KAMPUNG

Keeping up

What changed, and when

This page is rewritten whenever the game is, and the game changes every few days. Everything below is a rule that moved under a player who had already read about it — newest first, a day at a time. Today is open; press any other day to see it.

Older changes are in the changelog, which records everything including the parts no player would notice.

Start here

What this is

KAMPUNG is a slow-burning strategy game played in a browser tab. You are given one village on a scattered archipelago. You clear ground, work timber and stone and iron and rice, raise a war band, and decide what to do about the neighbours — take what they have, trade with them, ally with them, or hold the islands together when something worse arrives.

The important thing to understand up front: the game is not running in your browser. It runs on the server, in real time, whether or not you are watching. A building started before bed finishes overnight. An army sent across the strait keeps marching while your laptop is shut. What you see on screen is a window onto a world that carries on without you — which is why nothing here can be rushed by clicking faster, and why closing the tab costs you nothing.

This world

The pace, and what is set

This world runs at the classic pace, so every duration on this page is the duration you will wait.

Nothing is staged for the next world yet — it will open on the same settings this one is being played at.

A setting whose two columns differ is staged: it is decided, and it takes effect the moment the next world opens rather than under the villages standing now.

Getting back to a place

Marked places

Mark the places you want to come back to. Open any tile and press the star: the ally you garrison, the camp you farm, the ground you mean to settle, the beachhead. On a wide screen they stand in a list down the right, under whatever is under way; on a phone they are behind the star in the map's toolbar, so they cost the map no room until you want them. One tap takes you there.

A mark is on the ground, not on what is standing on it. Villages are founded, taken and razed, so the list tells you what is there now — and a mark on a village that has since fallen still takes you to the tile it stood on.

Thirty places each. The thirty-first is refused rather than quietly pushing the oldest off the end.

The world itself

Which map a round is played on

Reading the marks. Your own villages are gold and everybody else’s are green, except a kingdom you are at war with, which is dark red — the one thing on the map worth spotting before you spot anything else. A village that has gone to seed is grey. A Lanun camp is a violet tent rather than a house, because it is not a village and should not have to be told apart from one by colour alone: at the widest zoom every village is a few pixels, and a tent still reads as a tent.

Whose colour is whose is in the Kingdoms key under the map, largest kingdom first, with yours, your allies and anyone you are at war with marked. It used to sit over the top corner of the map; it is below it now so it covers nothing, and it folds to one line once you have read it.

The map reopens where you left it, and tells you when your village is off it. If you panned away to look at a front, the map is still there the next time you open it. When none of your own ground is on the part you are looking at, a bar appears over the bottom of the map — Your village is off the map. Go to it — and one tap takes you home. The crosshair button above the map does the same at any time.

A world is drawn rather than stored: every tile's terrain is worked out from its coordinates. That is why the map can never change under a round in progress — a village whose tile became sea would be a house drawn on the waves that nothing can march to. It changes at a turnover, where every village is rebuilt anyway.

There are three maps to be played on:

• Flat land — one landmass with a frayed coast. Most journeys are a walk, the sea is the edge rather than the obstacle, and a Shipyard is a luxury.
• Nusantara — a peninsula, a long island across a strait, a broad one east and a chain along the south. Straits to hold, and crossings that make a Shipyard worth its plots.
• River country — nearly all land, cut into lobes by its rivers. A river is water to a marching column, so nothing needs a fleet and everything needs a route: a neighbour across a channel is further off than one twice as far along the same bank.

And three sizes — close, middling and broad — which decide how far apart people end up and therefore how long a war takes to reach anybody.

A capital flies a pennant. The seat of a player’s country is drawn with a small flag above the house, in the same colour as the house itself — gold on your own, hostile red on a kingdom you are at war with — and the tile panel says Capital in words when you click it. Which village is a capital matters before you commit a column: its Longhouse builds higher, and taking it is a different undertaking from taking a second village.

A village’s name is a link. Wherever one appears — in a battle report, on the muster roll, in the market, beside a column on the road — clicking it opens the map on that plot with it already selected, exactly as though you had found the plot and clicked it yourself. Names with no plot behind them are not links: a village razed since the report was written has a name and nowhere to go.

The opening

Your first hour

New villages are protected from attack for 24 hours. Spend it building an economy rather than an army — soldiers you raise on day one eat rice for a week and fight nobody.

1. Raise your four resource buildings evenly. Timber Grove, Stone Quarry, Iron Mine and Paddy Field. Nothing later is affordable without all four, and a village strong in one is just a village that has to wait for the others.
2. Raise the Grand Balai. Every level speeds up all future construction, so it pays for itself and then keeps paying.
3. You can give a village up. Founded somewhere you regret, or holding an outpost you cannot defend? Pull it down from its own page. Its soldiers and any groves it holds march to your nearest village, the ground opens to anybody again, and it stops counting against your Longhouse allowance. It takes a few hours, you can call it off at any time before then, and it stands and defends exactly as usual in the meantime — so it is never a way out of a fight. If it is taken before the hour comes, the countdown stops: the new owner gets the village, not your decision about it. Your capital cannot be given up.
4. Or hand it to somebody on your side instead. Giving a village up pulls it down and opens the ground to anybody — which is not what you want if you meant your ally to have it. Hand to an ally, beside Give up on the village's own page, offers it by name to somebody in your kingdom or an allied one. They have to accept, and their Longhouse must have room. Everything of yours that was standing there — your groves, a champion living there — comes home to you, exactly as it would if the village had been conquered; the village arrives with the same loyalty and the same immunity a conquered one does, so passing ground around a kingdom gains nothing a fight would not. It cannot be done while somebody is marching on the village: a prize cannot be passed sideways at the last moment.
5. Ground that was given up says so, for two days. When a village comes down the tile keeps a faint mark — what stood there, whose it was and when it came down — and the panel says so when you click it. Three players reported villages "disappearing from the map" on the same morning and every one of them was watching a neighbour give one up exactly as intended; the map should have said so rather than leaving it to look like a fault. The ground is open to settle either way.
6. Dig the Kolong before protection ends. It is cheap, costs no population, and is the difference between a raid taking everything and a raid taking what you had spare. Nobody regrets it; plenty of people build it the day after they needed it.
7. Watch your storage. Production stops dead at capacity. If a resource is sitting full while you sleep, the Storehouse or Rice Barn is what you needed, not another mine.
8. Mind the rice. Villagers and soldiers both eat. Rice is the one resource that is also a limit — run out and you cannot grow.
9. Then think about soldiers. Warrior Hall needs a Grand Balai at level 3, and the Muster Ground is what actually lets you send troops anywhere.

One village can have one thing under construction at a time, with up to two more queued behind it, and up to five batches of troops in training. Planning the queue is most of the early game.

Painted or grid. Your village opens painted: every plot drawn as the building standing on it. When you just want to get building, press Grid above the plots for the plain tiles instead — icon, name and level — with a green Level button under each building you can raise right now, which starts it in one press without opening anything. Press Painted to go back. Your choice is remembered on that browser.

Quests. Quests sits at the top of the menu, and walks you from a first timber grove to a second village, paying in timber, stone, iron and rice. Past the second village come the advanced quests, in two chapters: ten trades, fifteen scouting runs, two hundred soldiers under arms, ten and then thirty assaults won, three and then five villages, a thousand people, a level-15 Palisade. They pay in gold coins and in equipment for your champion — a Fine piece, or for the hardest an Heirloom — rolled the moment you claim it and put in your champion’s satchel, ready to wear. Every quest that is not finished has a button beside it — Open the Grand Balai, Train soldiers, Go to the Bazaar and so on — that takes you to the screen where it is done, with the right building already open on your village. A quest is finished by doing what it asks, so the button is the way there, not a way round.

Economy

The four resources

Storage keeps pace with the world’s speed. Everything a village produces is multiplied by the speed this world runs at, and so is everything it can hold — so a Storehouse takes as long to fill here as it would on a world running at normal pace. It did not always: production was multiplied and storage was not, which on a fast world meant a store filled in a fraction of the time, and anybody who could not look in every day lost the difference to the ceiling. The Kolong keeps pace with both, so what it hides is the same share of what you hold whatever the pace.

Resource buildings produce continuously, and the return on each level climbs steeply — the difference between a level 10 mine and a level 20 mine is far more than double.

The whole curve, level by level and at this world's own pace, is in Every level, and what it gives — read out of the game's rules when this page was built rather than typed here, so it cannot drift from what the server does.

You begin with 500 of each, and a village founded later starts with 750 of each.

Reading the bar at the top. Each resource shows what you hold, what the store can take, and how fast it is rising or falling an hour. The All figure beside your gold adds the four together — everything the village makes in an hour, after the rice its people eat. On a narrow screen the bar starts folded to the two stocks that need you most; press Stocks to open it, and it stays open next time.

Every soldier costs stone, which surprises people, because stone sounds like a thing you build walls out of rather than a thing you arm men with. It pays for what a soldier stands behind and what they carry: shield rims and helm plates, the whetstones and moulds the smiths work at, the ballast and slipways a war prau is launched over, the counterweight in a stone thrower. It is never the largest part of the bill — timber leads for almost every unit, iron for the Kris Swordsman, rice for the Pioneer — and it runs from a tenth of a War Prau to a third of an Ironwood Shieldman, who is mostly shield.

What that means in play is the part worth knowing: your wall and your army are cut from the same quarry. The Palisade is the most stone-hungry building in the game, and a Stone Thrower is the most stone-hungry unit. A round where you pour everything into the wall is a round where the barracks waits, and the reverse is just as true. That is the choice, and it is deliberate — nothing else in the economy makes defence and offence compete quite so directly.

Twenty buildings, thirty-two plots

Every building

A village has thirty-two plots — sixteen worked fields and sixteen free plots for buildings — and twenty kinds of building, so you cannot have everything at once. Most buildings need another building first — those requirements are the real shape of the early game. Within each group below, the ones you can start straight away come first.

What they look like

A building is painted three times, not twenty: it changes at three points on the way up, and between those points a level buys capability rather than a new picture. What each stage covers is in the table above.

Timber Grove

Stone Quarry

Iron Mine

Paddy Field

Grand Balai

Storehouse

Rice Barn

Kolong

Bazaar

Balai Ilmu

Warrior Hall

Stable

Workshop

Palisade

Consulate

Muster Ground

Balai Pahlawan

Longhouse

Shipyard

Watchtower

What the next level buys

Every level, and what it gives

For nearly every plot, its level is the whole of its effect: what follows is what each one actually does as it grows, so a cost can be judged against what it buys rather than guessed at. The Balai Ilmu is the one exception — its level is a ceiling on how far a troop may be studied, and the study is what the troop is worth.

Worked fields

All four resource fields share one curve. The gain per level grows steadily, which is why a level 15 field is worth far more than three level 5 ones — and why the villages that win are usually the ones that pushed a few fields high rather than all of them evenly.

Storage

Production is wasted the moment a store is full, and a village that fills overnight is a village earning nothing until morning. Storage is not exciting and it is not optional.

Everything else

What a level unlocks

Eleven kinds of soldier

Every soldier

Read the table this way: Attack matters only when you are the one marching. The two defence numbers are used depending on who is coming — a wall of Bamboo Spearmen shreds cavalry and merely inconveniences infantry. Speed sets how long a march takes; a war party moves at the pace of its slowest member. Carry is how much loot each soldier hauls home.

