System mechanic — read this one

The Charter Stake

Found your own town anywhere in the world, wall it, staff it, and grow it into a city — nobody can delete it out from under you

The Charter Stake is a craftable tool with one purpose: planting it founds a brand-new town of your own, anywhere in the world, entirely separate from the game's three fixed settlements. What starts as nothing but a name and a claimed ring of ground can grow, over time, into a walled, garrisoned, rent-paying town — and eventually into a full city, judged by what's actually standing in it.

Founding a town

Crafting a Charter Stake and planting it costs 24 Iron Bar, 6 Gold Bar, 40 Plank, 60 Stone, and ¤5,000 in cash. A new town claims a ring 170 units across — the same size as the wall around each of the game's three official settlements — and must be founded at least 520 units from the centre of any existing settlement, official or player-founded, so towns can't be planted on top of each other. At the moment of founding, a charter town is genuinely just a name and a claim: no wall, no guards, no income yet. Everything below is built up afterward.

Merely carrying a Charter Stake or Guard Post isn't enough to use it. Both are placement tools that only actually work while held — put it in a hotbar slot and select it first, then press [F]. Pressing [F] while it's sitting in your satchel but something else is in your hand does nothing related to either tool at all: [F] belongs to whatever you're actually holding, so it might swing a weapon, harvest with a tool, or refuse silently, none of which explains why the stake itself "isn't working." The game now catches this specific case and tells you directly — "You are carrying a Charter Stake. Put it in a hotbar slot, select it, then press [F] to found a town" — after this exact confusion was reported four separate times before the cause was found.

Walls and gates

A charter town's ring is minted the moment you found it — roughly 178 real wall segments (at the standard radius) forming one unbroken curtain around the whole town, with exactly one gate: three door segments together at the ring's eastern point. That single gate opens for the town's own owner and stays solid to everyone else, which is what actually makes it a gate rather than a decorative gap — the ring's own founding-day geometry looked identical but had no real collision or ownership behind it at all. Every other point on the ring is ordinary wall, so an attacker either comes through that one gate or has to physically break through the stonework — there's no second opening anywhere else to funnel toward. Wall segments are ordinary buildable pieces and can be raised in the same materials the general build system already uses, from plain wood and stone up through Brick, Iron, and Armoured tiers for a tougher wall. A charter wall can genuinely be broken down in a fight rather than being indestructible scenery.

Hiring guards

Guard Posts (20 Plank, 24 Stone, 6 Iron Bar to build) each hold up to four hired guards, drawn from three tiers:

A hired guard stands at their post and fights anything hostile that comes within reach, using the same damage path the player's own weapons use, so every kill still counts toward drops, experience, and the bestiary. Guards don't patrol or chase — walls and gates exist precisely to bring the fight to them. Upkeep is charged daily like the rest of the game's economy, and a town that can't afford its garrison loses guards one at a time, oldest hire first, with a message telling you it happened.

A Guard Post can be upgraded twice by walking up to it and pressing [E] — the same in-world door every other interactable building in the game answers to — with the prompt naming the current tier and what the next one holds before you commit, right up until the top tier says plainly that this is as far as it goes. A post standing near the Town Hall takes priority for that key over the hall itself, so a post pitched close by is never accidentally out of reach. Each tier both raises the capacity and changes the building's own silhouette so the upgrade is something you can actually see, not just a number: a plain Post holds the four guards above, a longer, low-roofed Barracks with two doors and a chimney holds eight, and a battlemented stone Keep flying your town's own banner colour — tall enough to read over the wall — holds sixteen. The building's look also reflects its condition in real time: a burned-out post looks visibly different from a working one, which matters in a siege, where knowing at a glance whether an attack actually knocked out a chunk of your garrison (or, from the other side, whether your attack actually worked) is some of the most important information on the field.

A guard can genuinely be knocked down rather than fighting forever — an attacker standing near one wears its health down over real time, and at zero the guard goes down rather than dying outright. It returns to its post a short while later at a quarter of its original hire price, paid automatically out of the town's own treasury. An empty treasury, or a guard post that's itself been destroyed with nowhere left to stand, both stop that guard coming back at all — so attacking a town's garrison is, in a very literal sense, spending down the same income the town is relying on to pay for its own defence.

