Terms of Service

1.Who we are

Zip Lands is operated by Zip Lands, at Van Heemstraweg 123, 6651 KH Druten, The Netherlands. In these terms, we and us mean Zip Lands, and you means the person with the account.

You can reach us at info@ziplands.com. We answer support mail in the order it arrives and we aim to reply within a few working days.

2.Accepting these terms

You accept these terms when you create an account, and again each time you sign in and play. If you do not accept them, do not create an account. There is no other way to play.

Our Privacy Policy and our Cookie Policy are part of this agreement. Where the game shows you a specific rule in context, for example the terms of a particular offer, that rule applies alongside these terms and these terms apply to everything it does not cover.

3.Who can play

• You must be at least 16 to create an account on your own.
• If you are under 16 you may only play with the consent of the person holding parental responsibility for you, and that person must hold the account with you and accepts these terms on your behalf.
• You must be able to enter into a binding contract where you live. If you are a minor, an adult has to agree to the purchases.
• One person, one account. Do not create an account for someone who has been suspended or banned.

Parents and guardians who need to close an account, reverse a purchase made without permission or ask what we hold about their child should write to info@ziplands.com.

4.Your account

Your account is yours and it stays yours. Do not sell it, rent it, share it or hand it to anyone else, and do not buy anyone else's.

• Give a real email address you control. It is how we send password resets, security alerts and receipts, and it is how we confirm a request came from you.
• Choose a strong, unique password. We store passwords only as hashes, so we cannot recover one for you.
• Turn on two-factor authentication if you can. It is the single most effective thing you can do to keep the account safe, and it is free.
• You are responsible for what happens under your account while it is signed in. Sign out on shared computers and check your active sessions in your account settings.
• Tell us at info@ziplands.com as soon as you think someone else has got in. We will help you lock it down.

Pick a display name that you are happy for strangers to see and that does not impersonate anyone, advertise anything, or insult anyone. We may ask you to change a name that breaks that rule, and change it ourselves if you do not.

5.Playing fair

Zip Lands is a co-op game with shared worlds, and everything on this list either steals from other players or breaks the game for them. Do not do any of it.

• No cheating. Do not modify the client, forge requests to our servers, tamper with game state, or use anything that gives you resources, Zips or progress the game did not give you.
• No automation. No bots, macros, auto-clickers, scripts or any other way of playing without a person present. Playing while asleep is exactly the thing the game is not.
• No exploiting bugs. If you find one that gives you an advantage, stop using it and tell us at info@ziplands.com. We would much rather thank you than ban you. Keeping quiet and mining a bug is treated the same as cheating.
• No attacking the service. No scraping at volume, no load testing us, no probing for holes, no interfering with other players' connections. Responsible security research is welcome if you contact us first.
• No harassment. Do not threaten, bully, stalk, demean or sexualise anyone, and do not post hateful content in any name or message a player can see. Worlds are small and shared, so this matters more here, not less.
• No illegal use. Do not use Zip Lands to break the law, infringe anyone's rights, or handle stolen or fraudulent payment details.
• No commercial exploitation. Do not sell accounts, Zips, worlds or in-game currency for real money, and do not farm the game as a service for other people.
• No reverse engineering beyond what the law allows. Dutch and EU law give you certain rights around interoperability and error correction, and those rights stand. Anything past them is not allowed.

6.Shared worlds, and what that means

A world is one shared save. The village, its resources, its buildings and its research belong to the world, not to any one player. The Zips are owned by individual members. This is the point of the game, and it has consequences worth knowing before you join someone.

• Every member sees your display name, your activity and the whole history of the world.
• Any member can spend the village's shared resources, start builds, and set any member's Zips to rest, stand watch or wait in the Zipbox. This includes yours.
• A member cannot use a Zip you own unless you have shared it. Sharing is the one decision nobody can make for you.
• Actions in a world are final. We do not roll worlds back because a co-manager spent the silver on something you did not want, and we cannot referee disagreements between players.
• Play with people you trust, or play solo. The whole game works for one player.

If you leave a world or delete your account, the world carries on for the members who remain, and the shared village stays with them. Your Zips leave with you.

7.Virtual items and in-app purchases

Zip Lands is free to play and you never have to spend anything. Optional items and currency will be available to buy inside the game, and this is how that works when they are.

