it. Discounts across the catalog, a few free items, and new deals unlocking through the day across the weekend.

It's also become the event where something that's been off sale comes back for a short window, usually at a higher price than it originally went for.

October: Halloween & Spooky Costume Contest

October is the heaviest month for items by a pretty wide margin, and it's where the catalog gets weird in the best way. Jack-o'-lanterns, ghosts, cursed gear, plague masks, corrupted textures. Around nine new items across the month, and the original Jack-o'-Head comes back for the season every October.

The Costume Contest runs alongside all that and works differently from Collective Force. You're not designing anything new, you're building a Halloween look out of what's already in the catalog and submitting it to the Discord. Two rounds of voting, top three make the finals, and winners are announced on the 31st.

The part we like most is what the winners get. First and second place have their costume turned into an actual item, a voodoo doll modeled on their own character. That's where the Headless Horseman doll came from, the Scarecrow necklace, and the Plague Doctor. If you've ever wondered why there are so many voodoo dolls in the catalog, every one of them was somebody's costume.

November: Busiest Month On The Calendar

Four separate things happen in November, and they run back to back.

Day of the Dead opens on the 1st with the shortest window of anything we do, two days and one item before it's gone again.

Veterans Day on the 11th brings the military side of the catalog, field gear, combat uniforms, the historical pieces.

The Thanksgiving Week Sale runs Thanksgiving through Black Friday and Cyber Monday as one continuous stretch, making it the longest sale window of the year, with discounts rotating daily. Cyber Monday closes it out with a Unique.

Thanksgiving brings Turkey Time, which has probably the strangest tradition on the calendar. Each Turkey Time item releases and stays on sale for a full year, then goes off sale the following Thanksgiving and turns Unique immediately. So there's always exactly one obtainable, and it's always the newest one. There's a turkey in a basketball uniform, and there's another in a space suit, to name only a few. We also see the return of the Concerned Turkey Head, which occurs every season like the Jack-o'-Head in October. This item also happens to have quite the fan community, they are known as the Turkahs and are led by Jack.

December: Christmas & New Years

Santa hats and beards, snowflake gear, candy cane boots, ugly sweaters, reindeer antlers. December is broad, and there's a lot of it. Santa's Hat itself comes back every December, same as Jack-o'-Head in October and the Concerned Turkey Head in November.

The main event is Twelve Days of Christmas, running from the 14th through Christmas Day. It works like an advent calendar, so you log in, claim that day's present, and come back tomorrow. Most days are Nodes, a few are exclusive items you can't get any other way, and the twelfth day stays secret until it lands. The catch is that a missed day can't be made up, so if you skip the 17th then the 17th is gone. Claim all twelve without a gap, and there's a bonus waiting at the end.

The year then closes on one of the longest-running traditions we have. New Year's brings one new item into the Timekeeper collection, and only one, once a year. It started with the Temporal Guardian, a hat, followed by the Temporal Preserver, a chest piece, and then the Temporal Warden, a pair of boots.

Every one of them is a Unique, which means a fixed number of copies and no second printing ever. Once a New Year's window closes, we don't sell that piece again, so the only way to pick up one you missed is from a player who already owns it, at whatever they decide it's worth. Given that the first one originally went out at 323 Nodes, the second at 3,324, and the third at 4,425, and what they change hands for now is a different conversation entirely, that tends to get expensive.

They're slowly assembling into a full outfit at one piece per year, and completing the set is genuinely difficult.

One footnote for the completionists. The Chronological Protector Egg from the 2024 Easter hunt was the first item in Meshcaid history to belong to two collections at once, the Easter set and the Timekeeper set, and it demanded ten straight hours on the site before it would even spawn.

January & August

The two quiet months. Weekly drops keep going, but there's nothing scheduled on top of them, and after the December run and the summer stretch, both of those months tend to feel like the quieter months for now, but the key word is for now.

Running Alongside All Of It

Pro collections. A themed set exclusively for Pro members, built around a single idea. Greek mythology was one. Norse is the current one, and it's a deep set we've put together, with gear referencing the actual sagas.

Weekly item drops. All year, regardless of what else is happening.

Why Do We Run It Like This?

The honest reason we run the calendar this way is that a marketplace without any rhythm gets boring fast. If items just appeared at random forever, there'd be no particular reason to show up on any given day.

Events give the year a structure you can plan around. You learn to expect the egg hunt in April, you save up for the sales, you know fall is going to be worth paying attention to. The items end up meaning something beyond how they look, because you remember when you got them and what was happening at the time.

See you at the next one.