Cosmetics

Cosmetics change how your lord and villages look to you and to others: the cut and trim of the banners over your halls, the finial on their poles, the colour of your chimney smoke, a feast-day repaint of your hall and houses, the ornament and edge of your crest on the realm map, the board your village names are written on, the standard over your marching armies, an epithet after your name, the ink of your name in chat, a frame round your portrait, the wax on your letters, the fanfare when you watch a battle you won, and extra tinctures, charges, divisions and shield shapes for your arms. None of them changes a number in the game. The full list with prices is in reference/cosmetics.md.

The basics

• Open the Wardrobe from the nav bar. Pick a slot, pick an item, and the preview at the top shows it on your own hall, crest, army, profile, chat line or arms, drawn by the same code the game uses.
• Items cost Crowns, by rarity: Common 4, Uncommon 8, Rare 15, Epic 25, Legendary 40. Crowns are bought with gold at the royal mint (see Cards and Crowns), so every item can be had without real money.
• Some items are earned instead: by reaching a rank, by finishing a quest, or as a legacy reward at the end of a season. Earned items are never sold.
• Each slot holds one item. "Wear" puts an owned item on, "Take off" goes back to the plain look. Heraldry items are not worn: owning one adds the option to the arms editor on your profile.
• Items are yours for good. Taking one off does not lose it.

Slots and where each shows

Slot	Where you see it	Who sees it
Banner cloth	The banners and tower pennants over every village hall you hold, which fly your coat of arms	You, in your villages
Banner trim	Fringes, borders or tassels on those banners and pennants	You
Finial	The top of each banner pole on the hall	You
Hearth smoke	The smoke from every chimney in your villages	You
Festive dressing	Your village hall at every size, and your hovels and cottages, repainted for a feast	You
Crest ornament	Behind or around your crest on every village you hold on the realm map	Everyone
Crest edge	A coloured edge round that crest	Everyone
Name plaque	The board under each of your villages' names on the realm map	Everyone
Army standard	Over your armies on the realm map, and over your commander in battle replays	Everyone
Epithet	After your name on your profile and in chat ("Alda the Bold", "Alda of the Iron Hand")	Everyone
Name ink	The colour of your name in chat	Everyone
Portrait frame	Round your portrait on your profile	Everyone
Wax seal	On the letters you send	The lords you write to
Victory fanfare	When you watch a replay of a battle you won	You
Heraldry	New choices in the arms editor; once in your arms they show wherever your arms do	Everyone

Village looks follow your arms. The hall's banners are banners of arms: the field and its division fill the cloth, an ordinary such as a fess or bend runs across it, and any other charge stands upright in the middle. Tower pennants carry the field, a stripe of the second tincture and the charge at the hoist. The Heraldic Pageant hangings, the mantling, the army standards and the painted ribbon plaque take your two field tinctures, and the Banner of Arms standard carries the whole coat. A lord without arms gets the default muted crimson and ochre.

Festive dressings

Each festive dressing is a set of repaints of the village hall (all five sizes) and of the hovel and cottage, painted over the buildings as they ship so they keep their shape and place. Harvest Home adds wheat stooks, pumpkins and corn dollies; Fair Day strings bunting along the eaves; Lantern Night hangs lanterns and lights the windows; Midsummer Garlands adds flowers and birch boughs; Yuletide snows on the roofs and hangs fir and holly; the Heraldic Pageant hangs long banners in your tinctures. Other buildings keep their usual look. A building under construction shows its scaffold, not the repaint.

Heraldry

Owning a heraldry item adds it to the arms editor. Beyond the free set the Wardrobe sells more tinctures, the furs (ermine, ermines, erminois, pean and vair, drawn as patterns), patterned fields (chequy, lozengy, bendy, chevronny, pily, embattled and wavy lines among them), ordinaries (chief, pale, bend, cross, pall, pile, canton and others), painted charges (beasts such as the bear, griffin, dragon, unicorn and stag's head, birds, crowns and coronets, the sun in splendour and the sun rising, and tools and objects from the anchor to the portcullis) and more shield shapes. The Wardrobe lists them by kind.

Buying

The price is the item's rarity price, unless it is featured. Four items are featured at a time, a quarter off (rounded, never below 1 Crown), and the four change every 24 real hours, the same for every lord. At least one featured item is rare or better. The featured items and the bundles also appear at the foot of the card shop.

Bundles sell a set of items for less. You pay only for the items in it you do not own yet, at the bundle's discount (25%, or 30% for the Herald's Roll). One bundle each real week is the bundle of the week and takes a further 10% off.

Worked example. The Midsummer Fair bundle holds Midsummer Garlands (rare, 15), Bunting (uncommon, 8), Juniper Smoke (uncommon, 8) and Long Pennon (uncommon, 8): 39 Crowns in full. At 25% off it costs round(39 * 0.75) = 29 Crowns. If you already own the Bunting, the bundle charges for the other three: round(31 * 0.75) = 23. As the bundle of the week it would be round(31 * 0.65) = 20.