What they look like

A column can be called back in its first forty-five seconds. After that it is committed. The window is deliberately short: long enough to catch the wrong village on a crowded map, too short to have learned anything by it — no scout has reported, no battle has resolved, and nobody has seen you coming and reacted. Inside it nothing is charged and nothing refunded, because nothing happened: the soldiers walk straight back through the gate.

Meriam can be aimed. When you send a column with meriam in it, the send dialog lets you name a building — and every level they bring down goes into that one first. It takes twenty meriam to knock down a single level, so a siege that flattens anything is a serious army, and spreading that across nine buildings at random was spending it on nothing in particular.

Two buildings are safe from meriam altogether: the Grand Balai and the Paddy Field. A village that loses its hall can never build again and one that loses its fields starves, and neither is a defeat worth inflicting. This page used to say they could still be caught by the ordinary spread and were only safe from being named — that was wrong, and it had been wrong since meriam could be aimed. No siege touches either of them by any route, so however badly an assault goes, your hall and your fields are exactly as they were. And if what you aimed at is already rubble, the meriam knock down whatever else they can reach rather than wasting the shot, so scouting an hour early costs you nothing.

The Palisade is the Rams' work, not the meriam's. Battering Rams break the wall level by level during the battle; meriam cannot touch it at all — not aimed, and not in their spread. Until 1.145.0 the meriam's spread could knock a Palisade flat in an assault that brought no rams, while the report's wall line still said it stood. If you want a wall down, bring rams.

Everything else can be knocked down to nothing, and that is not a figure of speech: a building taken to level zero is gone, and rebuilding it starts from the first level again. Your report now names every building the meriam levelled and what it went from and to, so a defeat tells you what it cost. Reports from before this was recorded do not carry it — the damage happened, it simply was not written down at the time, and the page says so rather than claiming nothing fell.

Combat

How a battle is decided

There are no rounds and no dice you can watch. When an army arrives, the server works out both sides' strength and settles it at once.

1. The attacker's strength is every soldier's attack value, added up.
2. How much of that strength is cavalry is measured — call it the horse share.
3. The defender's strength is worked out using that share. If half the attack is mounted, each defender contributes half their anti-infantry value and half their anti-cavalry value. This is why the composition of an attack matters as much as its size: send pure cavalry into massed spearmen and you are attacking their best number.
4. The Palisade multiplies the defenders — 5% per level — and adds a flat amount of its own.
5. Luck swings the result by up to 15% either way. Small enough that the better army usually wins; large enough that a close fight is never a certainty.
6. Losses fall on both sides, scaled by how lopsided the fight was. A narrow win is expensive. A crushing one is nearly free.

Scouting is resolved separately: your Outriders either slip through or are cut down by the defender's own scouts, and a Watchtower both stiffens that screen and guarantees the defender is told they were scouted.

Working out the odds. Before you send an army, the send dialog offers to work out what is likely to happen: your chance of taking the village, what you would lose, and what they would. It runs the same rules the battle itself uses, two hundred times over, so what comes back is a chance and a range rather than a promise — luck swings every fight by up to a sixth either way, and a close number means a close fight rather than a safe one.

Where you have scouted the village, your own report fills the enemy's numbers in, and says how old it is. Where you have not, you type what you think is there. Nobody else's scouting is ever used: finding out is what an Outrider is for.

Defence, as one number. Every village now has a standing figure — its garrison and its Palisade added up the way a battle adds them up, so a wall counts and an empty village with a tall wall is not reported as nothing. On a village of your own, the map panel measures it now, because it is yours and adding it up by eye is how people get it wrong. On somebody else's, you are shown what your last scout measured and the hour they looked, and nothing at all if you have never looked — a live figure for a village you do not hold would make scouting pointless. It is a snapshot, not a feed: they may have reinforced since, and the panel says so rather than letting the number look fresher than it is.

The send dialog puts your own column's attack strength beside it as you pick soldiers, so an attack shows what it is worth against what was last seen standing there before you commit it. That pair is a comparison and not a promise — luck, the wall's level at the hour you arrive, and anybody who has marched in since are all outside it. Where you want the real odds, the calculator underneath still runs the actual battle engine two hundred times and reports a chance and a range.

Your reports are ordered by what they are about, not only by when they happened. Anything involving somebody else — a fight with another player, a Lanun camp, the Compact — comes first, newest at the top. Your own movements sit underneath, behind a heading that says so, because a page that quietly stops being chronological reads as broken.

Sharing a report. A report has its own address, and pasting that address into your kingdom’s channel lets your kingdom read it — both kingdoms in the fight, and the kingdoms allied to either. It is not public: opening one still needs an account, and it needs to be an account on one of those two sides. What your mates see is the fight as the attacker saw it, which is why this is safe to do after a raid on your own village: they learn what the raider learned and no more, and the copy that lists your garrison is never the one shared. This works for a fight over a spice grove as well as for an assault; a scouting report is not shareable, because it describes a third party’s village. Your kingdom’s defence board does this for you: once an attack on any member has landed, the row carries a way straight through to the fight.

Reading one report after another. A report has Newer and Older at the top, which step through your reports in the same order as the list, and Next unread when any are still waiting — so a pile of them can be read straight through without going back to the list.

Geography

The sea, and why it says no

The world is water as much as land, and this is the rule new players trip over. A land army can wade a little — but if more than 40% of the route is open water, the march is simply refused. It is not slower; it is impossible.

Where a column can ford, water still costs two and a half times what the same distance costs on land. A target that looks close across a bay is often further, in time, than one twice the distance inland.

To cross properly you need the Shipyard. A War Prau carries 30 soldiers, a Dragon Jong carries 110, and both fight when they land. Ships are what turn a neighbouring island from scenery into a target.

Ships sail connected water, from port to port. A fleet leaves a village with water beside it — the same jetty that lets you build the Shipyard — and sails to another village with water beside it, along water that really joins the two. It goes the whole way by water at the fleet's speed and the troops step off at the quay: there is no stretch of land to march. A river that never reaches the sea can carry ships only to places on that same river. A fleet will not be sent to a village inland, or to one whose water is not joined to yours — the send screen says so, and the troops go on foot instead. On the Military page every soldier carries three small marks for the sea, rivers and lagoons so you can see at a glance what it can cross.

Scouts are the exception. A party of nothing but Outriders will get itself across water an army cannot — they take a fishing boat, buy a passage, swim the narrows — so you can look at a neighbour across a strait without building a fleet first. Add a single spearman and the party is an army again, with an army's limit.

It is not unlimited. Past about 85% open water the crossing is ocean and nobody is swimming it. And scouts pay for the water in time: it costs them twice what a detour costs a land column, so a long crossing is a real decision rather than a free look.

Expansion

Founding more villages

A second village is the single biggest step up in the game — and the most expensive.

• You need a Longhouse, which needs a Grand Balai at 10 and a Muster Ground at 5. Every five levels of every Longhouse you hold grants one more village — not each level, and not only your tallest. A capital’s Longhouse builds to 15 and is worth three villages; every other village’s builds to 10 and is worth two. So a Longhouse at level 4 has earned nothing yet and the fifth level is the one that pays. No player holds more than sixteen villages however much they build. Rounds 1 and 2 counted differently — one village per level of your tallest Longhouse alone — so a number you remember from then does not apply here.
• You need three Pioneers, travelling together. They are slow, costly, and eat five rice an hour each.
• The site must be dry land, a tile nobody is standing on, and reachable — the water rule above applies to settlers too. There is no minimum distance any more: you may settle the tile next to your own village, and a tight cluster is a legitimate plan rather than something the server refuses.
• If somebody takes the ground while your party is walking, the Pioneers turn round and come home rather than vanishing.
• Anything else you send with them — the War Prau that carries them over water, an escort to hold the new ground — stays in the new village as its first garrison. Only the three Pioneers are spent founding it.

Loyalty

Taking a village from somebody

An assault burns what it finds and walks away. Taking a village is a different undertaking: the buildings, the fields and the levels stay exactly as they are, and the name on them changes to yours.

Loyalty

Every village holds a loyalty between nought and a hundred, and every village on the map starts at a hundred. It is not a wall you knock down with soldiers — no amount of fighting moves it on its own. It moves only when somebody brings a headman.

Loyalty recovers by itself, two points an hour at this world's speed. That number is the spine of the whole thing: a village talked down to forty is whole again in a day and a bit, which means a single attacker chipping away once a night never gets anywhere. The recovery outruns them. To take a village you have to arrive with enough at once.

The Penghulu

A Penghulu is a headman of standing, and the only unit in the game that can move loyalty at all.

• Trained in your capital and nowhere else, from a Longhouse at its greatest extent — the last thing that building is for. Expensive, slow to raise, and heavy to feed.
• They do not fight. They are carried into somebody else's battle and contribute nothing to winning it.
• Only the ones who survive do any talking. A wave that wins badly arrives with fewer headmen than it set out with, and the ones who fell talk to nobody.
• Each surviving Penghulu talks the village down by 20 to 30, rolled for each of them separately.
• They can be sent ahead to wait with the Reinforce order: to another village of yours, or to a forward base in somebody else's village that has a Muster Ground, so the assault that carries them sets out near the target instead of from your capital. A village with no Muster Ground is refused, because no column could ever leave it.

So the arithmetic is deliberately blunt. One headman needs four winning assaults, spread across days, against a loyalty that is climbing back the whole time — which usually means it cannot be done at all. Three or four in one wave will usually take a village in a single afternoon — usually, because each headman is rolled separately and four unlucky rolls can leave a village standing on two or three loyalty. You will see how close you came, and one more headman finishes it. Conquest is a campaign you commit to, not something an ordinary raid does by accident.

The assault still has to win. Headmen riding with an army that loses achieve nothing at all, and you have paid for them.

And the Longhouse has to be gone. A village whose Longhouse still stands will not change sides, however far its loyalty falls: when the headmen finish talking it is left at a loyalty of one instead. Bring it down with meriam — aim them at it from the send dialog — and the headmen can finish the job. The siege lands before the headmen speak, so a single wave carrying enough meriam and enough headmen can raze the Longhouse and take the village in the same blow. A village that never built a Longhouse has nothing standing in the way.

What can never be taken

• A capital. Ever. However many headmen arrive, however long the siege. Whatever else happens to a player, there is somewhere they still are.
• A village belonging to somebody still under beginner protection.
• A Lanun camp — there is nobody there to talk to. Burn it instead.
• A village that has just changed hands, for eight hours. Without that pause the second wave takes it off the first and a village changes owner four times in an evening while nobody holds anything.

What you actually get

Everything standing on it, at the level it stands — which never includes a Longhouse, since that had to come down first. What leaves with the old owner is what was never really the village's:

• Spice groves held from there are released, and the soldiers holding them march home to the player you took it from. The groves' bonus to the village goes with them.
• Soldiers other players had stationed there march home rather than switching sides.
• If the old owner's champion lived there, they go to that player's capital.
• The village counts against your Longhouse allowance like any other. If you are already at your limit when the headmen finish talking, the village is left at a loyalty of one instead of changing hands — so it is worth checking your allowance before you commit a wave to it.
• It arrives at a loyalty of 25, not nought, and cannot be taken again for eight hours. That is your day to garrison what you have just taken.

