The Village

Your village is a 48 by 48 tile patch of land around a village hall. You place buildings on it, peasants staff them, and the goods they make are carried to the nearest store. Where you put each building changes how much it makes, because carriers walk every trip.

All times and rates on this page are at world speed 1. The server has a worldSpeed setting that divides every timer and multiplies every rate. At world speed 2 a two-minute hovel takes one real minute and an orchard makes twice as much per real hour. The client always shows real time and per-real-hour rates.

The basics

• You start with a hall, a stockpile and a granary, 8 peasants and some wood, stone and apples. Founding a village also adds 300 gold to your treasury.
• Gold is yours, not the village's. Every village you hold pays its taxes into one treasury and spends from it, and that treasury has no cap. It shows under your rank and Renown at the top of the village panel, with its rate per hour summed over all your villages.
• Buildings cost resources up front. Two build at once (four with premium) and three more can wait in the queue (eight with premium).
• A village gets dearer and slower as it fills. Each building of a kind costs 15% more than the last one of that kind, and every building you place makes the next one take longer to build (see Growth costs).
• Each workplace needs peasants. If you have fewer peasants than jobs, the newest workplaces stand empty.
• Producers walk their goods to the nearest store of the right kind. Wood, stone, iron and the other materials go to the stockpile, food to the granary, ale and wine to the inn, weapons to the armoury. Shorter walks mean more output.
• Some buildings must sit on or near a particular kind of ground: a quarry on stone, a woodcutter near trees, a fishing hut by water.
• Orchards, dairies, vegetable patches, wheat farms and hop gardens make up to 30% more on meadow.
• A building that stops working shows a reason: no store, no workers, storage full, or a missing input. It also shows "z z Z" over its roof.
• The village's stores (everything but gold) are listed at the foot of the village panel, below rations, ale and tax, with each good's rate per hour. They stay in view while the rest of the panel scrolls. A selected building's output is per real hour too, so six woodcutters' outputs add up to the wood rate in the stores.
• Cancelling a building before it finishes refunds what you paid for it. Demolishing a finished one refunds nothing. For 10 seconds after placing a building you can undo it for a full refund (see Cancelling and demolishing).
• Any building except the hall can be moved, free and at once, to a spot where it could be built (see Moving buildings).
• A workplace can be paused. Its workers go to other jobs and it makes nothing until you resume it (see Pausing buildings).
• With more than one village, the village switcher at the end of the tabs along the top bar shows the one you are looking at and lists the rest with their biome, peasants and popularity. The [ and ] keys step through them, and Enter village on your own village's map panel opens it. Every village keeps working on the server whichever one you are looking at.

Founding and the starting layout

You found your first village by claiming a free site on the world map. The site's biome decides the village's terrain and production multipliers (see Biomes). Later villages are founded by marching a commander from a village you already hold (see Military), up to the number your rank allows (see the Max villages column in Ranks and Renown).

A new village starts with:

Item	Value
Wood	250
Stone	60
Apples	120
Gold	300
Peasants	8
Housing	8 (the hall)
Rations	Normal (level 3)
Ale	None (level 0)
Tax	Low (level 1)

Three fixed buildings are placed for you and can never be demolished or moved by the player:

Building	Footprint	Position on a 48 tile map	Role
Village Hall	5 x 8	x 22, y 20	Housing for 8
Stockpile	6 x 6	x 15, y 21 (left of the hall, one tile gap)	Stockpile store, 2,500 per material
Granary	3 x 5	x 24, y 14 (one tile past the hall's low-y edge, its high-x edge flush with the hall's)	Granary store, 1,500 per food

The hall's centre is at (24.5, 24). That point matters for the hall-distance bonuses on Popularity.

The hall grows with the village

The village hall is rebuilt grander as the village grows. Its look follows the village's size tier, the same tier that sets how big the village looks on the realm map. The tier counts finished buildings (working or idle), leaving out the hall, stockpile and granary. Queued and unfinished buildings do not count.

Tier	Finished buildings	The hall
Hamlet	0 to 4	A timber-framed hall under thatch, one banner over the porch
Village	5 to 14	A larger hall with a jettied upper floor, dormers and a cross wing
Large village	15 to 29	A stone ground floor and a square stone tower with a banner
Town	30 to 49	Slate roofs, a second wing and a walled courtyard, a crenellated tower
Walled town	50 or more	A stone great hall with two towers inside a curtain wall with a gatehouse

The change is only in looks: the hall keeps its 5 by 8 footprint, its housing and its effects at every tier. Demolishing buildings so the count drops below a threshold takes the hall back down a tier.