• Prices are shown in euros and include VAT at the applicable rate. The price you see at checkout is the price you pay.
• What you buy is a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable licence to use the item inside Zip Lands. You are not buying property.
• Virtual items and currency have no value outside the game. They are not money, they are not credit, they cannot be exchanged for cash, and they cannot be transferred, sold or gifted to another account.
• Unused virtual currency is not a deposit. We do not pay interest on it and it is not redeemable.
• In-app purchases are sold by Polar Software Inc. (Polar), acting as merchant of record. Your purchase contract for the item is with them, they collect and remit any VAT that is due, and they issue the receipt. Their terms govern the transaction itself, and these terms govern what the item does inside the game.
• We may change prices, change what is on sale, and add or retire items. A price change never affects a purchase you have already made.

We also tune the game. Balance changes, rebalanced costs, reworked buildings and new content are a normal part of a live game, and they can change how useful something you bought feels. That alone is not a defect and does not give a right to a refund. If we remove something you bought outright, we will offer you a comparable item or a refund of the unused part, which is what the law expects of us.

8.Your 14 day right of withdrawal, and how you lose it

As a consumer buying at a distance you normally have 14 days to withdraw from a contract without giving a reason. This is the part people miss, so we are saying it as clearly as we can.

Digital content is delivered the instant you buy it. Under Article 16(m) of the Consumer Rights Directive, as implemented in Dutch law in Article 6:230p of the Burgerlijk Wetboek, you lose the right of withdrawal for digital content that is not supplied on a physical medium once performance has begun with your express prior consent and your acknowledgement that you thereby lose that right.

So at checkout we ask you to confirm two things before payment is taken.

• That you expressly ask us to deliver the item immediately, during the 14 day withdrawal period.
• That you understand you lose your right of withdrawal as soon as we deliver it.

If you tick both and we deliver, that purchase is final and you cannot withdraw from it. We confirm that consent and that acknowledgement in the receipt we email you, on a durable medium, because the law requires us to. If you do not tick them, we do not deliver immediately, and your 14 days run as normal.

Where a right of withdrawal does still apply, tell us within 14 days at info@ziplands.com. Any clear statement is enough, and you may use the EU model withdrawal form. We refund within 14 days of being told, by the same payment method you used, and you pay nothing for the refund. The refund itself is issued through Polar Software Inc. (Polar), who took the payment.

On top of that, we give you something the law does not require. If you buy currency and have not spent any of it, you can ask us for a full refund within 14 days of the purchase and we will give it, without asking why. We check one thing only: that your balance still holds at least the amount you bought. If it does, you get the money back and the currency comes off your balance. If you have already spent it, we cannot refund it, because you have had what you paid for.

9.Availability, and changes to the game

We want Zip Lands up and playable and we work at keeping it that way, but we do not promise uninterrupted service. Maintenance, hosting problems, attacks and plain bugs all happen.

• We schedule maintenance for quiet hours where we can and announce it in the game beforehand.
• We may change, add or remove game content, features and balance at any time, so the game can be developed and kept fair.
• Worlds nobody visits go dormant. Waking one is as simple as opening it again, and nothing in it is lost while it sleeps.
• If we discontinue Zip Lands altogether, we will give at least 30 days notice in the game and by email, stop selling anything before that notice starts, and refund the unused part of anything you paid for that you can no longer use.
• We may suspend the service immediately and without notice if there is a security incident or an attack in progress, and we will explain it as soon as we sensibly can.

If a change substantially and negatively affects what you already paid for, Dutch law implementing the Digital Content Directive gives you the right to end the contract for that content and get a proportionate refund. We will tell you clearly when such a change is coming and how to take that up.

10.What you put into the game

Your content is the material you choose to add, such as your display name, world names, names you give your Zips, and anything you send us in support.

• You keep whatever rights you have in it.
• You give us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty free licence to store, copy, display and adapt it as far as running Zip Lands requires, including showing it to the other members of your worlds. The licence lasts as long as the content is in the game and ends when it is removed, apart from copies sitting in backups until they rotate out.
• You confirm that your content is yours to give and does not infringe anyone's rights or break the rules in playing fair.
• We may remove content that breaks these terms or the law, and we will tell you when we do.

If you believe something in Zip Lands infringes your copyright or another right, write to info@ziplands.com with enough detail to identify the material and your claim, and we will look at it promptly.

11.Our intellectual property

The game, its code, its art, its creature designs, its sounds, its text, the name Zip Lands and terms such as Zip, Zipbox, Zipdeck, Den and Sanctuary belong to us or to our licensors, and are protected by copyright and trade mark law.

We give you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable licence to use the game for your own entertainment, subject to these terms. Everything not given to you here stays with us. You may make screenshots, videos and streams of your own play and share them freely, including on monetised channels, as long as you do not present them as official, do not use our branding in a way that suggests we made or endorsed them, and do not use them to sell cheats or accounts.