Knowing what you are marching at

A village's loyalty is not written on the map. You find it out the way you find out anything else about somebody else's village — send scouts, and it is on the report. What the map will tell you is whether a village can be taken at all, because that much is public: a capital is visibly a capital, a camp is a camp, and a village that changed hands this morning did so in front of everybody.

That is on purpose. If you could read the number from the map, conquest would be arithmetic — count the headmen, send exactly enough, never scout, never risk anything.

Moving your capital

Because a capital cannot be taken, which village is your capital is a real decision rather than an accident of where you started. You may move it to any village you own — once every three days.

The ration is the whole rule. Without it, anybody watching a village fall would simply promote it as the army arrived, and conquest would stop existing: the defence would be a button rather than an army. Three days means the choice has to be made before you know where the blow is coming.

The levels past twenty stay with the capital, not with the village. Fields and stores in your capital build to 30; everywhere else they stop at 20. Move the capital and the old one keeps every level it has — nothing is pulled down or refunded — but anything past twenty works as twenty there: it produces and holds what a level-twenty field or store does, and its page says so. Make it your capital again and they work again. The villagers working those levels are still fed either way.

Two villages, one economy

Moving goods to your own villages

A second village starts poor, and the one with two iron sites will never grow enough rice. Goods move between villages you own by the same merchants that trade with other players, on the same roads, at the same speed — a caravan leaves, travels, unloads and walks home.

• It costs merchants, which are then not trading, and it costs travel time. Distance is a decision here as everywhere else.
• A load is never smaller than 100 of a resource — below that it is not worth the round trip.
• A shipment is capped by what the destination can actually store, so nothing is carried across the map to overflow on arrival.
• A standing route always leaves one merchant at home, so feeding your own villages never quietly closes your Bazaar.

Every caravan you have on the road is listed in the Bazaar — from all of your villages, not only the one you happen to have open — with what it carries and when it lands. They used to sit among your war parties on the Army screen, which counted a load of timber as a column in the field. Soldiers are on the Army screen; goods are with the merchants who carry them.

Moving your own soldiers between your own villages writes no battle report, because there was no battle. The column shows on the Army screen while it walks and the soldiers appear in the garrison and on the muster roll when it lands. Reinforcing somebody else still writes one, for both of you — that is a commitment to another player and worth a record.

A fifth thing to hold, and it is not in the storehouse

Gold coins, and what they buy

Nothing produces gold coins. No field grows them, no building makes them, and a raid cannot take them — it is not in the storehouse to be taken. Every coin in the world came over the Bazaar's own counter.

Your gold is yours, not a village's. It sits in one vault shared by every village you hold: coin earned at one Bazaar pays for study, mercenaries or a trade in any other, and a village that changes hands takes none of it with it. Click the coins in the resource bar for your balance sheet — every coin in or out this round, what it was for, which village, and the vault after each. A new round starts every vault empty.

Spending coin to finish a build sooner

Where a world switches it on, a build that is already running can be hurried with gold coins. In a village’s Construction panel, and in the side panel of the building being worked on in the village picture, a build with a crew on it shows a button: Take 2 hours off · 4 coins (1 of 3). Press it and that much comes off the clock, and the coin comes out of your vault. The price is for exactly the time it takes off, at a set number of coins for each hour of real time, rounded up to a whole coin — so a long build is no cheaper to buy down than a short one, and the same on a world that runs faster.

Each press takes a share of what is left, so it never finishes a build outright. The default is a quarter of the time remaining: eight hours becomes six, then about four and a half. A build can be hurried only a few times (three by default) and then no more, a build still waiting for a crew has no clock to shorten and a demolition cannot be hurried, and a press sent twice buys once. Every purchase is a Build boost line in your balance sheet. The administrators set whether it is on, the share, the price and how many presses a build takes, and can change them during a round; the button always quotes the current price.

Your analytics: the timeline, the resources and the ledger

"How your round went" on your profile now opens a whole page of its own. Click Open your analytics there, or go to /analytics. At the top are six figures — your ranking, your villagers and villages, the levels you have built, the enemy levels you have flattened, and how your attacks and your defences went (won, lost and drawn). Click any of them and the timeline underneath draws that figure over time. Tick Compare on a second card to draw it beside the first.

The timeline is yours to move about in. Hover for the exact value and the moment; drag to scroll back through the round; scroll the wheel or press the plus and minus buttons to zoom, and the round-arrow button to reset. The strip beneath it is the whole round in miniature — drag the box on it to move the window. Choose 24 hours, 7 days, 30 days, the entire round or a range of your own, and hourly, daily, weekly or monthly steps. Little diamonds mark the things that happened: a fight, a village won or lost, an unusually large movement of goods. Switch any line off from the key above it.

One scale per kind of thing. Two kinds of figure — villagers and gold, say — get a left axis and a right axis, each named. Pick three or more and every line is rebased so that it starts at 100, and the axis says so; the chart never lays two different units on one unlabelled axis. Ranking is drawn upside down on purpose, so being first is the top of the chart.

Times are shown in Kuala Lumpur time unless you switch them to UTC or to your own device's, and the zone is always named.

Resources and coins, account by account. Resource Income and Resource Expenses give timber, stone, iron and rice an account each: what you started with, what was produced, what came in by trade or as a reward, what went on building, training and study, what was sold, sent away or plundered, and what you ended with. Gold Coin Ledger and Transaction History list every single movement — ten to a page, or 100, 200, 400 or 1000 — newest first, with a search box, filters for resource, category and dates, and a Details button for the full breakdown of a line. You can export what you have filtered as a spreadsheet.

History starts when it began being kept. Goods are recorded from the day this arrived and rank and the hourly figures from a little earlier; before that the page says historical data unavailable rather than draw a line it cannot stand behind. What is recorded stays after the round ends and after you rename yourself.

It is private. Only you see your own page, and nobody sitting for you can. An administrator can look at any player's records when investigating something, and every time one does, the look is written into a trail. Nobody — you, an administrator, anyone — can edit or delete a line of the ledger.

Selling and buying at the counter

Your Bazaar has a counter that will always trade, at a price you do not set. Sell it goods and it pays coin; buy goods from it and it charges coin. It pays less than it asks — that gap is deliberate, and it is the only thing in the game that takes coin back out of the world. Trading with the counter is meant to be the worst price you can get and the one always available.

The Niaga pay less at the counter. It is what the tribe is for, and it compounds: the tribe that trades most cheaply is also the one whose soldiers can be bought.

The chart beside it shows a rate, not a receipt. Every figure on it is what a standard load of that good fetched — so a sale of six hundred thousand stone and a sale of ten thousand sit at the same height if they were paid at the same price, which is what a price is. Each card leads with that rate and with how far it has moved since the start of the window, up or down. The counter's own price is fixed by the world's settings and so draws a flat line, honestly labelled steady; what moves in between is what players are asking each other for.

The rate is on the counter itself, as a load and the coins it fetches — ten thousand timber for a coin, half as much iron for the same, because iron counts double. The card also shows what that same load would cost you to buy back, which is always more: the gap between the two is the counter's cut and the only thing taking coin out of the world. A load too small to be worth a whole coin is refused rather than bought for nothing.

Offers between players

An offer you post is priced in gold coins. You put up goods, you name a price, and whoever takes it pays coin. The goods travel — your merchants carry them, and they are gone from your village the moment you post, exactly as before — but the payment does not travel at all. It is settled at the counter the instant the offer is taken, so the buyer sends no caravan and books no merchants.

Two things follow, and both are worth knowing before you plan around them. A buyer with no merchants can still buy. And a trade now needs only one Bazaar big enough to carry a load: the seller's.

You can also post an order to buy. Name the goods you want and the coin you will pay, and it sits on the board beside the sales, marked as somebody wanting to buy. Your gold is set aside the moment you post it — exactly as goods are on a sale — and returned in full if you withdraw it, so the same coins cannot back two orders at once.

Filling one works the other way round from taking a sale. The goods travel from your village, carried by your merchants, from whichever of your villages you choose when you accept — so the distance shown is your journey, not theirs. You are paid the moment you accept, because the coin was already set aside; the person who posted the order receives the goods when your caravan arrives. One order is filled by one person: a sale cannot be taken in parts either.

Offers made before this change are still on the board, still asking for goods rather than coin, and they are honoured the way they were made — goods both ways, a caravan each way, and the buyer needs the merchants to carry their half. You cannot post a new one.

Hired swords

The Upahan is the Niaga signature unit, and it is bought rather than raised: it costs gold on top of its resources. A new village is founded with an empty treasury, so a Niaga player cannot hire anybody on their first morning — the first thing that tribe does is trade. That is the shape of them, and it is why their discount at the counter matters more than it looks.

The Balai Ilmu

A house of learning, and the one plot whose level is not the whole of its effect. What it does is let you study a troop: pick one kind of soldier, pay resources, coin and time, and every one of that kind you own — in every village, now and in future — fights a little harder.

• Each troop can be taken five rungs, and each rung adds five per cent to that troop's attack and its defence. A troop taken all the way is a quarter stronger, whichever end of the fight it is on.
• It follows the player, not the village. Study spearmen once and every spearman you own is better, wherever they stand and wherever they were raised.
• One study at a time, however many Balai Ilmu you have built. A second hall does not let you learn two things at once; it lets you learn where you happen to be.
• The building's own level is a ceiling on how far you may go. The fifth rung needs a Balai Ilmu of five.
• Each rung costs more than the last, in goods, in coin and in time. The coin is the part that bites: ten gold for the first rung, and ten more for each one after it, so taking a single troop all the way costs a hundred and fifty gold. At roughly ten thousand timber to the coin, that is a kingdom's project rather than an afternoon's.

Where to find it. Study is its own tab on the Military page, beside the barracks, your columns and your reports — not a panel inside the training list, which is where it used to hide. Each troop there shows the three numbers a battle actually uses: its attack, its defence against foot and its defence against horse, as they stand and as they would be after the next rung, with what that rung costs in goods, coin and time. Those are the figures the fight is settled with rather than a separate sum, so what the screen promises is what your soldiers do.

The building points there itself. Upgrading the Balai Ilmu does not make your army stronger on its own — studying does. Open the Balai Ilmu in your village and Choose what to study takes you straight to the tab; when it is first built you are told the same; and while it stands idle, with something left to learn, the Army button and the Study tab carry a small gold dot until you choose.

A study that finishes while your column is walking still counts when it lands. The same is true defending: if the rung completes before the attack arrives, your soldiers fight at the better number. Nothing has to be collected and nothing expires.

Training speed subscription

Gold coins can also buy faster training. Every unit's box on the Military page has a Training speed subscription under its Train button, with four cards: None, Basic (1 coin an hour, 7% faster), Advanced (2 coins, 12%) and Elite (3 coins, 18%). Nothing is charged until you press Save and confirm the price.

• It is one subscription for you, not one per unit or village. Every training box shows the same card, the same balance and the same paid time, and the boost applies to every village you hold.
• The percentage is a rate. A Bamboo Spearman that takes 8 seconds takes about 7.48 at Basic, 7.14 at Advanced and 6.78 at Elite. What a unit costs, what it eats and how strong it is do not change.
• Training under way is sped up, not restarted. What a batch has already done stays done; only the time still to go changes, for the batch running and for those waiting behind it. When a boost ends, the time left goes back to normal and nothing already trained is taken away.
• You pay the first hour when you save, then once an hour. The coins come from your gold vault, the same one that pays for study and mercenaries. If the vault cannot cover a renewal the boost ends when the hour you paid for ends, you are told, and it does not start again until you choose it again. Your coins never go below nothing.
• Choosing None stops the renewals but keeps the hour you paid for: the boost runs to the end of it and nothing more is charged.
• Moving up to a better plan starts at once, and the unused part of the hour you paid for is credited back in whole coins, so you are not charged twice for the same hour. Moving down waits for the next renewal.
• The prices and bonuses are set for the world and can change. A change reaches you at your next renewal; the hour you have paid for keeps the terms you bought it on.