The banners on the hall fly the lord's colours: the two field tinctures of the coat of arms and its division, or a muted crimson and ochre for a lord with no arms yet. They lean the same way the chimney smoke drifts.

Town charters

At Large village the lord may grant the village a town charter, and a second one at Walled town. Each charter gives the village a lasting bonus and opens buildings only it may raise, listed on the Charter tab of the build menu. Each charter flies its own small pennon, in its colours and with its device, under the lord's banners on the hall. A charter building in a village that no longer holds its charter stands idle with the reason "Needs the ... charter."

Signs of work

Buildings show that they are working. Hearths smoke (houses, the inn, the bakery and brewery, the hunter's hut, the fishing hut's smokery, the hall), the bakery's oven glows and throws sparks, the brewery steams, chips fly at the woodcutter's block, ore dust rises from the iron mine, dust and chaff lift off the vegetable farm and dairy, birds wheel over the granary, the chapel and the vineyard, moths drift over the garden, the well's bucket is wound up and let down, and rings spread on the water by the fishing hut. All of it stops while a building is idle, paused, unstaffed, queued or under construction, so a still building is a building that needs attention.

The village map and tile kinds

The map is 48 x 48 tiles. Villages founded under an older map size keep their stored size. Every tile is one of seven kinds:

Tile	Code	Buildable	Used by
Grass	g	yes	anything
Meadow	m	yes	anything; farms get the meadow bonus
Trees	t	no	woodcutter, hunter, charcoal burner and herbalist must be near it; windmill must be far from it
Water	w	no	fishing hut and salt works must be near it
Stone	s	only for a quarry	quarry
Iron	i	only for an iron mine	iron mine
Pitch	p	only for a pitch rig	pitch rig

The map generator keeps every tile within 8 tiles of the centre (a Chebyshev distance under 9) as grass, so the starting buildings always have room. Just outside that clearing, about 14 tiles from the centre, every village gets a starter grove of trees and a small stone outcrop, whatever the biome. That guarantees a woodcutter and a quarry are always possible. The rest of the map (meadow, woodland, a river or pond, stone, iron and pitch clumps) depends on the biome. Biomes has the details.

Placement rules

A placement is checked in this order. The first rule that fails gives the error.

1. The building exists and is not a fixed building.
2. Your rank is at least the building's minRank.
3. Every unlock token in requires is held (a research: token from Research or a quest: token from Quests).
4. The position is a whole tile and the whole footprint is inside the map.
5. The footprint does not overlap any other building, including ones still queued.
6. Every footprint tile is grass, meadow, or the building's requiresTile.
7. If the building has a requiresTile, at least one footprint tile is that tile. One stone tile under a 3 x 3 quarry is enough; the other eight can be grass. Output does not depend on how many deposit tiles are covered.
8. near: at least one tile of the named kind lies inside the footprint grown by within tiles on every side. This is a square box, not a circle, so diagonal tiles count at the full distance.
9. farFrom: no tile of the named kind lies inside that same grown box.
10. maxCount: you have fewer than this many of the building, counting queued and unfinished ones.
11. A builder is free, or fewer buildings are waiting than the queue limit allows.
12. You can pay the whole cost, as raised by Growth costs.

Buildings with placement limits:

Building	Min rank	Unlock	Ground rule	Max
Woodcutter's Hut	0 Peasant		within 5 of trees
Stone Quarry	0 Peasant		on stone
Iron Mine	2 Serf		on iron
Pitch Rig	3 Villein	research Pitch Extraction	on pitch
Hunter's Hut	1 Cottar		within 7 of trees
Fishing Hut	1 Cottar		within 2 of water
Windmill	3 Villein	research Windmills	more than 3 from trees
Charcoal Burner	3 Villein	research Charcoal Burning	within 6 of trees
Salt Works	4 Freeman	research Salt Panning	within 1 of water
Herbalist	3 Villein	research Herb Lore	within 8 of trees	2
Inn	1 Cottar			1
Chapel	2 Serf	research Devotion		2
Maypole	1 Cottar	quest Village Life		4
Garden	1 Cottar	quest Gardens (reward of A Varied Table)		6
Well	0 Peasant			3
Barracks	2 Serf			1
Armoury	2 Serf			1
Storehouse	3 Villein	research Storehouses		3
Trade Post	3 Villein	research Trade Routes		2
Manor House	6 Reeve	research Manorialism		2
Banqueting Hall	5 Yeoman	research Feasting		1
Stocks	2 Serf	research Village Justice		4
Gibbet	4 Freeman	research Harsh Justice		3
Wayside Shrine	1 Cottar	research Wayside Shrines		4
Church	6 Reeve	research Parish Church		1
Cathedral	12 Viscount	research Cathedral Chapter		1
Village Fountain	4 Freeman	research Waterworks		2
Village Statue	3 Villein	research Sculpture		6
Lord's Statue	6 Reeve	research Heraldry		2
Obelisk	9 Knight	research Monumental Masonry		2
Grand Statue	12 Viscount	research Royal Patronage		1

The other buildings (hovel, cottage at rank 3, apple orchard, dairy farm at rank 1, vegetable patch at rank 2, bakery with research Milling at rank 3, brewery with research Brewing at rank 2, vineyard with research Viticulture at rank 4, wheat farm with research Open Fields at rank 2, hop garden with research Hop Growing at rank 2, fletcher and pole turner at rank 3, blacksmith at rank 4) have no ground rule or count limit. The full list of costs, footprints and stats is in Buildings reference.

Rank is your lord's rank, shared by all your villages. The quest "Village Life" asks for 20 peasants; completing any quest grants a quest:<id> token, which is how the maypole unlocks.

Construction queue and slots

Placing a building takes its cost at once and adds it to the queue as queued. The queue then starts as many as the free construction slots allow, in placement order.

Setting	Default
Construction slots, normal	2
Construction slots, premium	4
Buildings waiting, normal	3
Buildings waiting, premium	8

The waiting limit counts only buildings that have not started. A building you place while a builder is free starts at once and never counts against it. With the defaults a free lord can have five buildings in hand (two going up, three waiting) and a premium lord twelve. Placing one more is refused with "Your builders are busy". A waiting limit of 0 means you can only place a building while a builder is free.

All four numbers come from server tuning (premium.buildSlots, premium.premiumBuildSlots, premium.buildQueue and premium.premiumBuildQueue), so an admin can change them in the Premium limits section of the admin panel. If an admin lowers a limit below what a village already has waiting, nothing is cancelled; the village just cannot add more until the queue shrinks.

Queue order and finish estimates

Waiting buildings are numbered 1, 2, 3 in the order they will start, which is the order you placed them. The number shows on the map above each waiting building and in the Builders panel at the bottom left, which also lists what is going up now with its time left.

Each waiting building also shows how long until it should be finished, counted from now. The server works this out by handing each waiting building, in order, to the builder who frees up first:

startsAt = earliest time a builder is free (now if one is free already)
finishAt = startsAt + its build time at the current build speed

Worked example at world speed 1 with two builders. Builder A finishes a hovel in 4 minutes and builder B a farm in 10. Waiting are a well (6 minutes to build) and a hovel (5 minutes). The well goes to A and should finish in 4 + 6 = 10 minutes. The hovel goes to B, free at 10 minutes, and should finish in 15. It is an estimate: a build-speed card, new research, or a change of premium before a building starts changes its real time.

Build time in real milliseconds is:

scaledSeconds / buildSpeed * 1000 / worldSpeed

scaledSeconds is the building's listed time raised by Growth costs, fixed when you place it.

buildSpeed is the product of research, card and admin multipliers (2 means twice as fast). It is read once, when a building starts. A build-speed card played after a building has started does not shorten it; one that is active when it starts does, even if the card expires before the building finishes.

When a building finishes, the next queued building starts in the same instant, and the finished building begins producing from its completion time even if you were offline.

Unfinished buildings do not count for anything: no storage, housing, jobs, popularity, Standing or production.

Growth costs

Like SHK, a village is cheap to start and slow to fill. Two things grow as you build.