A purchase takes the Crowns at once and fails without taking any if you are short. You cannot buy an item twice, nor a bundle you already own in full.

Earning without Crowns

How	Item
Quest "A Patch of Land" (found a village)	Oak Board name plaque
Quest "Eyes on the Wilds" (first scout)	Lance Pennon standard
Quest "The Lord's Due" (taxes)	Tassels trim
Quest "Village Life"	Harvest Sheaves dressing
Quest "Raise an Inn"	Applewood Smoke
Quest "A House of Prayer"	the Pious epithet
Rank 2 (Serf)	Iron Spearhead finial
Rank 4 (Freeman)	Walnut Brown name ink
Rank 6 (Reeve)	the Steadfast epithet
Rank 8 (Squire)	Oak Wreath crest ornament
Rank 10 (Banneret)	Gilt Edge crest edge

The server checks every few seconds and hands over anything you have earned, with a note in your inbox under World events. Lords who were already past a rank or quest when cosmetics arrived get those items on their next check.

Legacy items

Legacy rewards from the end of a season (see the crown feature's Hall of Fame) arrive in the Wardrobe as cosmetics: the Weathered Banner trim, Gilt Crest Frame edge, Laurel Crest Frame ornament, Royal Standard, Masons' Banner and Victor's Pennant standards, the Royal Purpure and Cloth of Gold tinctures, and the Crown and Mason's Tower charges. Legacy titles ("King of Season 2", "Knight of the Realm") can be worn in the epithet slot. A lord carrying legacy items from another world finds them in the Wardrobe on their first check.

Equip rules

• You can wear only what you own, and only in its own slot.
• Coronets (the Coronet Finial and the Baron's Coronet ornament) can be bought by anyone but worn only from rank 11 (Baron). If your rank falls below that, the coronet comes off on the next check.
• A legacy title can be worn as an epithet only while you hold it.
• Heraldry items cannot be worn. In the arms editor, options you do not own show locked; choosing one takes you to the Wardrobe. The server refuses arms that use an option you do not own.

What cosmetics never do

The cosmetics feature has no part in the village simulation, battles, Renown or trade. A test equips an item in every slot and checks that a village advanced three hours produces exactly the same state, modifiers and Renown as without them.

Interactions

• Cards and Crowns: where Crowns come from; the card shop shows the featured items and bundles.
• Profile: epithet, portrait frame and the extra heraldry.
• World map: crests, plaques and army standards.
• Inbox: wax seals on letters, and the note when an item is granted.
• Battles: the commander's standard and the victory fanfare in replays.
• Quests and Ranks and Renown: the earned items.

For maintainers

• server/src/features/cosmetics/content.ts: the catalogue, rarities and prices, slots, bundles, featured count, discount and rotation.
• server/src/features/cosmetics/logic.ts: buyItem, buyBundle, bundlePrice, featuredItems, equip, tidyEquipped, earnedNow, legacyMissing, stampLooks (map looks on village sites).
• server/src/features/cosmetics/index.ts: messages, the tick that pays earned and legacy items, grantCosmetic.
• server/src/features/registry.ts: cosmeticsApi / grantCosmetic(game, playerId, id, why?), the seam other features use to hand out items, and legacyCosmeticId. The crown feature calls it for each legacy item at season end.
• server/src/features/profile/content.ts: extra arms options carry cosmetic, the item that unlocks them; profile/logic.ts validateArms checks ownership.
• packages/protocol/src/features/cosmetics.ts: types, looksOf, ownsCosmetic. PublicLord.looks, ChatMessage.from.looks, InboxEntry.from.seal, WorldSite.ownerLooks and BattleReplay.standards carry what a lord wears.
• clients/web/src/features/cosmetics/draw.ts: banner cloth in the lord's arms and its trims (paintBannerCloth), finials, smoke tint, crest ornaments, plaques, standards and fanfares; villageLife.ts dresses the hall's banners; preview.ts is the Wardrobe stage.
• clients/web/src/features/cosmetics/art.ts: loads the paintings for finials, crest ornaments, plaques and standards from clients/web/public/cosmetics (made by tools/art/process_cosmetics.py), with cloth layers tinted to the lord's tinctures.
• clients/web/src/features/cosmetics/festive.ts: loads the festive repaints from clients/web/public/sprites/festive (made by tools/art/festive.py from Tripo nano-banana-2 edits of the shipped sprites); village.ts swaps them in.
• clients/web/src/features/profile/heraldry.ts: shields, divisions, ordinaries, furs and paintArms, the one canvas painter used by crests, banners and standards. Painted charges are clients/web/public/heraldry/<id>.png (tools/art/process_profile.py).
• /cosmetics-preview.html and /village-preview.html?looks=...&charge=... on the dev server show the paintings and dressings without signing in.
• Tests: server/src/features/cosmetics/cosmetics.test.ts.