Gold coins, spent in a hurry

Hiring a company

When an attack is coming and there is no time to train, the Bazaar can find men for gold. Open the Bazaar and choose Hire. Three companies are on offer:

• Hired Pikemen — long spears for a wall, strong against horse. 2 gold coins a man.
• Hired Blades — swordsmen for an attack. 3 gold coins a man.
• Hired Riders — fast horsemen. 5 gold coins a man.

They stand in the village the moment you pay, and fight, march and reinforce like your own soldiers. They need no rice and no room. A Bazaar can find 25 men a level for one contract, and you can hold one contract for each company at a time.

A contract lasts one day of world time. When it runs out the men leave — from your village and from any village they are defending. Men still on the road finish their march and leave when they get home. You can hire the same company again as soon as its contract has ended.

Somebody else's wall

Helping somebody hold, and marching on from there

Send troops with the Reinforce order and they stay where they land. They defend that village as if they were its own, and they eat that village's rice, not yours — so a host who cannot feed them will watch them starve. The muster roll lists every garrison of yours that is standing in somebody else's village, and they march home whenever you say so.

They do not have to march home. A village you have soldiers standing in is a village you can march from. Pick a target anywhere on the map, and the send dialog offers that wall alongside your own under Marching from — or press March from here on the Military screen, which opens the map with that wall already chosen. An army you sent to an ally three days into enemy country can attack, raid, scout or reinforce from where it stands instead of walking all the way back to be useful again. When it is done, the survivors return to that same wall — not to your village — which is the whole point of having one out there.

What it costs is that a forward base is not free ground:

• The host's Muster Ground is what forms the column. No Muster Ground, no column — the troops can only come home.
• Anything the column carries back is unloaded into the host's stores. They fed the army; they keep the plunder. The dialog says so before you place the order.
• You cannot march out of somebody's gate at another of their villages. A guest may not turn on a host.
• The host's treaties bind your column as firmly as your own do. If they have sworn peace with your target, that attack cannot leave their village — though it can still leave yours.
• Founding a village and holding a grove start from your own ground only.

The host is told when a column leaves their village. The host can also send your soldiers home: on their army screen, under Guests on your walls, each guest has a Send home button. Your soldiers then march back to your village at their own pace, exactly as if you had recalled them, and you get a notification saying who sent them. Letting somebody station an army with you is a real decision on both sides.

With one exception: reinforcing a kingdom you are at war with hands the soldiers over. They walk in and they are theirs — they defend that village, they eat that village's rice, they answer that village's muster, and you cannot call them back. Your champion is not part of the bargain and turns for home. Nothing stops you doing it, and the send dialog says plainly what it will cost before you place the order; there are reasons to, from suing for terms to covering a friend whose kingdom went to war without them. It is simply not a way to lend an enemy a garrison you could take back the moment it mattered.

The war is read when the column lands, not when it leaves. Soldiers who set out in peacetime and arrive into a fresh war are surrendered; soldiers who set out during a war that ended by terms an hour later are not.

But a village that falls while your soldiers are on the road to it is not somewhere they arrive. Every reinforcement still marching to it turns round where it stands and walks home, taking as long to come back as it had already walked, and you are told. It does not matter whose village it was or who sent them: only the new owner's own columns carry on. This is the same as the soldiers already standing inside, who are marched home when it changes hands.

Where your army is

The muster roll

The muster roll is on the Army screen. The box of soldiers at the top counts every soldier you have, not just the village you are in, and pressing it opens the roll beneath: where each of them is standing — in your own villages, on somebody else's wall, or walking. One page and one total, so the question "how many do I have" has an answer you do not assemble by hand.

It also says what each garrison costs. A soldier eats rice every hour, charged to the village it is standing in — so an ally's army on your wall is your rice bill, and yours on theirs is not. The roll adds up what your own villages are paying, guests included.

Two orders sit on it. Call them all home sends a garrison back as an ordinary march. Call some… opens a box per unit so you can bring back the spearmen and leave the horse. Both appear only where the rules already allow a recall: on somebody else's wall, and in a village of yours with no Muster Ground where nothing can form a column. A village of yours that can march uses the ordinary send, which is the order that knows about war parties and treaties.

A village of yours holding nobody is called out in red. That is not an error — it is the thing most worth knowing on the page.

Everybody at once

Striking at one hour

Twelve columns that arrive one after another are twelve columns beaten one after another. Arriving together used to mean every player working out their own travel time, subtracting it from an hour agreed in the channel, and being awake at whatever odd moment that produced — which sorts a kingdom by who can stay up rather than by who can fight.

Your Raja or a Laksamana can now name a target and an hour. Find the village on the map and press Plan a strike with your kingdom; anyone in the kingdom can do that much, and the officers are the ones who can call it.

Everybody else pledges soldiers to it — which village to march from, which units, and either the plan's order or a scout riding in with the wave. The server works out when each column has to leave and sends it. A neighbour two tiles away leaves last; somebody three days out leaves first; everybody lands on the hour.

All, beside Clear, puts every eligible soldier standing in that village into the pledge at once. Civilians and other units that cannot join the selected order are left out; if you switch to a scout, only scouts remain. If the column comes back refused as too slow to arrive in time, it is usually the siege engines — take those out and pledge the rest, or ask for a later hour.

Pledged soldiers leave the garrison the moment you pledge them. That village stands without them until they march. It is the price of a promise that means something — an army that could quietly be spent elsewhere an hour before the strike is not an army anybody can plan around — and it is why you can take them back at any time before they leave, instantly and in full. They never went anywhere. Meanwhile they still eat that village's rice and still occupy its villagers, so pledging is not a way to stop feeding an army.

A plan buys coordination and never permission. Each column goes out under the ordinary rules when its moment comes: a treaty still refuses it, a fleet still has to be big enough to carry it, a village with no Muster Ground still cannot form one. If a column cannot march when the hour comes, its soldiers go straight back on the wall and you are told why.

Your champion can ride with a pledged column, on the plan's order — not on a scout, where they would be risked for a report you would have got anyway. A champion works differently from the soldiers above: they are asked for, not taken. They stay yours the whole time the plan waits, free to defend, to mend, or to go out on an expedition, and they are looked for only when the column forms. If they are wounded, away, or standing in another village when the hour comes, that column marches without them rather than not marching at all — because a column that fails is not one player's misfortune here, it is a hole the rest of the wave lands into. The plan says which columns brought a champion, and which asked for one and went without.

A strike can be aimed. Beside the mission, the officer calling it may name one building to bring down — the same list a single assault may point its meriam at, so never the Grand Balai, never the Paddy Field, and never the Palisade, which is the Rams' to break. The aim is carried out by whichever pledged columns are bringing meriam; everybody else simply fights. So the plan says what it is aiming at, and it says it where the kingdom is deciding what to pledge: a wave that turns up with no meriam in it has named a target nothing can hit. Anything the aim cannot use — a Warrior Hall already flattened by the first column — falls on whatever else those meriam can reach, rather than being wasted. Raids take goods and leave, so a raid is not offered the choice.

The hour must be at least ten minutes away, so the kingdom has time to answer it, and at most a week. An officer can call the whole thing off, and every pledge goes home.

Two strikes can land together. When a plan is already open, the officer calling another can choose Lands with the strike on … instead of a time, and the new plan lands on the same second as that one. Otherwise the hour is set in hours and minutes, or with the quick buttons from half an hour to a day, and the form says what time that is on your own clock before you call it.

You can pledge from where your army is standing. Soldiers you have sent to hold a friend's village are listed under March from as well as your own villages, and they march from there — their travel is worked out from where they are, not from home. The column forms on that village's Muster Ground, so a village without one is listed but cannot be chosen.

Somebody has to hold

Calling the kingdom to a wall

The mirror of the war plan, and deliberately not the same machine. A village expecting a blow raises a call — the village, the hour help is needed by, and a line saying what is coming — and everybody in the kingdom sees it, in the Defence tab and as a notice.

You may pledge from as many of your kampung as you like — one pledge from each. Post one, choose another village in the picker, and post again; every column marches from its own village and they all land on the same hour. What is refused is pledging twice from the same village, which is why the message names the village rather than the plan. Once you have a pledge standing, Pledge more, from another village stays on the plan so the next village is one press away.

Anybody can call for their own village. Calling a strike is an officer's decision because it spends the kingdom's armies; being attacked is not a decision at all, and a member who has to wake a Laksamana first will be sacked before they find one. An officer can raise a call for anyone's wall, which is what lets them rally a village whose owner is asleep. One call per village at a time — two would split the kingdom's answer between them and each would look under-answered.

Nothing is held. This is the real difference from a war plan, and it comes from a difference in what the two are for. An attack has to be simultaneous: twelve armies landing an hour apart are twelve armies beaten one at a time, which is why a war plan takes your soldiers off the wall and holds them until the moment that lands everybody together. Defence buys nothing with that. Two reinforcements arriving an hour apart are worth what they would be worth arriving together, and the earlier either stands on the wall the more use it is. So what you send to a call marches at once, as an ordinary reinforcement, and can be recalled from the muster roll like any other.

You are told what your soldiers did. If a village you have reinforced is attacked, the battle report comes to you as well as to the two sides — you fought in it, and your losses are in it. A notification names the village, so if you are holding three walls you know which one was struck. Somebody who simply lives nearby is told nothing.

Late help is still help. A war pledge that cannot make the hour is refused, because a column landing after the wave feeds itself to a defence the others already failed to break. A defence column that arrives after the blow has still arrived — the village may hold without it, the attacker may come again, and a garrison on the wall the day after a siege is worth having. So nothing is turned away for being slow. The call shows two numbers instead: everything promised, and the part of it that will actually be standing there when the hour comes. The second is the one to read.

Closing a call does not turn anybody round. Those soldiers are an ordinary reinforcement belonging to whoever sent them, and recalling them is that player's decision to make.

Not being at your desk

The Steward

Everything here happens in real time whether or not you are watching, which is the point — but it also means an empty build queue at 3am is a wasted night. The Steward is the standing order you leave behind.

• A build plan: the buildings you want raised, in the order you want them, started as soon as they are affordable. Each step has a number you can type into — type 1 on the fourth step and it goes to the top, with the rest renumbered behind it — and a target level you type too, anything from one above where the building is now up to its highest. When you add a step, buildings already at their highest level are not offered, and you can type a name to find the one you want. A village with no shoreline is not offered a Shipyard, because it can never build one. A plot with nothing built on it yet is listed as not built yet and can be planned like any other: you do not have to raise it by hand first, the Steward builds its first level when the step's turn comes.
• The Niaga pay less. The merchant tribe gets a percentage off the Steward fee, set by the administrators (it is in the settings table under Steward discount for Niaga, and is nothing until they set it). It is worked out for each village and rounded to a whole coin, and never below one coin: at a fee of 12 and 10 percent off, a Niaga village pays 11. The price on your Steward screen is the price you are charged, discount taken.
• Garrison targets: keep this many of these units in this village, and train the difference.
• A supply route: ship the surplus to another of your villages on a schedule, under the rules above. A village runs up to three standing routes — the first with any Bazaar, the second at Bazaar 8, the third at 15 — and the routes take turns, one shipment per sweep, so one full caravan beats three underloaded ones.

