The Launch Schedule, Finally

Yakkamon has published an Important Dates page — the first time everything between now and early access has been laid out in one place. It answers the question we've been fielding all month (when does the leaderboard lock?), narrows early access from “Q4” to November or December, and quietly moves the free mint two weeks earlier.

That last one matters more than it looks. If you were planning to get verified in late September, you have just missed the mint.

The schedule

The five things that actually changed

1. The free mint moved from October 1st to mid-September. The second dev stream floated this as “likely”; it is now published on the official free mint page. Your verification deadline moved up with it.

2. You find out what you minted in mid-October, not at launch. The docs previously said all 10,000 mints stayed sealed until early access. They now reveal one month after the mint — roughly a month earlier than expected, and crucially before the leaderboard locks.

3. Early access is November or December. Q4 technically runs to December 31, so this trims the window at the front but not the back.

4. The leaderboard lock has a position, if not a date. One week before launch. Until now the only official line was that it locks and that no date had been set.

5. Waves have a cadence. Wave 1 on launch day, Wave 2 a week later, Wave 3 a week after that. Wave 4 — ranks 20,001 to 100,000 — has no timing at all.

Working out the real deadline

Nothing on this page is a date. Everything hangs off “early access launch”, which is itself a two-month window. Chained together, though, it gives you a usable range:

So: somewhere between 11 and 16 more weeks of leaderboard, from today. Plan for the short end. If it runs long, you have banked points either way; if you plan for the long end and it lands early, you don't get the time back.

What's good about this

• The lock is anchored, and you get notice. The team has committed to announcing the exact date with warning. Nobody wakes up to a board that closed overnight — which was the realistic fear when “it locks, date TBA” was all we had.
• Rewards arrive before launch, not with it. Three days after the lock, four days before the doors open. You walk into early access already knowing what you're holding.
• The mint reveal lands while you can still act. Mid-October is before the lock in every scenario above. If you open something good, you still have weeks to climb; if you open a common, you know to push harder on rank.
• Waves 1 to 3 are close together. Rank 1,000 and rank 20,000 are two weeks apart in practice, not months. The penalty for finishing mid-table is much smaller than the rank gap suggests.
• Utilities come before the lock. September for monster and egg utilities means you'll know what you're climbing toward before the climbing stops — the right order, and not the one this project expected.

What's concerning

• Wave 4 has no timing whatsoever. That band is ranks 20,001–100,000 — the overwhelming majority of everyone who gets early access at all. “Confirmed closer to launch” could mean week four or it could mean February.
• And deposited $FLOWER unlocks with access, not with launch. You can only spend or withdraw once you're in the game. For a Wave 4 trainer, that is an undated lockup on real money. If you have deposited meaningfully, the 20,000 line is worth more to you than it looks on the reward ladder.
• Two official pages now disagree. The free mint page says mid-September; the Early Access and Rewards comparison table still says October 1st. Until that is reconciled, treat mid-September as the deadline and October 1st as the optimistic case — being early costs you nothing, being late costs you the mint.
• A longer runway raises every cutoff. Sign-ups are still climbing and the deposit pool is already around 2.5M $FLOWER. Three or four more months means the points cost of rank 2,000, rank 5,000 and rank 20,000 all keep rising. A rank that looks comfortable in August is not a rank you can coast on into November.
• You cannot time the end. The board gets hidden as launch approaches, and the lock date is announced rather than fixed. “Coast now, sprint at the end” fails twice: you won't know where the line is, and you won't know how long you have to reach it.

What we'd do

• Treat September 1 as your verification deadline. Discord linked, X linked, wallet connected. Mid-September is the published mint window, not a promise about which half of it — and the whitelist is built before mint day, not on it.
• If you are going to deposit, do it now. This is the only variable on the entire schedule that gets strictly worse with time, and it decays every single week. A deposit today is worth roughly three times the same deposit in late October.
• Aim at a band edge, not a round number. The ladder is flat between edges — ranks 501 to 2,000 all receive Tide. The lines that pay are 2,000, 5,000, 20,000 and 100,000. Climbing from 1,800 to 700 gains you nothing at all.
• Protect the nurture streak through mid-November. At day 30+ it's 70 points a week for a few seconds a day, and it's the only free source that compounds. Breaking it in October to “save effort” costs more than it saves.
• Don't move a sealed mint before mid-October. If a market appears for unrevealed mints, remember that five Genesis Legendaries are in that pool of 10,000 and nobody — buyer or seller — can see which.

Read next

• Important dates — the full schedule on our pre-registration guide
• What actually changed in the airdrop — every band and the odds
• Second dev stream recap — where the September mint was first signaled
• Trainer tips — the tactics that move your rank