What a garrison actually contributes to a raid, measured

Hiring guards has a second cost beyond gold that isn't obvious from the numbers above: the size of a raid's wave scales directly with how many guards you've hired — every guard added puts two more raiders in every future wave. According to the development log, at each guard's full listed damage connecting every single second, a break-even garrison — one that can actually clear its own wave before a raider finishes capturing the town — works out to twelve Knights, roughly ¤72,000 to hire and ¤1,680 a day in upkeep. Cheaper garrisons fall short by a wide margin: two Militia against the wave they themselves provoke would need over twenty minutes at perfect uptime, against the roughly one minute a raider needs to stand in the town's centre uninterrupted to take it. And that twelve-Knight figure is already the generous version — actual measured uptime came in well under half of perfect, because a guard only fights whatever wanders inside its own reach while raiders simply walk past it toward the centre. For comparison, an NPC-owned world city's own free garrison hits for roughly seven times what a paid Militia manages, at no gold cost at all. None of this makes hiring guards worthless — a garrison still occupies raiders, chips away at them, and can finish off anything you've already weakened yourself — but on the numbers alone, a garrison can't be counted on to win a raid unassisted; the real fight still needs you. This reads as a deliberate balance point rather than an oversight: nothing about the guards' damage, reach, or the raid's own math is behaving inconsistently, it simply adds up to a smaller number than the Guard Post's own framing might suggest.

Raids: an event you can prepare for

A charter town can be raided, but only while you're actually on Earth — never while you're off-world with no way to respond. A raid gives a full 90-second warning before the first wave actually lands, specifically so walls, a gate, and a garrison are things worth running back to rather than a punishment for looking away from the screen. Raiders spawn outside the ring and walk in, meeting the wall, the gate, and the garrison exactly the way any other enemy would, so every weapon, pet, spell and summon works on them normally. A town can't be raided again for at least 30 minutes after the last attempt.

Ninety seconds is a real, measurable distance rather than an arbitrary number: at your ordinary running speed it's enough to cover roughly 3,600 units and get back — around twenty-one town-widths, since a charter town's own wall ring is about 170 across. Wander further than that from your town and the warning genuinely isn't enough time to run home on foot, no matter how fast you are otherwise; a Teleporter is the only thing in the game that puts you back at your town instantly regardless of distance, so carrying one is the real insurance against being caught somewhere the warning can't save.

A raid can never delete your town. If a raider stands inside the ring's centre for a full uninterrupted minute with nothing stopping it, the town simply changes hands — ownership flips to the raiders. Nothing is destroyed: the walls, guard posts, and every building are exactly where they were. Killing every raider still inside the ring hands ownership straight back. A charter town is never lost for good, only held by someone else until you take it back.

Town income: the tithe, and the cost of a second town

Before this was added, a charter town was pure expense — the founding fee, materials for every piece, daily guard wages — with no income of its own at all. A town now pays a daily tithe on its own: a base amount plus a share of the value of everything actually built inside the ring, so a bare claimed plot earns a small trickle and a genuinely developed town earns considerably more. Guard wages and every other cost are drawn from the town's own treasury before ever touching your personal cash, and the COLLECT button on the town panel pulls the balance out for you.

Holding more than one charter town isn't simply better. Every town past your first adds a daily administration cost that applies to all of your towns at once, and raises how often any of them can be raided — so a second town has to genuinely out-earn what it costs to hold, not just add free income. A town currently held by someone else (see raids, above) earns you nothing and drops out of these totals entirely until you take it back.

Houses and rent

Houses built inside a charter town generate rent into the town's own treasury, on the same centrality principle as the game's official real estate: a house near the town's centre earns roughly double what one against the wall does. Rent also depends directly on how intact the wall actually is — occupancy runs from half (at a badly breached wall) up to full (a completely intact ring), so a raid that smashes through the wall keeps costing the town income until someone repairs it, even after every raider is dead. The treasury itself is a real, physical, lootable building rather than an abstract number, the same way the game's Drift Bank works — walk up to your own treasury and press [E] to deposit or withdraw, the same way you'd interact with a merchant or any other building in the world. Standing between your own treasury and a rival's specifically offers your own business, never theirs.