The Steward has no privileges you do not. It cannot spend what you have not got, cannot exceed a queue limit, and obeys exactly the rules your own orders obey — it is you, doing the boring part on time.

A world may charge for it. Where it does, the fee is gold coins, per village, for the period ahead, taken from your vault — so six automated villages cost six times one, and a village that has never switched the Steward on is never charged for it. The period is a day unless the administrators have set it shorter: a fee of one coin every two hours is twelve coins a day, but it is taken in small pieces through the day, so a purse that cannot find twelve at once can still keep the Steward running for a while. The price and the period can be changed during a round and take effect at once; your Steward screen always quotes the current figure and how often it is taken, and the settings table near the top of this page lists both. Where the price is nought, the Steward is free.

It is never a debt, and it never loses your setup. A village that cannot find the coin simply stops being worked until it can. Your build plan, your garrison targets, your routes and your rules all stay exactly as you left them, nothing is switched off, and the Steward starts again by itself on the first sweep after a coin arrives — there is nothing to turn back on. Gold comes over the Bazaar counter and nowhere else, so if a village has gone quiet, sell it something.

It tells you what it is waiting for. Every step of the build plan shows the cost of its next level with its state beside it in a word: Ready to upgrade in green, Not enough resources in red, Waiting in gold (for an earlier step, since steps go in order, or for a free building slot), Currently upgrading in blue with a bar and the time left, Completed, or Paused. Each resource you are short of is red on its own, and the line underneath says exactly how much is missing and roughly how long your production will take — or, when no wait will help, what to do about it (nothing is producing it, or your store cannot hold the cost on top of the reserve). Press the costs to see, for each resource, what you have, what it needs, and what is left or missing. “Available” always means above your reserve, which the Steward never touches. Ready is about the next level only: a plan to level 20 does not wait until you can pay for all of it, and the whole climb’s estimated cost is folded away under each step. Garrison targets show how far along each one is and what the next batch needs. A Steward that is waiting will carry on by itself; there is nothing to press. And the bar at the top of every screen says whether it is working the village you are in — Steward on in green beside your gold, or off in grey — and takes you here if you press it.

Ground worth holding

Spice groves

The gold tiles on the map are wild nutmeg and clove. Station at least one soldier in one and it adds 8% to everything the village they marched from produces — up to ten groves per village, which is a village producing at 1.8×.

No grove is empty any more. Every spice grove that nobody holds is guarded — by the Lanun or by wild beasts. Which, and how strong (a small band, a strong band or a large host), is fixed by the tile, so everybody sees the same thing: tap a grove on the map and it says who is in it. Taking one means beating the guard, and a guard that survives your assault is whole again six hours after the last fight, so a failed attack is worth following up quickly. The fight writes a report like any other.

Held groves are raided. Between three and six hours after you take a grove — and again after each raid — either wild beasts or the Lanun come for it, chosen by chance. Beasts fight at once. The Lanun march a column you can see on the road, and if they win, the grove becomes theirs. How big a raid is depends on how big you are: the more villagers you have across your villages, the stronger the camp the Lanun send, and the larger the pack of beasts. A grove that falls goes back to the wilds, and it can be taken again. A player still under beginner protection is left alone.

Wild beasts, and who else guards a grove

A Wild Beast is tigers, boars and crocodiles that have taken a grove for their own. Nobody trains, hires or sends them; they hold ground and they raid it. They are poor at pulling down a wall and good at standing where they are, and they carry nothing away.

Which kind guards a grove, and how strong, is fixed by the tile. The wilds refill every 6 hours — four times a day — and the beasts grow each time, with no ceiling: a grove left alone through the round gets harder every refill, and the Lanun, who live alongside the beasts and wait for someone to come, do not grow. A guard that survived your attack is whole again at the next refill.

The catch is that a grove has no Palisade and no champion to mend. The garrison stands in the open, everyone can see exactly where it is, and anybody who wants the grove has only to beat it. Holding ground is the one thing in this game you do somewhere that is not somebody's home.

Your own kingdom’s groves are marked. A grove held by you or by somebody in your kingdom is ringed on the map — gold for yours, jade for a kingdom mate’s — and named when you are zoomed in far enough to read it. That is so you can see at a glance which groves are friendly before you send anybody at one. Nobody else’s is named: whose garrison stands on a grove across the water is still something to find out by scouting or by clicking the tile.

You feed the men holding it. A grove garrison eats rice like any other soldiers of yours, charged to the village whose grove it is — the same village the yield goes to. That was not true for a while: a grove garrison was the one part of an army nobody was paying for, so an army parked on groves cost nothing and did not count against what your rice can support. It does now, and they appear on the muster roll where the rest of your soldiers are.

Beyond the tenth, a grove pays nothing — but it is still denied to everyone else, which is a reason to take one anyway.

Sending more out, from the same screen. Every grove you hold has a Send button beside the recall ones. It opens the ordinary march dialog with that grove already chosen, so reinforcing a grove no longer means finding it again on the map. What arrives joins the garrison already standing there.

Where to see what you hold. Your village page carries a grove tile: how many feed that village, how many of them are paying, and what they are adding to it — pressing it opens the grove screen. There, if you hold groves for more than one village, you can show one village’s at a time rather than reading one long list. The paying count is always worked out against every grove that village holds, so narrowing the list never changes which of them are earning.

A fight over a grove writes a report, for both sides. It is a battle like any other — the same resolution, the same losses, the same luck — so if your grove is taken you get the whole account of it: who came, how many, what they lost taking it and what your garrison took with them. Your notification links straight to it. The same is true when your garrison holds: you can read how close it was.

Calling a grove garrison home still has to be a possible march. If the return crosses water and the ships standing in the grove cannot carry the troops you are recalling, the order is refused before anybody leaves the grove. Call back fewer troops, or leave enough War Praus and Dragon Jongs in the recalled stack to carry them.

Intelligence

Seeing trouble coming

Without a Watchtower you learn about an army when it arrives. With one you learn earlier, and the taller it is the more it tells you.

That ring is the difference between defending your village and defending your neighbourhood — it catches marches on the groves you hold and on the allies beside you, which is usually where a war actually starts.

A kingdom shares what its towers watch. What your kingdom can see is the union of its members' rings, not each member squinting over their own wall: when a mate's tower makes out a column near their frontier it reaches your list too, and it says which village saw it. So a kingdom wants a lookout on each frontier rather than everybody watching their own doorstep.

Allies share their towers too. If your kingdom is allied with another, what their towers see reaches your list and your map as well, marked as an ally's tower. It is sight and nothing more: the count of villages nobody is watching stays your own kingdom's.

You need a Watchtower of your own to receive it, at any level. That is the lowest bar there is and it is deliberately a contribution rather than a tax — if one member's tower lit the map for everybody, nobody else would ever raise one.

Your watch is drawn on the map too. Press Marches and every ring your sightings come from appears as a faint dashed circle — your own towers in gold, your kingdom mates' in grey-blue, an allied kingdom's in violet — so "what can we see" is a shape on the ground rather than arithmetic. The ground inside any circle is ground where a landing gets reported.

All of it is drawn on the map. Press Marches and the columns appear as lines with a mark creeping along each one: red for anything coming at you, drawn from the village it set out from, amber for an attack on your kingdom, and your own columns by what they are doing — gold going to fight, jade reinforcing, trading or settling, tan on the way home — blue for what your kingdom mates have on the road, and a grey ring on the landing tile for something sighted. The ring has no line on purpose — a tower reads a landing and an hour off the horizon, not a departure, so where that column started is not yours to know and the map will not pretend otherwise. It does say where: the tile's name sits under the ring, so an assault on a kingdom mate reads as one rather than as a column landing in a field.

Your kingdom's own columns are on the map. Every attack, raid and reinforcement a kingdom mate has on the road is drawn as a blue line from the village it left, with their name at the far end, so you can see who is already marching at a village before three of you send at it. No Watchtower is needed. It shows whose each column is and where it is going, not what is marching in it. It is your kingdom's and nobody else's: an ally's columns are not drawn, because alliances end.

The Watch lists all of it. Your kingdom's screen has a Watch tab: one live list of every column you can see, soonest to land first — your own in gold, your kingdom mates' in blue, anything marching on you or on a mate or an ally in red (marked at you when it is yours), and tower sightings in grey, with an ally's tower named in violet. The chips above it narrow the list to one side. It shows nothing the map does not — same Watchtower rules, same reason an ally's own marches stay theirs — it just puts it in the order it will land.

The neighbours nobody chose

Lanun camps

The unclaimed villages scattered across the map are camps, and they are the safest fight in the game — the first war band most players ever send out goes to one. They are not, however, a vending machine.

• They rebuild. A camp you clear replaces what it lost over about 60 game-hours. Come back the same evening and there is a garrison waiting again.
• They grow. Left alone, a camp gains a tier roughly every 480 game-hours — two days at this world's pace — up to four tiers. A corner of the map nobody patrols quietly becomes something worth bringing friends to.
• They raid. From the second tier a camp sends out about 40% of its garrison at a village within 10 tiles — roughly once every 240 game-hours at tier 2, and more often the bigger it grows: every 160 at tier 3 and every 96 at tier 4. A zombie village keeps tier 2's pace. The world's keepers can also take a camp or a zombie village in hand — its tier, its pace, its garrison, or one player it is sent after — so now and then a raid comes from further off than ten tiles. It only picks on villages of at least 120 people, so a beginner is never the target — but a fat undefended second village near an ignored camp certainly is.

Everything above is worked out from when the camp was last touched, not ticked while you were away, so a camp is exactly as strong as the time says it should be the moment you knock. What the map shows you is what you are about to fight.

They do not always stay. The corsairs are here to give an early map something to push against, and a world can outgrow them — hundreds of thousands of soldiers standing on ground nobody can settle. When that happens they may be sent away, and you will know: the wind turns, the stockades are found cold, and a notice across the top of every screen says so. Any column of yours already marching on a camp turns round rather than arriving at empty sand, and you are told why.

They may fight as a tribe. A camp's soldiers are not always the plain kind. The world's operator can have the corsairs fight as a tribe — Pelaut, say — and can set one camp apart from the rest. A Pelaut camp's spearmen are Penjaga Geladak and its swordsmen Lanun Penyerbu, with those tribes' own strengths and weak points, so the figures you scouted against a camp are the figures it fights with, defending and raiding alike. A camp can also be made to hold a larger garrison and larger stores than its tier gives. Scout before you send: a camp that looks like the one you cleared last week may not be.

Some have a champion. A camp can be given a champion of its own — named, with its own strengths and its own kit. It rides out with the camp's raids and stands in the camp when you attack it, and it counts exactly as a player's champion does: its strength is added to the fight and it lifts the whole column or garrison around it. It is the Lanun's, not yours to fight separately — it cannot be killed or hurt, and a won fight does not take it. The battle report names it when it was there, so you will know after the first time; scout before you send, because a camp that a few swordsmen cleared last week may now be standing behind a champion.