The listed cost is for your first building of a kind. Each one already standing, queued or under construction raises the next by 15%, compounding, rounded to whole units:

cost = listed cost * (1 + costGrowth) ^ owned

owned counts buildings of the same kind in this village. A hovel costs 25 wood, then 29, 33, 38, 44, 50, 58, 67, 76 and 88 for the tenth. The twentieth costs 356. Demolishing one lowers the count, so the next costs less again, but a finished building refunds nothing.

Build time grows with the whole village. Every building you have placed, of any kind, makes the next take longer:

scaledSeconds = buildSeconds * (1 + timePerBuilding * placed ^ timeCurve)

placed counts every building in the village except the hall, stockpile and granary, including queued and unfinished ones. The time is fixed when you place the building; placing more afterwards does not slow it down.

Buildings already placed	Time multiplier	A hovel (2m base)
0	1x	2m
10	1.95x	3m 54s
20	3.68x	7m 22s
30	5.93x	11m 52s
50	11.6x	23m 13s

Times are in game time, before world speed and build-speed bonuses. The build menu shows each building's next price and its time at the current world speed (before research and card bonuses).

Setting	Default
costGrowth	0.15
timePerBuilding	0.03
timeCurve	1.5

All three are server tuning (buildScaling) and an admin can change them live under Village growth. A building may set its own costGrowth; none does yet.

A card that places a building for free pays its grown cost.

Cancelling and demolishing

• A building that is queued or constructing refunds what was paid for it when removed.
• A finished building refunds nothing.
• Undo: for 10 real seconds after you place a building, the Undo plate at the foot of the screen (or Ctrl+Z, or U) takes it back and refunds everything it cost, even if a card finished it at once. Only the building placed last in that village can be undone. See Interface.
• The hall, stockpile and granary cannot be demolished.
• Removing a building frees its slot and starts the next queued one at once.

Demolishing a storage building lowers capacity immediately. Anything above the new capacity is cut down to it the next time that resource is updated, so tearing down a storehouse while the stockpile is full loses the excess. Demolishing housing when the village is full removes the extra peasants (see Popularity).

Moving buildings

Select a building and press Move, then click where it should go. The footprint shows green where the building may stand and red where it may not. Right-click or Escape gives up the move.

• Moving is free and instant. Nothing is refunded or charged.
• Every building can move except the village hall, including the stockpile and granary.
• The new spot follows the same rules as a new building (bounds, buildable ground, required tiles, near and far-from rules). The building's own old footprint does not block it, so it can shift by a single tile.
• A building that is queued or under construction keeps its place in the queue and its finish time.
• Haul distances, the hall-distance bonus of maypoles and gardens, and anything else that depends on position are worked out again at once.

Pausing buildings

Any building with workers (producers, the inn, chapels, churches, the cathedral, herbalists, trade posts) has a Pause button. Buildings with no workers, such as housing, storage, wells and the barracks, cannot be paused.

A paused building:

• holds no workers, so its peasants go to the next workplaces in placement order (see Staffing);
• makes nothing and uses no inputs;
• gives none of its effects: no popularity, no hall-distance bonus, no Standing, no faster arrivals and no extra market carts;
• shows as idle with the reason Paused. and keeps it until resumed.

Resume puts it back in its place in the staffing order. A building can be paused while it is still being built, and it then starts paused.

Storage

Each resource belongs to one store. Capacity is per resource: a granary of 1,500 holds up to 1,500 apples and also up to 1,500 cheese, not 1,500 food in total.

Store	Resources	Built by	Base capacity each
Stockpile	wood, stone, iron, pitch, charcoal, salt, wheat, flour, hops	Stockpile 2,500; each Storehouse +1,500 (up to 3)	2,500 to 7,000
Granary	apples, cheese, meat, bread, vegetables, fish	Granary	1,500
Inn	ale, wine	Inn	400
Armoury	bows, pikes, swords	Armoury	200

Gold has no store in the village. It goes to your treasury, which every village shares and which has no cap (see Ranks and Renown).

Storage multipliers from research and cards apply to every store. Research that raises storage (Weights and Measures, Warehousing, Cellars and Lofts, Royal Charter, Chartered Towns) stacks by multiplication. Example: a stockpile and three storehouses (2,500 + 3 x 1,500 = 7,000) with Weights and Measures (x1.1) and Warehousing (x1.15) hold 7,000 * 1.1 * 1.15 = 8,855 of each material.