The Town Hall and clans

A Town Hall is minted at the centre of every charter town — a real, ownable building with three times the durability of an ordinary wall piece, breakable, and rebuildable at half its original cost if ruined. Standing at an intact Town Hall you own lets you found a clan: a shared faction identity that everything you own — gates, guards, tithes, rings — is re-stamped to at the moment of founding, so nothing you already built suddenly locks you out. Clan roles are stored as real data with their own permissions, and invitations are recorded as a genuine ledger entry rather than faked — there is no live player-to-player multiplayer session to accept one on today, but the record is written in a shape a future server can act on directly.

Becoming a city

A charter town's rank as a "town" or a "city" is judged live, by the total build-cost value of every intact building actually standing in it — houses, the Town Hall, a treasury, factories, and guard housing all count toward the total, weighted roughly by what they cost to place. Reach a total value of 120 and the settlement counts as a city. Because the rank is recalculated live rather than stored, it runs in both directions: burn the buildings down and the same place reverts to being read as a town again.

Decay: built, but switched off

A full decay-and-deletion system exists for a charter town whose Town Hall is destroyed and left unrepaired for 30 days — not simple inactivity; a town you've merely stopped visiting is completely safe, and rebuilding a ruined hall at any point resets the clock. This system ships switched off by default, gated behind a flag the game does not turn on for anyone by default, because it's the only mechanism in the entire build capable of permanently destroying a player's paid-for property, and it was written to exist without being armed until that's a deliberate decision. As things stand, no charter town can currently be permanently deleted through ordinary play.