The neighbours, at sea

Fleets at sea

An operator can call out a Lanun war fleet — not one camp but seven, standing in open water rather than on any village, scattered across the archipelago. It is not a standing feature of the world; it happens when somebody in charge decides it should.

• You are warned first. A banner and a notice go out the moment the wave is called, naming when the ships will actually make landfall. Nothing can be sent at them until then — the mark on the map is faint and the fleet is not yet a target.
• Then they arrive, and the clock starts. Once landfall happens the mark turns sharp and a second notice says so. You have a window to sink each one before it slips away.
• Nothing points you at them. The banner says how many are still standing and the clock they are standing against; it does not say where. A fleet is drawn where it sits, on water you have actually looked at, so finding one means panning out over the open sea rather than reading a list. That is the event: seven ships somewhere in the strait, and whoever goes looking finds them first.
• You need ships to reach one. A column with no War Prau or Dragon Jong in it is refused outright — a fleet sits on water no army can wade to, whatever the map's distance says.
• They scale with the world. A bigger world faces a stronger fleet, by the same rule the Compact's landings use, so a young world is not asked to sink what a mature one can.
• Sinking one pays. Loot, the same as any won fight, and it counts toward the Bandit Hunter medal exactly as clearing a camp does.
• The end is announced. When the last ship of a wave is gone — sunk or sailed off — the whole world is told how it went: how many went down, how many slipped away, and who sank what. Whoever sank one takes renown for it, three a ship and a little more to whoever took the most. Renown is a record of what you did and nothing else: it buys nothing, unlocks nothing, and appears in no calculation anywhere in this game.
• Ignoring one has a cost. A fleet nobody sinks in time raids the nearest coast once, then sails off for good — it does not linger, and it does not raid twice.

The report it leaves reads like any other fight, with one difference: the panel that would normally name an attacker or a defender instead says Fleet, because there was no village to fight over — only ships, and what was left of them afterwards.

Other people

Kingdoms and treaties

A Consulate lets you found or join a kingdom: a private channel, a shared defence board, and diplomacy the server actually enforces.

• Alliance — both kingdoms must agree. The server will refuse an attack on an ally; it is not an honour system.
• Non-aggression pact — both must agree, and attacks between you are likewise refused.
• War — declared unilaterally, and it tears up whatever stood before.

Marking a player as an enemy. A treaty is with a kingdom, and some of what a kingdom needs to say is about one person: the player who keeps scouting, poking and raiding your members, who may be in no kingdom at all. Your Raja, Bendahara or Laksamana can mark them from the Diplomacy tab, with a note for your own members, up to twenty at a time.

It is a label and nothing else. Nobody may attack them who could not before, no treaty changes, and no battle is decided differently. Your own members see a ring around their villages on the map and the list on the kingdom page; nobody else sees your marks at all.

Two kingdoms agreeing makes it public. One kingdom's mark is one kingdom's opinion. When a second kingdom marks the same player, the mark is shown to everybody — on that player's profile and beside their name on every leaderboard, naming the kingdoms that made it. Letting one go is a press, and the public mark goes when the kingdoms behind it do.

There is exactly one relationship between any two kingdoms at a time. You cannot quietly upgrade a standing treaty into something else — end the current one first, in the open, where the other side can see it happen.

Open war. A kingdom's Raja — and only the Raja — can declare open war: a challenge to the whole archipelago at once, announced to every player. While it stands, any attack, raid or scout between that kingdom and another — whichever way it goes — puts the two at war from that moment, with the full war board, timeline and record. Allies and kingdoms with a non-aggression pact are never drawn in. A player in no kingdom can join the fight as an individual, with Join the fight on the kingdom's page or simply by marching on it; from then on they are at war with that kingdom as a kingdom would be. The send dialog warns you before a march that would start a war. The officers can close the open call at any time: no one new is drawn in after that, and the wars it started carry on until they end in the usual ways. Once an open war is closed, the kingdom must wait a day of world time before its Raja can declare another. The Laksamana and the Bendahara may propose open war: the Raja is told, and approving the proposal declares it. Any officer can close one.

Emptying a kingdom at war is surrendering it. Members can still leave a kingdom that is at war, but when the last one walks out the war does not simply vanish. It is archived as that kingdom's surrender, and the record names everybody who fought it on both sides, including anyone who left part-way through. The other kingdom is told. A war otherwise ends by terms, or at the end of the round.

The front line. Each war your kingdom is fighting shows, under its painting, the attacks on the road between the two kingdoms right now: green columns marching out from you, red ones coming in, with how many each way and a countdown to the next to land. It counts attacks and raids, not scouts or reinforcements, and refreshes every half-minute while you watch.

A war, hour by hour. Every war on your kingdom's War tab, running or finished, carries a painting of where it stands (declared, fighting, or how it ended) and Show the timeline. That opens the totals, with the soldiers each side lost as one green and red bar; a line of battles won and lost for every hour of the war; and green and red bars of each side's dead for the same hours. Hours with no fighting stay on the chart, so the gaps are real time, and a castle marks any hour a village changed hands. Switch to By day for a long war. Press any hour to see its fights, each with its own green and red bar of the dead. Green is always what went your way, red what it cost you. An attack by somebody in neither kingdom is shown as a third party. A finished war shows only what happened between its declaration and its end.

An assault on any member — or an ally's — is not only on the defence board. It is drawn on the map too, named in full with no Watchtower required, and everyone in the kingdom but the one under attack gets a notification the moment the war party marches, not only once somebody thinks to check.

The defence board also names how many soldiers are standing in the threatened village right now — the host's garrison and anyone reinforcing it, added together — so a kingdom can judge how many more to send without asking. It is a live figure, not a record of what the attacker will actually meet: it moves as the garrison does, right up to the moment the fight lands.

Officers can rewrite the kingdom’s description. Press Edit description beside it on the kingdom page. Up to 500 characters, held to the same rules as when the kingdom was founded. The name and the tag cannot be changed yet.

Looking at other kingdoms. The All kingdoms tab on your kingdom page lists every kingdom in the archipelago with its members, leader and population; open one to see its page and everybody in it.

Who speaks for a kingdom

Offices

A kingdom has a Raja who founded it, and two offices the Raja may grant: one Bendahara, the Raja's own minister, and up to four Laksamana. Everyone else is a subject.

An office is not a decoration. An officer can invite people, answer the requests of those asking to join, remove members, and act for the kingdom in diplomacy — so a Raja who is asleep is no longer a kingdom that cannot admit anybody.

Every kingdom has a channel its members can talk in, and the Kingdom button in the menu carries a mark when somebody has spoken in it since you last looked — so a conversation does not wait on you happening to open the screen.

Granting one is on the members list, on the Raja's screen only: the shield beside a name opens the offices, and an office already full is shown as full rather than refused after you pick it. A Raja may also hand the crown over entirely, which steps them down to Laksamana in the same movement — the one choice here that cannot be taken back by the person making it.

Whose ground is whose

Borders, and what marching over them costs

Zoom the map out and the islands are washed in colour: every tile belongs to whichever kingdom is nearest to it, and "nearest" is weighted by how many people actually live there. A capital of two thousand throws its border much further than a hamlet on the next island, and the line between two kingdoms sits where the two claims are equally strong rather than halfway between the villages.

The 3D map. The 3D button beside Borders opens the map full screen in 3D: the ground stands at different heights — open sea lowest, then plains and spice groves, then jungle, with the highlands tallest — drawn at an angle from a corner of the world, in the same painted ground as the flat map. Drag to pan and use the wheel to zoom. The buttons at the top right zoom in and out, switch the 3D off and on, take you back to your own village, and close it; Esc closes it too. Villages, marches, borders and the sites highlight all sit on top of the blocks, and a click lands on the block you pointed at. The heights are modest on purpose, so a hill never hides the village in front of it, and zoomed far out they would be smaller than a few pixels, so the map draws flat there and the 3D returns as you zoom in. The map on the page itself is always the flat one.

The map is wide. On a desktop the map takes the whole width of the page. Tap a tile and its details float over the left edge of the map, with the buttons for what you can do there; close them and the map is clear again. The short note about sailing and crossing water sits underneath the map.

• A village's reach grows with the square root of its population, so doubling a border costs four times the people. It is capped, so no single village paints the map.
• A spice grove you hold projects a flat 3 tiles regardless of anything — a grove has no population, and the ground round it is claimed because your soldiers are standing on it.
• The colours mean something fixed: gold is always your own kingdom, jade an ally, blue a pact, and dark red a kingdom at war with yours. Strangers get quieter hues, enough to tell two of them apart.

Borders are not decoration. Where a column marches changes how fast it marches, sampled along the whole route rather than judged by the destination:

• Friendly ground — yours or an ally's — moves you 20% faster. Roads, food, and nobody shooting at the baggage.
• Enemy ground — a kingdom you are at war with — is 25% slower. A deep strike through hostile country arrives tired and late.
• Neutral ground, including a kingdom you merely have a pact with, costs exactly what it always did.

A route that crosses three kingdoms is charged for each stretch in proportion, so the fastest way to a target is often not the straight line you would have drawn — and a war is now won partly by owning the ground your enemy has to walk over.

Who you are, this round

Tribes

At the start of a round you choose a tribe, and it changes how your whole round plays. Every one of them is best at something and worst at something else, and the two are far enough apart that the choice is a plan rather than a preference.

It is chosen once and cannot be changed until the world ends — nobody swaps into the raiders the hour before an assault and back into the highlanders before being assaulted. It is chosen per round rather than for good: when the next world opens you choose again, and a veteran of nine rounds starts the tenth level with somebody who registered that morning.

Where to choose. Until you have chosen, the tribe screen opens by itself each time you sign in. Pick one there, or press Decide later and play on; it will ask again at your next sign-in. It is also reached any time from Settings, under Your tribe. A player who never chooses plays the round at the plain figures, with none of a tribe's strengths, none of its drawbacks, and no soldier of their own.

A tribe changes nothing else. Everything absent from a row is played at exactly the figures in the rest of this handbook — which is also what a player who chooses no tribe at all plays, in every row.

One soldier each

Beyond the numbers, every tribe raises one soldier nobody else can. They are trained from buildings you already have, so there is no new chain to climb — and each does something none of the eleven can, because a unit that is merely a better Kris Swordsman is a costume rather than a choice.

Each tribe's own soldiers

The six soldiers every player raises — spear, blade, bow, scout, horse and lance — and the two siege engines are raised differently by each tribe, under the tribe's own names and in its own colours, and each is shaped to the tribe. No tribe's soldiers are simply better: every strength in a unit is paid for in that same unit, a harder blade being a thinner one, and the training screen shows each figure as your tribe fields it.

• Pelaut — Nibong Spearman, Parang Boarder, Sumpit Skirmisher, Shore Runner, Beach Rider, Tide Lancer, and for a siege the Lela Rentaka (a ship's swivel gun brought ashore) and the Prow Ram. Quick blades and stinging darts that cover less well; horses and siege engines that are lighter, weaker and cheaper.
• Darat — Ironwood Pikeman, Golok Hillman, Highland Bowman, Ridge Watcher, Hill Pony Rider, Bukit Lancer, and for a siege the Lontar Batu catapult and the Gajah Perang — a war elephant in quilted armour that tears down more palisade than any ram, and is dear to keep. The line that does not move: thick defence, a lighter blow, less carried home.
• Sambar — Raider Spearman, Amok Blade, Dart Raider, Night Scout, Sambar Raider, Warlord Lancer, and for a siege the Fire-Pot Thrower and the Fire Ram. The hardest blows and the deepest saddlebags, and very little to stand behind.
• Niaga — Guild Pikeman, Bazaar Guard, Caravan Archer, Courier, Caravan Rider, Syahbandar Lancer, and for a siege the Bronze Meriam and the Iron-shod Ram, each knocking down more and costing more. Well armed and steady all round, carrying trade goods as readily as loot, and some of it dearer to raise.

