System mechanic — not covered elsewhere

Bounty Contracts

A rotating board of kill jobs, one accepted at a time, paid better the more the Guild trusts you

The Bounty Office, a dedicated building distinct from the general quest system, runs its own separate job board: bounty contracts, each one a straightforward "kill N of this creature" job for a flat cash reward. It's run by the Bounty Hunters Guild, one of five factions whose own separate reputation track determines how much every completed contract actually pays.

This board is hand-authored and finite — for a source of work that never runs out, see The Long Ledger, whose commissions are generated rather than written.

The board

Six contracts are shown at once, drawn at random from a pool of 32 spanning five rough difficulty tiers — from early jobs like culling hippies or clearing a rat problem, through wilderness and dungeon targets, up to endgame contracts on Vulcanis worth thousands of coin for killing just two or three dragons. Only one contract can be active at a time. Finishing (or simply not liking) the current board's options costs nothing to change: the board can be rerolled for free at any time, and it also turns over automatically the moment you complete a contract, so the office is worth revisiting rather than grinding the same handful of jobs forever.

Getting paid

Standing with the Bounty Hunters Guild moves every contract's payout in either direction: +1% cash per point of reputation above zero (so a hunter at the Guild's top standing earns noticeably more per job), and up to a flat 50% docked off the payout if your standing has fallen to Hostile — the Guild simply doesn't trust a hunter it considers an enemy, whatever the contract says on paper.

Version history

Reputation bonus added, giving good standing with the Bounty Hunters Guild a direct, per-contract cash reward.
The Hostile-standing penalty added, giving the other end of that same reputation track real teeth for the first time — before this, falling to Hostile with the Guild had no actual consequence on contract pay.
The board stopped offering contracts on worlds that aren't reachable. When certain worlds were switched off, three endgame contracts targeting creatures that live only there stayed in the rotating pool regardless — a player could accept a bounty on a monster the game would never actually fly them to, and it would sit on their board forever. The board now checks the same reachability test the game's own recipe system already used, so switching a world back on automatically returns its contracts to the pool with no separate list to maintain.
The "Complete N contracts" achievements were fixed. The counter those achievements actually read had been sitting in the save template, unused, since the system shipped — nothing anywhere ever incremented it. Directly measured before the fix: accepting, finishing, and getting paid for a contract left the counter at zero. All four tiers of that achievement were unearnable by anyone until the counter was actually wired up to a completed contract.

Trivia

The reward-counter bug that made the contract achievements unearnable is the same recurring failure shape as two other, unrelated fixes elsewhere in the game — a real player action happening correctly while the specific save field an achievement reads quietly never gets written.
The most expensive contract in the pool pays 9,000 coin for killing just two Pyro Drakes — by far the best coin-per-kill ratio of any bounty on the board, offset entirely by how dangerous reaching and fighting one actually is.
A named citizen's own kill-target requests, tracked in the Citizen Journal, draw from a much smaller pool of nine creatures — most of which also appear somewhere in this board's own much larger list.