Version history

• The Charter Stake itself, and the ring. Directly from an operator request: "the player should be able to build an entire town, including walls and protection, hiring guards etc... this is supposed to be a very integral part of the multiplayer." Built from day one around faction-id ownership rather than a single hardcoded "the player," specifically so another real player is simply a different owner of the same kind of record — and as a parallel system that touches nothing about how the three official settlements already worked.
• Walls made to actually stop creatures, closing a real gap: a charter wall stopped the player but not a single enemy, the same way the three official settlement walls never stopped a creature either (their garrisons had always done that job instead). Scoped narrowly to player-owned rings specifically so nothing about the three world settlements or their existing siege behaviour changed.
• v1208 — fixed wall sections floating above the ground or sinking into it on uneven terrain. Each wall section measured the ground's height at only one point and built the whole section flat from there, which looks fine on the hand-placed, gentle ground the three official settlements sit on — but a town chartered on natural, hilly terrain could end up with sections visibly floating or half-buried, and a buried section was invisible to monsters even though it still physically blocked them. Sections now measure the ground along their whole length instead of a single point, fixing the large majority of a typical town's wall, gate posts included.
• v1332 — the wall ring itself became a real, destructible structure. The automatically-minted ring was, underneath its correct appearance, permanent world scenery with no health, no owner, and no way to actually damage it — stronger than any wall a player could ever build by hand, and impossible to "destroy the wall" against, of all walls, the one that matters most. It's now made of the same real, damageable pieces as everything else you build, with a half-cost rebuild path for any section that falls; a town founded before this version converts automatically the first time that character loads.
• Guard posts and hired guards added, with real upfront cost and real daily upkeep — unpaid guards actually leave, which is what turns a garrison into an economic decision rather than a one-time purchase.
• v1162 — fixed guards and guard posts vanishing from sight after a reload, while still billing you. Everything was saved correctly — the town, the posts, every guard, their positions, their daily cost — but nothing rebuilt the actual visible buildings and guards when a character loaded back in, so a player's whole garrison could look completely gone the next session while the treasury kept paying for it exactly as if it were standing there. Fixed to correctly rebuild everything for whichever character is actually loaded, so switching between two characters never leaves one character's guards standing in another's world.
• Raids added, with the 90-second warning and the never-delete-only-capture rule described above.
• v1154 — fixed raiders freezing in place and never actually reaching the town. Raiders were only ever programmed to move once a player stood close enough to threaten them, but a raid spawns just outside the wall — far enough from a player standing at their own town centre that the warning message would announce an attack while every raider stood completely still, indefinitely, until someone walked right up to one. Raiders now advance on the town itself, still switching to fight any player who gets close along the way.
• Three tougher wall materials added above plain wood and stone, using materials that already existed elsewhere in the game rather than introducing anything new to gather.
• The wall was made to actually cost HP rather than being unbreakable scenery, and a matching half-cost rebuild path was added for it.
• The Town Hall and clans added, giving the civic building an actual purpose from day one rather than waiting for a later stage to justify it.
• The treasury became a real, physical, lootable building instead of a bare number on the town's record.
• v1141 — the tithe added, described above: a town's first real income, plus the real cost of holding more than one at once.
• Rent from houses added, tied to both a house's distance from the town centre and how intact the surrounding wall currently is — giving a raid a lasting economic cost even after every raider is dead.
• v1147 — rent fixed to actually pay most of the time. Rent had only ever been paid out once every twenty seconds, in whole coins with no fraction carried forward — meaning two ticks out of every three paid nothing at all, and a rented house looked dead for most of the time you watched it. The same hourly total now arrives every second instead, in fractional amounts properly carried between collections, and the passive tick stopped printing a chat message on every single payment; the COLLECT button still confirms, since that's a deliberate action you took.
• City rank added, calculated live from the value of whatever is actually standing in a town at any given moment.
• Fixed the treasury and clan founding being completely unreachable for a stretch after they were built — both existed only as developer console commands, with no actual button or prompt in the game's own interface that could reach them, so no ordinary player could ever have used either. Fixed by giving both buildings the same [E]-to-interact prompt every other building in the world already answers to.
• Decay and deletion written, and shipped disarmed — the only system in the game capable of permanently destroying paid-for player property, and the one the operator has not yet switched on.
• Fixed guard-housing upgrades being console-only, twice. The Post-to-Barracks-to- Keep ladder above existed and worked correctly the moment it shipped, but the only way to actually trigger one was typing a developer command. A town panel got an UPGRADE button first — but that panel lives in one specific interface mode and simply can't be opened in the other, so it only solved the problem for some players. The [E]-at-the-post prompt described above followed shortly after, specifically because it works in every interface the same way every other interactable building does.
• Fixed the town panel under-reporting its own income. Rent (added above) was wired into the treasury's real ledger but not into the separate calculation the panel itself reads, so the one screen a player actually checks their town's finances on could show a town losing money while its treasury was genuinely growing. The panel now reads from the same source the real ledger does, and also gained a live occupancy percentage, the town-to-city rank threshold, and a count of guards currently down. That same ledger — income, costs, net, vault, garrison, and rank — is also readable directly at the Town Hall's own [E] prompt now, so checking it never actually requires opening the panel at all.
• Added a direct hint for carrying a placement tool without holding it, described above. Reported four separate times before the actual cause was found — the tool was never broken, but every report described trying to use it from the satchel rather than the hotbar.
• Fixed [F] casting a spell instead of planting a Charter Stake or Guard Post. Reported twice before the cause was found: a fresh character ships with a spell bound to [F] by default, and the game's own key-conflict guard only knew how to stand down for two other kinds of tool, not for either of these — so pressing [F] while holding either one quietly cast whatever spell was loaded instead of placing anything, with no error to explain why. The Homestead Stake was never affected, since it plants on [E] instead. The bug was also easy to miss while testing: on a freshly-created character with a low-level spell, the spell simply fails to cast and [F] appears to do nothing either way, so the conflict only becomes visible once a character actually has a working spell to steal the key.
• Fixed melee attacks landing straight through stone. The v1177 fix above only ever checked a player's own built walls, so a wooden wall stopped a bite but a stone building — a chapel, a town house, even a tree or a rock — stopped nothing at all, and creatures on the far side of one could still land melee hits through it. Now every solid in the world blocks a melee attack's line of sight the same way a player-built wall already did, with two carve-outs: a doorway stays open even though the building around it isn't, and a solid standing on top of the attacker or target can't block, so a character who spawns inside a building's own footprint isn't rendered permanently unattackable. It only stops damage arriving through stone — a creature that's already walked in through the wall still attacks you from inside exactly as before.

Trivia

• A charter town's minimum distance from any other settlement (520 units) is more than three times its own ring's diameter — deliberately spaced further apart than the ring size alone would require.
• Because a town's clan record re-stamps every gate, guard, tithe, and ring it owns to the clan's own identity the instant it's founded, a solo player founding a clan effectively becomes their own one-person faction rather than losing access to anything they'd already built.
• The decay system's own trigger is stricter than it sounds — it isn't enough for a Town Hall to simply be ruined; the clock only starts from the moment it's ruined, and rebuilding it at half cost at any point before 30 days pass resets it completely.