A tribe's siege engines also differ in how much they knock down: what a won assault takes off a Palisade or a building is the engine's own figure, so a Gajah Diraja breaks more wall than a Naga Haluan. Ships, settlers and each tribe's signature soldier above are the same as before. A player who has not chosen a tribe raises the six as they have always been.

Not every tribe rides horses. The Pelaut have none: their scouts, raiders and war-captains come by sampan and prau and go ashore on foot, so on land they march about a sixth slower than a horseman would, and cost less to raise — the price of a sea people. The Darat ride the jungle: a tiger scout outruns any horse, a boar rider is cheap and hard to break, and a rhino knight hits hardest and guards best of all their soldiers but arrives last. The Niaga ride armoured kerbau: slower than horsemen, tougher, and carrying more home than anybody. A march goes at the pace of its slowest member, and the send dialog shows the time it will take.

Pelaut

Darat

Sambar

Niaga

Every tribe's soldiers, in numbers

The paintings above name each tribe's soldiers; these are their figures. Each row is the tribe's own version of one of the plain soldiers, and the small grey line under its name says which. Times are for a Warrior Hall, Stable or Workshop at level 1 at this world's ×1 pace — every level of the building takes a further 2% off. The three right-hand columns are what a training speed subscription does to that time, with the price in gold coins an hour (the shipped prices; the Military page always shows the current ones).

Pelaut

Darat

Sambar

Niaga

The four tribes side by side

The same soldiers laid out by role, one measure at a time, so the question “whose spearman is best for what I want?” can be answered by reading one table.

Attack

Defence against infantry

Defence against cavalry

Cost (all four resources added up)

Training time, no subscription

Marching speed (fields an hour)

You may only raise your own. Change nothing else about how you play and the soldier alone is a reason to pick one tribe over another.

What they eat. A soldier's rice an hour is the tribe's own figure, not always the plain one. The Darat's Pengintai Harimau eats 3 rice an hour, where an ordinary scout eats 1, and the Gajah Diraja eats 5, where a plain ram eats 3 — a tiger and an elephant are dear to keep, as their entries say. Every other soldier, of every tribe, eats what it always did. Your village feeds them at your tribe's figure, so the rice figure on the village and the muster roll counts the tigers and elephants as they eat.

One named hero

Your champion

Every player has a champion from their first village — no building is needed; name them on the champion screen. A champion belongs to you rather than to a village, and mends faster at the Balai Pahlawan, the hall of heroes. They ride with an army, add their own strength to the battle, and lift the whole force alongside them.

You can rename them. The pencil beside your champion's name opens it for editing, exactly as a village name does. The name is not only yours to read — it appears on every report a champion fights in, on both sides — so the same rules apply as anywhere else a name is chosen.

• They gain experience and level up — 100 for level 2, 1,600 for level 5, 8,100 for level 10. Fighting no longer pays it: a champion is levelled by adventures, and a world pays experience for a fight only where the operator has switched that kind of fight on (attacking an NPC village or a player's, or being attacked by an NPC village, wild animals or a player). Where a kind is on, it is full experience for winning and a quarter for losing, and your battle report shows what each side's champion learned. A fight that pays nothing still wounds the champion and still counts as won or lost.
• They carry equipment found on expeditions, and you choose where their levels go.
• Five slots to begin with — weapon, armour, mount, charm and cloth — and in a world that has them switched on, four more that open as your champion climbs: head at level 5, waist at 10, feet at 15, off hand at 20. The pieces for those slots are deliberately slighter than the founding four; together they add about a third to a fully kitted champion, and they arrive one at a time rather than all at once.
• They have health, which recovers at the Shrine, and below 20% they will not march at all.
• They always come home. A champion is never lost the way soldiers are lost.
• They outlive the round. When a round turns over and the archipelago is swept away, your champion is not: their name, look, kit, pets and whetstones all carry into the next round. Their level and experience start again at level 1, and with them their attribute points, which come with levels — so every round is a climb, made with the kit you already own. A piece worn in a slot that opens only at a higher level is taken off and kept aside until they reach it again. They begin it rested and with no home; the first village you found takes them in. Anything you had at the Bazaar is taken back for you. The one exception is the four treasures of the realm, which go back to the realm at the end of every round to be found again.
• They look like somebody you chose. You choose who they are and their hair; the cloth they are painted in is the baju they wear. Six people, three hairs and three cloths is 54 champions, and every one of them is painted. Not a drawing assembled from parts: a picture somebody made of that exact person.
• There is no level cap, and no attribute cap either. The curve is the only ceiling and it steepens for ever: a quarter of a million experience to reach 50, nearly a million to reach 100. Every point you earn can be spent, and all of it can go into one attribute if you want it there — three points a level, for as many levels as you can win. Bearing is the one to think hardest about: it lifts the strength of the whole army your champion rides with, and nothing bounds it any more.

The six attributes

Every level gives three points to place, wherever you like:

• Valour — attack. Your champion's own strength when they ride out to fight.
• Guard — defence. Their own strength when holding a village, and fewer wounds.
• Bearing — the attack buff. Lifts the attack of the whole army they ride with, 0.2% a point.
• Resolve — the defence buff. Lifts the defence of everybody holding the village they stand in, 0.2% a point.
• Stewardship — the resource buff. More timber, stone, iron and rice from their home village, 0.2% a point, up to half again.
• Vigour — speed. The column they ride with marches faster, 0.2% a point, up to half again; they also mend sooner and haul more home.

Stewardship and Vigour, told apart. They are the two that get mixed up, because both add 0.2% a point and both stop at half again (250 points). Stewardship is about your home village: every point makes it produce more timber, stone, iron and rice, all the time, even while your champion is away or resting, and it never moves a soldier. Vigour is about the road: every point makes the column your champion rides with march quicker, and also makes the champion mend faster between fights and carry more plunder home; it does nothing for production. So a champion who stays at home and keeps the economy going wants Stewardship, and one who rides out a lot wants Vigour. Next to each attribute on the champion screen is a small (i): tap it for what a point is worth, a worked example for a hundred points, where the effect stops, and when it is a good place for a point.

The champion screen shows what Stewardship is worth. Above the attributes, What your champion adds at home gives the percentage Stewardship is adding to the village they call home, how much that is an hour of each resource, and what points you have chosen but not yet placed would make it. It counts the points you have placed, any Stewardship on the gear they wear and the Kancil if it is the pet walking beside them, and it says when you have reached the most it can add.

Placing points in Resolve and Stewardship now works. Until 20 October the screen left those two out when it saved, so a point put into either was never placed and nothing said so. Nobody was ever charged for it — the points simply stayed unspent — so if you tried and gave up, go back and place them.

A raider and a defender want different champions now, and a champion who stays at home can earn their keep there. When the six arrived, every champion's points were handed back once, to be placed again — Bearing used to lift both sides of a fight, and points bought for that should not be stuck in something that does less.

Beasts, and the pets they become

Sometimes the word that reaches your champion is not of a ruin or a wreck but of a beast abroad — something large taking livestock at the forest edge. It is marked on the map like any other site, and on its card you see which beast it is, how strong, and your champion's chance of beating it as they stand now. Their own attack strength is what counts, so Valour, level and the right kit all help; perilous ground is about twice as hard.

Beat it and it may follow your champion home — a quarter of the time on easy ground, half on perilous. There are six, and each lends a different attribute:

• Harimau (tiger) — Valour
• Buaya (crocodile) — Guard
• Beruang (sun bear) — Bearing
• Seladang (gaur) — Resolve
• Kancil (mousedeer) — Stewardship
• Enggang (hornbill) — Vigour

A pet lends three points a level of bond. Bringing home the same kind again deepens the bond, up to five — fifteen points. One pet walks beside your champion at a time; choose which under Companions on the champion screen, whenever they are at home. Pets stay with your champion from round to round.

Making a champion look like somebody

Open your champion and click their face. Two rows sit under it — who they are and their hair — and every option in every row is the painted face that choice would give you, so you are choosing between people rather than between words. A click saves straight away.

Cloth is worn, not chosen. A champion is painted in the baju in their cloth slot, and each baju carries its own virtue: the Jade Baju mends them faster and adds vigour, the Clay Baju adds valour, the Indigo Baju adds bearing and a little pace on the road. Expeditions find them like any other piece. Above all three is the Royal Songket, gold thread from collar to sampin, the one cloth that lifts all four attributes — found only by a champion of level 20 or more. With no baju on, a champion stays in the cloth they already had.

Six people, three hairs and three cloths is fifty-four champions, and all fifty-four are painted: a bust for the boards, and a full-length figure on your own screen. There is no drawn stand-in behind any of them and nothing that looks different once you change it.

Fewer choices than a slider-and-swatch character maker, and that is on purpose. Every combination you can make is a picture somebody painted, rather than a great many combinations that mostly are not.

Your champion stands down the left of their own page, with everything about them — attributes, expeditions, the kit — in the two columns beside. The figure is dressed in what they wear — their armour and their footwear, painted for the way your champion stands and in their own cloth, changing the moment you change either. The rest of the kit — blade, off hand, headgear, sash, charm and mount — is listed beside them rather than drawn.

Finding somewhere to go. Word of a place worth looking reaches you from time to time — a wreck, a shrine, a bandit hoard. It does not come with directions. What you are told is that there is something, and roughly how long before the trail goes cold; where is marked on the map, as a ring with a cross through it, gold where the going is ordinary and red where it is perilous. Only you can see your own: a site is rolled for you when word of it arrives, so somebody else’s is not a place on the map at all.

They sit within a ride of home — between four and twenty-two fields — so the ground to search is the ground you already know. Click the mark and send your champion from there. Nothing is lost by not looking except the trail itself, which goes cold on its own and is replaced in time by another.

The fifty-four painted champions

Six people, three hairs and three cloths, and every one of the combinations is painted — a bust at the size of a coin for the boards, and the same champion head to foot on their own screen. There is no drawing behind any of them and no preset that has to be kept to: change your hair or your cloth and you get another painting, not a diagram of one. It is only a face either way — nobody's champion is stronger for it.

And any of them with any hair and any cloth — here is one of the six, nine ways:

Your own face

Your portrait, which is not your champion

Two different faces, and they are easy to mix up. Your champion is a person in the world who marches with an army and can be killed out of a battle report. Your portrait is you — the face beside your name on the boards, in a letter and on your profile — and it does nothing at all.

Pick one in Settings. There are twenty-four, every one of them painted, and no rule anywhere reads which you chose.

What a champion can carry

The later slots

Every champion has four slots from the day they are commissioned: a weapon, armour, a mount and a charm. One piece in each, and what it adds folds into your champion's own attributes — so the strength on the card is always the champion as they would actually be fielded.

In a world with the later slots switched on, four more open with your champion's level:

They are slighter than the founding four, and that is deliberate. A head piece is worth less than a weapon; the four together add about a third to what a fully kitted champion carries, spread across fifteen levels. The point is that something new becomes possible as you climb, rather than every number getting bigger at once.