The Trade branch's storage line adds flat room to the stockpile, granary and inn (the inn only once it is built), before the multipliers: Barrel Vaults +4,000, Undercrofts +10,000, Staple Rights +22,000 and Great Warehouses +40,000, 76,000 in all. The armoury gets none of it.

capacity = (buildings + flat research) x storage multipliers

With every storage research the multipliers come to about x2.11, so a stockpile with three storehouses holds (7,000 + 76,000) x 2.11 = about 175,000 of each material, and a granary (1,500 + 76,000) x 2.11 = about 164,000 of each food. A Granary charter's tithe barns add their room on top.

A producer whose resource is at or above capacity goes idle with "Storage is full." It keeps its workers while idle.

Staffing

Every peasant is a potential worker. Each step the game counts whole peasants (floor of the exact count) and hands them out to finished workplaces in the order the buildings were placed, oldest first. Each building takes as many as it needs, up to its workers value; the next one gets what is left.

• staffed is a fraction: a quarry (2 workers) with one peasant is half staffed and makes half as much.
• Order is placement order, not completion order. A building placed early that finished late still gets workers first.
• Staffing ignores whether a building can actually work. An idle building (storage full, no input, no store) still holds its workers unless paused, and so do non-producing workplaces such as the inn, chapel, church, cathedral, herbalist and trade post.
• Buildings with 0 workers (housing, wells, statues, storage, barracks) always count as fully staffed.
• There is no penalty for unemployed peasants. They still eat and pay tax.

To move workers to a newer building, pause an older one that is not pulling its weight (see Pausing buildings). Paused buildings are skipped and their jobs do not count. The village panel shows jobs and employed counts.

Production

Each production building makes amount of one resource per trip. A trip is the work time plus a walk to the nearest store of the right kind and back.

centreDistance = Euclidean distance between the two buildings' footprint centres
dist           = max(1, centreDistance - (wA + hA + wB + hB) / 4)
cycle          = workSeconds + 2 * dist * 0.75            (seconds per trip)
meadowFactor   = 1 + 0.3 * (meadow tiles in footprint / footprint tiles)    (meadowBonus buildings only)
fearMult       = 1 + 0.05 * min(6, fear)
mult           = biome[res] * mods.production[res] * mods.productionAll * fearMult * meadowFactor
base           = amount * 3600 / cycle * mult * staffed    (per game hour)
output         = base * boost.multiplier if every boost input is in stock, else base

dist is an approximation of edge-to-edge distance and is never below 1 tile. Walking costs 0.75 seconds per tile each way. The building panel shows the haul distance rounded to 0.1 tiles.

mods.production[res] and mods.productionAll combine research, cards, admin tuning and Weather, all multiplied together.

Which store is nearest

The game picks the store building of the right kind with the smallest dist. On a tie the one listed first (the older building) wins. Only the stockpile store can have more than one building (the stockpile plus storehouses), so storehouses are the only way to shorten hauls for materials. The granary, inn and armoury are single buildings, so food producers want to be near the granary and breweries near the inn.

Worked example: an apple orchard

An orchard (3 x 3, 6 apples per 100 s) placed at x 28, y 14, just past the granary at x 24, y 14:

granary centre   = (24 + 1.5, 14 + 2.5) = (25.5, 16.5)
orchard centre   = (28 + 1.5, 14 + 1.5) = (29.5, 15.5)
centreDistance   = hypot(4, 1)          = 4.12
dist             = max(1, 4.12 - (3 + 5 + 3 + 3) / 4) = max(1, 0.62) = 1
cycle            = 100 + 2 * 1 * 0.75   = 101.5 s
base (no mods)   = 6 * 3600 / 101.5     = 212.8 apples per hour
in Greenvale Plains (apples 1.25)        = 266.0
on all-meadow ground (* 1.3)            = 345.8

The same orchard 20 tiles from the granary has cycle = 100 + 30 = 130 and makes 21,600 / 130 = 166.2 apples per hour, 22% less. Short-cycle buildings lose more to distance: a woodcutter (60 s trips) drops from 292.7 wood per hour at distance 1 to 240.0 at distance 10.

Fear

Stocks (fear 1) and gibbets (fear 2) add fear points. Fear counts up to 6 points; anything above is wasted. Each point is +5% production on every building and -1 popularity, so the cap is +30% production for -6 popularity. Four stocks and three gibbets would be 10 points, of which 6 count.

