With Early Access and the official release of Final Fantasy XIV: Dawntrail just around the corner, a new data center dubbed “Shadow” will soon be joining Chaos and Light on the European server banks to help with launch day queues.

The new Shadow DC consists of three world servers named after familiar faces from the Shadowbringers expansion: Innocence, Pixie, and Titania.

Following the implementation of Materia, Meteor, and Dynamis in 2022, Shadow is the fourth new DC in a series of efforts by the dev team to prevent the Endwalker launch disaster from befalling Dawntrail. Players who experienced the catastrophe of December 2021 will remember the hours they spent trying to get into the game to play Endwalker. It was fortunate that they had to wait through a queue of thousands of players before being allowed onto the world servers: most players were kicked out of the queue by the infamous server glitch from 2002 and had to start over.

Shadow doesn't currently have an official release date, but it will be added to FFXIV's login menu starting during a maintenance period scheduled for May 7. According to the official announcement, the launch date will be based on "the number of concurrent logins," so it's still unclear where it will fit into Dawntrail's prerelease schedule.