12.Suspension and termination

You can stop at any time. Close your account from your account settings, or ask us at info@ziplands.com. Closing it ends this agreement, and the terms that by their nature outlive it, such as intellectual property and liability, carry on.

We can suspend or close an account if you break these terms, if we are legally required to, if there is fraud or an unresolved chargeback, or if the account is being used to harm other players. How we go about it depends on how serious it is.

• For most breaches we warn you first, tell you what the problem is, and give you a chance to fix it.
• For serious breaches such as cheating at scale, harassment, fraud or attacking the service, we may suspend immediately.
• We tell you the reason, unless the law stops us or telling you would frustrate an investigation into fraud or abuse.
• You can appeal any decision by replying to us at info@ziplands.com. A person will look at it, and we will explain the outcome.
• If we close your account for breaking these terms, virtual items on it are lost and we do not refund them, except where consumer law says otherwise. If we close it for a reason that is not your fault, we refund the unused part of anything you paid for.

13.When things go wrong, and who is liable

Plenty of terms of service try to disclaim everything and hope nobody checks. In the Netherlands that does not work against a consumer, so we are not going to write it. Here is the honest position.

What we owe you. Zip Lands has to match its description and do what you can reasonably expect of a game of this kind, and it has to keep doing so for as long as you have access to it. That is your conformity right under Dutch law implementing the Digital Content Directive. If the game or something you bought is defective, tell us and we will repair it. If we cannot repair it in reasonable time and without significant inconvenience to you, you can ask for a price reduction or end the contract and get a refund for what you did not get. This costs you nothing and is on top of everything else in these terms.

What we do not limit, ever.

• Liability for death or personal injury caused by our fault.
• Liability for intentional acts or gross negligence by us or our management.
• Liability under Dutch mandatory consumer law, including product liability and your conformity rights.
• Anything else the law says cannot be limited.

What we do limit. Outside those cases, our liability is limited to damage we could reasonably have foreseen when you agreed to these terms, and to the amount you paid us in the 12 months before the event, with a floor of 50 euro so a free player is not left with nothing. We are not liable for lost game progress, lost virtual items or lost time as such, or for what another player does to your village in a world you chose to share. We keep backups and we try hard, but a co-op game is a game you agreed to share.

The game is provided as it is, without any promise beyond what the law requires and what we have written here. We do not promise that it is free of bugs or that it is always available, and we do not promise any particular level of enjoyment or advantage.

14.Complaints and disputes

Come to us first at info@ziplands.com. Describe what happened and what you would like done. We confirm receipt within 14 days and give you a full answer as quickly as we can. Most things end here.

The European Commission used to run an online dispute resolution platform for consumer complaints. That platform stopped operating in July 2025, so there is no longer an EU wide portal to submit a complaint through. Your other routes are unaffected: you can take a dispute to a competent Dutch court, and as a consumer you may also bring it before the courts of the country where you live.

Complaints about how we handle personal data go to the Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens. That is covered in our Privacy Policy.

15.Governing law

Dutch law governs these terms and any dispute arising from them. If you are a consumer resident in another EU or EEA country, this choice of law does not deprive you of the protection given to you by the mandatory rules of your own country. Where those rules give you more, they apply.

Disputes go to the competent court in the Netherlands, without prejudice to your right as a consumer to bring proceedings in the country where you live.

16.Changes to these terms

We will need to change these terms from time to time, because the game changes and the law changes. Each version carries the date it took effect and we keep the older versions available.

• For a change that affects your rights or duties, we give you at least 30 days notice in the game and by email.
• If you do not accept a change, you can close your account before it takes effect and we refund the unused part of anything you have paid for.
• Carrying on playing after a change takes effect means you accept it.
• Small corrections such as fixing a typo, a broken link or an out of date company detail take effect when we publish them.

17.The rest

• These terms, the Privacy Policy and the Cookie Policy are the whole agreement between us about Zip Lands.
• If a part of these terms is invalid, the rest still applies, and the invalid part is replaced by the closest valid alternative.
• If we do not enforce something straight away, we have not given up the right to enforce it later.
• You may not transfer your rights under these terms to anyone else. We may transfer ours to a company that takes over Zip Lands, and if we do we will tell you first and you may close your account if you would rather not continue.
• These terms are written in English. If we publish a translation and the two disagree, the English version governs, unless the law of your country of residence says otherwise.

Questions about any of this go to info@ziplands.com. We would rather explain it than have you guess.