Boosts and consumed inputs

There are two kinds of input.

A consumed input (consumes) is required. If the store holds less than one trip's worth, the building idles with "Needs ...". While running it uses base * n / amount per hour.

A boost (boost.consumes) is optional. If every boost input holds at least one trip's worth, output is multiplied by boost.multiplier. The boost input is used at base * n / amount per hour, computed from the unboosted rate, so the extra output costs nothing beyond the listed input.

Both input rates scale with base, which includes every multiplier. A production bonus to bread makes a bakery use flour faster in the same proportion, so multipliers never improve input efficiency.

Worked example, a bakery at haul distance 2 with no modifiers:

cycle         = 120 + 2 * 2 * 0.75 = 123 s
base          = 6 * 3600 / 123     = 175.6 bread per hour
with flour    = 175.6 * 2          = 351.2 bread per hour
flour used    = 175.6 * 3 / 6      = 87.8 flour per hour

Inputs are checked once per simulation step. If a store runs dry partway through a step, the building keeps its rate until the step ends and the store is floored at 0.

Idle reasons

A finished production building is active or idle. The checks run in this order and the first failure is shown:

Reason	Cause
Needs an inn to deliver to.	Ale or wine producer and no finished inn
Paused.	The lord paused the building. Checked first, and also shown on non-producing workplaces
Needs the Mining Town charter. (and so on)	A charter building in a village that does not hold its charter. Checked after Paused, on every charter building
No stockpile. / No granary. / No armoury.	No finished store of that kind
No workers.	Staffed share is 0
Storage is full.	That resource is at or above capacity
Needs wheat. (and so on)	A consumed input has less than one trip's worth in store

Buildings with no production are always active once finished, unless paused or missing their charter.

Production chains

Every chain in the current content:

Chain	Steps	Per trip
Bows	Woodcutter (wood) to Fletcher (bows to the armoury)	6 wood makes 1 bow
Pikes	Woodcutter (wood) to Pole Turner (pikes to the armoury)	8 wood makes 1 pike
Swords	Iron Mine (iron) to Blacksmith (swords to the armoury)	4 iron makes 1 sword
Charcoal for swords	Woodcutter to Charcoal Burner (charcoal) boosting the Blacksmith	8 wood makes 4 charcoal; 2 charcoal per sword trip gives x1.5 swords
Bread	Wheat Farm (wheat) to Windmill (flour) boosting the Bakery	8 wheat makes 6 flour; 3 flour per bread trip gives x2 bread
Ale	Hop Garden (hops) boosting the Brewery (ale to the inn)	2 hops per trip gives x1.75 ale
Cheese	Salt Works (salt) boosting the Dairy Farm	1 salt per trip gives x1.4 cheese
Fish	Salt Works (salt) boosting the Fishing Hut	1 salt per trip gives x1.3 fish
Wine	Vineyard (wine to the inn)	no inputs

The bakery and brewery work without their boost input, at the base rate. The fletcher, pole turner, blacksmith, windmill and charcoal burner do not work at all without their consumed input.

Nothing in the village uses wine; it goes to Feasts and Markets. Weapons are used by the barracks (see Military).

Base rates with no modifiers at haul distance 2, for planning ratios:

Building	Output per hour	Input per hour
Wheat Farm	254.9 wheat
Windmill	228.6 flour (distance 3)	304.8 wheat
Bakery, plain / with flour	175.6 / 351.2 bread	87.8 flour when boosted
Brewery, plain / with hops	70.6 / 123.5 ale	47.1 hops when boosted
Blacksmith, plain / with charcoal	11.9 / 17.8 swords	47.5 iron, plus 23.8 charcoal when boosted

One windmill at distance 3 grinds enough flour (228.6) for about 2.6 bakeries at distance 2 (87.8 each). One wheat farm (254.9) does not quite keep one windmill (304.8) busy.

Offline and catch-up

Your village keeps running when you are offline. The server advances every village every 5 seconds whether its owner is connected or not, so production, consumption, population and construction all carry on.

