System mechanic

Factories

Placeable building, one per skill · passive XP income whether you're logged in or not

A Factory is a building tied to one specific skill — there's a Mining Factory, a Combat Factory, even an Edging Factory (it's one of the eight core skills; if a skill exists, it has a factory). Once built, it earns XP in that skill every hour, in the background, whether the game is open or not. Log back in after a week away and there's a backlog of XP waiting, up to a cap.

Building more than one doesn't multiply income evenly — each additional factory earns 0.65× what the one before it earned, so stacking has fast diminishing returns:

Catch-up XP from time away is capped at 24 hours of backlog per factory, so leaving a save alone for a month doesn't hand back a month of levels in one lump sum.

How to get one

Cost is a flat 2,400 wood, 1,200 plank, 2,400 stone, 900 iron — payable entirely from gathering skills. What gates you is land, not levels: a factory can only be built inside a town you own, which means founding a town with a Charter Stake first. Factories also need real space around each other — no dropping two on the same spot.

Risk: factories can be destroyed

A factory is a real building with hit points (5× a stone wall's HP) and a real hitbox — it can be shot, blown up, and ruined like any other structure. A ruined factory stops earning until rebuilt, and a factory in a town you lose control of earns its new owner nothing. This is the deliberate trade for removing the old level requirement: income you have to actually defend, instead of a number you unlock by grinding. Destroying one doesn't refund materials — rebuilding costs the resources again, at the ordinary half-cost repair path other buildings use.

Version history

• Added, originally buildable anywhere in the world with no town or land requirement — the only gate was the flat material cost. At launch a factory had no failure state at all: nothing could destroy one. Paid a flat 9,000 xp/hour with no per-factory decay curve.
• A total-level requirement of roughly 1050 was added later to unlock factories at all, specifically so players couldn't idle their way to end-game power without having actually played to get there.
• The big rewrite changed what a factory is: the level requirement was removed completely and replaced with the town-ownership gate described above — a land-and-defense requirement instead of a grind requirement. The flat 9,000 xp/hour rate was cut to a base of 3,000 with the 0.65× decay curve shown in the table (roughly an 8.6× cut at 8 factories compared to the old flat-rate stacking), and factories became real, destructible buildings for the first time. Old saves with factories built under the earlier rules kept earning — nothing already built was retroactively broken.

Trivia

• The Edging Factory is a real, working building — it earns Edging XP exactly the way every other factory earns its own skill's XP. There is no special case for it.
• A factory that can't currently earn (ruined, or its town lost) still has its internal payment clock move forward without paying out — you can't leave one broken for a week and then fix it to collect a full week of backlog you didn't actually earn.