If the server itself was down, the village is caught up in one go when it comes back. The catch-up walks forward in steps, recomputing everything at the start of each step:

• A step is 60 game seconds, or one two-thousandth of the gap if that is longer (gaps over about 33 hours at world speed 1).
• A step is cut short whenever a construction finishes, so new buildings start producing and the next queued building starts on time.
• Within a step, rates are fixed. A store that empties or fills mid-step is clamped at 0 or at capacity when the step ends.

For a player, the result is close to what would have happened had you been watching. One difference: outside modifiers (research, cards, feasts, Weather, admin tuning) are collected once at the start of each advance, not per step. In normal running an advance covers 5 seconds, so this does not matter. In a catch-up after downtime, whatever is active at the moment the server comes back applies across the whole gap, and a card or feast that ran out during the downtime counts for none of it.

Interactions

• Popularity: rations, ale and tax use what the village stores; popularity brings and drives away the peasants who staff buildings.
• Biomes: set the per-resource production multiplier and what tiles the map has.
• Research: unlocks most buildings and adds production, storage, build-speed, arrival and popularity modifiers.
• Cards and Crowns: production, build-speed, storage and popularity effects through the same modifier path, plus cards that settle peasants into free housing.
• Weather: per-resource production multipliers and a popularity factor through the same path.
• Ranks and Renown: rank gates buildings and the number of villages.
• Quests: the opening quests teach placement, and two quest tokens unlock the maypole and garden.
• Feasts: spend stored food, ale, wine and gold; need a finished banqueting hall for the larger ones.
• Military: soldiers and scouts are taken from the village's peasants and weapons from the armoury.
• Markets: trade posts add market carts while finished and staffed.
• Town charters: village bonuses, charter-only buildings and the pennons on the hall.

For maintainers

Source files:

• server/src/village/sim.ts: founding, placement (checkSpot), undoPlacement (window UNDO_PLACE_MS in protocol, the last placement kept as lastPlaced), moveBuilding, setPaused, demolish, construction queue (builders, startQueued, planQueue for queue numbers and finish estimates), derive() (staffing, production, idle reasons, storage), advance() (catch-up stepping).
• server/src/village/mapgen.ts: map size and generation.
• server/src/content/index.ts: resources, stores, buildings, walkSecondsPerTile.
• server/src/content/footprints.json: footprints, which override the values written in content/index.ts.
• server/src/tuning.ts: worldSpeed, premium.buildSlots, premium.premiumBuildSlots, premium.buildQueue, premium.premiumBuildQueue, buildScaling, admin multipliers.
• packages/protocol/src/index.ts: scaledBuildCost and scaledBuildSeconds, shared so the build menu prices buildings the same way the server does. sim.ts buildCost and buildSeconds apply them to a village. A placed building records paid (for the refund) and buildSeconds until it finishes.
• server/src/game.ts: the 5 second tick is in server/src/index.ts; Game.step combines modifiers before each advance.
• Tests: server/src/village/sim.test.ts, server/src/village/chains.test.ts.
• clients/web/src/village.ts: picks the hall sprite for the tier (villageTier, sprites village_hall_t2 to village_hall_t5) and the chimney smoke (CHIMNEYS). clients/web/src/villageLife.ts: the banners (FLAGS), the charter pennons under them, and each building's signs of work (LIFE). /village-preview.html on the dev server shows every tier and effect. Tier art: tools/art/raw_v2/village_hall_t*.png, rendered with tools/art/blender/render_all.sh.

Constants this page depends on:

Constant	Where	Value
VILLAGE_SIZE	mapgen.ts	48
CLEAR_RADIUS	mapgen.ts	9
starting resources, peasants, policy	sim.ts foundVillage	250 wood / 60 stone / 120 apples, 300 gold to the lord, 8, rations 3, ale 0, tax 1
FEAR	sim.ts	0.05 per point, max 6
meadow bonus	sim.ts derive	0.3
walkSecondsPerTile	content/index.ts	0.75
storage capacities	content/index.ts buildings	100,000 / 2,500 / 1,500 / 1,500 / 400 / 200
build slots	tuning.ts premium	2 / 4
buildings waiting	tuning.ts premium	3 / 8
growth costs	tuning.ts buildScaling	costGrowth 0.15, timePerBuilding 0.03, timeCurve 1.5
catch-up step	sim.ts advance	60 game seconds, or gap / 2000
server tick	server/src/index.ts	5,000 ms