Your champion is drawn wearing it. The standing figure on the champion screen shows the kit you have actually put on — the blade in their hand, the shield on their arm, the sash, the boots, the helm. Put something on and it appears; take it off and it goes. The mount is the one exception, being a thing they travel on rather than a thing they wear.

You will not find a piece you cannot wear. An expedition only ever brings back something for a slot your champion has already opened — so each unlock widens what the ground can give you, which is also why a particular sword gets harder to find as the list grows. That is what the forge and the whetstones are for.

If your world has them switched off, your champion has the four and the screen says so. Nothing is hidden behind a wall you cannot see: the slots that do not exist here are not drawn at all.

Weapon

Armour

Mount

Charm

Head

Waist

Feet

Off hand

Cloth

Making something of a pile

The forge

Equipment arrives by luck, so a long round leaves a champion with a pack of common pieces, one of them worn and the rest worth nothing. Two pieces of the same standing can be worked into one of the next: two common into a fine, two fine into an heirloom. There is nothing above an heirloom.

• Both pieces are consumed, including the one whose shape survives. What comes out is the same kind of thing in the same slot as the piece you chose to keep — which is how you steer the luck: a spare charm can become the weapon you actually wanted.
• The village where your tallest Shrine stands pays for the work.
• The result is rolled fresh, not your old piece with bigger numbers. A forged heirloom is its own object, and two players who melt the same pair do not end up with the same sword.
• A piece you were wearing comes back on, so upgrading the blade in your hand does not disarm you. Your champion must be home.

Whetstones. The forge stops at Heirloom, and a champion wearing four of them has nothing left to work. Expeditions also bring back whetstones, and each one improves a single piece a little — five is all one piece can hold, and together they add about a quarter to what that piece rolled.

A stone is a share of what the piece itself is worth, so tempering never lifts a poor piece past a good one: spend them on the finest thing you own. Nothing is ever risked — the stone is used and the piece improves, and there is no chance of losing either.

Your champion

Selling a piece at the Bazaar

A piece your champion is not wearing can be offered for gold. On the Champion screen, under Kept aside, choose Sell and name your price — anything from 1 to 100,000 gold coins. It appears in the Bazaar under Wares, where every player can see it, with exactly the numbers you see.

While it is for sale it is still yours, but it is promised: it cannot be worn, tempered, forged or thrown away. Take back returns it to you at any time before somebody buys it. You can have up to ten pieces on offer at once.

When a piece sells, the gold goes straight into your vault and you are told who bought it. The buyer pays from their vault, needs a champion to carry the piece, and receives it ready to wear. Both lines are on each player’s balance sheet.

Your champion

The treasures of the realm

Four pieces are above everything else a champion can carry, and there is only ever one of each in the world. They are the pusaka: the kris Taming Sari, the Baju Rantai of the Bendahara, the royal elephant Gajah Kenaikan, and the sceptre Cogan Alam — a weapon, an armour, a mount and a charm. Each always comes at Heirloom, and each is stronger than the best ordinary Heirloom of its kind.

They are found only on perilous expeditions, rarely, by a champion of level 15 or more — and only while nobody holds them. Once a treasure is found it is somebody’s, and it cannot turn up again until it changes hands or the round ends. The whole archipelago hears when one is found.

A treasure can be sold at the Bazaar like any other piece. That is the only other way to come by one.

A storm, not the end

The raiding season

Some rounds get a raiding season: an outside fleet that lands, takes what it can and leaves again. It is the Compact's little brother — the same beachheads at real coordinates on your map, the same pooled damage, about a third of the strength, and it does not end the world.

• Seven waves, one every 240 game-hours — about a day apart at this world's pace, so a season runs the better part of a week.
• One landing per wave, so there is always a fight somebody can reach rather than a front nobody can hold.
• Damage against a beachhead is pooled across every player: the kingdom that could not have cleared it alone still contributed to clearing it.
• When the season is spent the sails leave and the round carries on. Nothing is archived, nobody is wiped. A season is spent once the last wave has landed and its landing is broken — the ships go straight away rather than waiting out the day.
• Everybody who marched at a landing is remembered. When the season ends, every player who made at least one assault on one of its beachheads — won or lost — is credited with a war fought, which is the Pahlawan Selat medal. Your battle reports of the fighting stay in your reports after the landings are gone. The same is true when the Compact's war for the world ends.

It is the same machinery as the endgame with the ending taken out — a reason for people who have spent the round raiding each other to point their armies the same way for a week.

The thing nobody beats alone

The Westward Compact

At some point in a world's life, an outside power arrives — Marines, Musketeers, Dragoons and Bombards, landing at real coordinates on the same map you have been fighting over. They are not another player and they are not scaled to you.

This is the part of the game that is not about beating your neighbours. It has two shared endings, and which one a world gets depends on what everybody in it does — including the people you have spent the round raiding.

If somebody else breaks the works while your column is still on the road, it turns round. A landing that is down stays down — an assault arriving afterwards fights an ordinary garrison for no damage to the Compact at all — so rather than let you spend an army on a fight that counts for nothing, the column comes home and you are told why.

Every assault on every landing is on the War screen, under Assaults on the Compact — who went, which wave and how it went, with your own rows linking to your report. It is a long list in a busy wave, so press its title to fold it away; it stays folded on that browser until you open it again.

You are told where the next wave will come ashore. The War screen names the ground and the hour, and the map marks it with a ringed cross — no line, because the Compact comes out of the sea beyond the western edge of the world and there is no road to draw. It is a forecast rather than a promise: it is worked out by the same search the landing itself runs, so it is exact for the world as it stands now and it moves if somebody settles that ground first.

This is deliberate. The Compact is the one enemy the whole world is meant to throw itself at, and a shared enemy nobody can muster against in advance is a shared enemy in name only. Knowing the tile a week early is what lets a kingdom call an hour on it and be standing there when the ships arrive.

Not the same war every round. How long a tide lasts, how much warning the sails give, how many waves come and how many landings each one brings are set for a world before it opens — as is the hold that loses the islands, and how quickly a beachhead left standing gains it. So do not carry a number from a previous round into this one. What yours is being fought at is in the settings table under the pace, and what is set, and the War screen counts the waves against your world rather than against a figure written here.

What is happening, in pictures

The Events screen

Where to find it. Events is in the menu down the left, straight after the Map, and on a phone it has a button of its own in the bar along the bottom. When the war moves — the omen, the landing, every new wave, the ending — Events wears a dot until you open it: ember while the Compact is ashore, gold otherwise. The dot is remembered by your browser, so a second device shows it once more.

A tab for every event. Across the top of the Events screen is a tab for each of the world's events, the busiest first. A bell marks the one happening now, a gold dot the one that is coming, and a tick the one that has just ended. Each tab opens that event's own page: its status laid over a painting of where it stands now, then its own sections. The address in your browser remembers where you are, so a refresh or a link you share lands on the same page.

The war, wave by wave. Under the Westward Compact — and a raiding season — are Overview, Landings broken and the Assaults. The assaults are split into a tab per wave, W1 to W7, opening on the wave the war is on, newest first; you can show only your own, only those thrown back or only those that broke through, or search for a player, a landing or a coordinate. Your own assaults open your full report; everyone else's army stays in their own report, as it always has.

The painting behind each event's status is where that event stands right now: sails on the horizon while it is coming, the fight while it is happening, and how it ended once it is over — the strait held or the islands fallen, the fleets sunk or the coast raided. It changes by itself as the event moves on. An event that is not running shows its first picture and says it is quiet, with when the next one is due where the game knows. An ending stays up for three days, so if you were away you can still see how it went.

Something worth taking

Bounties

From time to time a prize appears on the map: a village that is not anybody's, holding a garrison, with a reward on it. When one opens you are told across the top of every screen — the name, the coordinates and exactly what it is worth.

The first player to win an assault against it takes the whole reward. Nobody else takes anything. There is no share for turning up and no second prize, so going late is going for nothing — and the moment somebody breaks it the world is told that too, so nobody marches for a hoard that has already gone home with somebody else.

The fight itself is an ordinary assault. The garrison defends as any garrison does, the battle is resolved exactly as every other battle is, and the spoils go into the village your column set out from — capped by what that village can store, like any other load arriving. Bring enough.

The record keeps up with names. In the chronicle of worlds that have ended, everyone is listed under the name they use today, and that name opens their profile. If they have renamed since, the name and the kingdom they had in that round are shown beneath it — the record of what happened is never rewritten, and nobody leaves it by changing their name.

Kingdom against kingdom

The five strongholds

Some evenings, five forts appear on the map among the villages, for a set time — often two hours, sometimes longer; the announcement says how long, and the Strongholds page counts it down. Everybody is told when they rise and where they stand, and they are on the Strongholds page of the Events screen with a button to march on each. They are walled and well garrisoned — nobody takes one by accident.

It is kingdom against kingdom. Beat a fort’s garrison and it belongs to your kingdom, and the soldiers who survived your assault stay inside as its new garrison. Anybody in your kingdom may send more soldiers in to hold it; anybody else who arrives is attacking it — allies too, because every kingdom is scored on its own. If you are in no kingdom you can still fight, as a kingdom of one. Raids are refused (a fort has nothing to carry off), and Penghulu do nothing there: a fort is beaten, not talked down.

The kingdom holding the most forts when the time runs out wins. If two hold the same number, the one that held forts for longer in total wins. Who is ahead is on the Strongholds page the whole time; who is standing inside a fort is not — send scouts, as anywhere else.

Gold for holding a stronghold. When a contest ends, every fort that a kingdom is still holding pays out — to that kingdom’s members who took part. Of those, the one who held the fort longest is paid 20 gold coins, and everyone else who took part — who held it for a while, or stood soldiers in it to defend it — is paid 15. It is per fort, so holding three pays three times. A kingdom that held a fort for hours and lost it near the end is paid nothing for it, and a member who did not take part in the event is paid nothing at all. Who was paid what is listed under the result.

Earlier contests are kept. The Strongholds page lists every contest that has ended, newest first, each filed under the round it was fought in: who won, and how many forts each side held. A new contest no longer pushes the last result off the page.

Nothing you send is lost. When the time runs out the forts vanish, and every soldier who fought for them comes home — the garrisons, the columns still on the road, and everybody who died. The dead are counted against the village they marched from and handed back there. Fighting for the strongholds costs you the evening and nothing else, so send what you dare.

Medals go to the people who fought. Everybody in the winning kingdom who attacked a fort or stood in one counts the win towards Penakluk Kubu, and everybody who fought for a kingdom holding forts at the end counts each of those forts towards Penjaga Kubu. A kingdom’s win is not a medal for members who slept through it.

Endings

Worlds end, on purpose

A world does not run forever. Rounds come to an end, the standings are written into a chronicle that outlasts them, and a new world opens with everybody back to one village.

A new world opens empty. Your village is not standing there waiting for you: it is raised the first time you look in after the round begins, wherever the placer likes on the fresh map. Nothing is lost by arriving late except the days you were not there — and your beginner protection starts when you do, rather than running out while you were away. What this spares everyone is a map dotted with the villages of people who never came back, each of them somebody else’s farm.

This is deliberate rather than a reset button. It means a bad first week is not permanent, a dominant kingdom does not own the map indefinitely, and the question of who actually won gets an answer instead of trailing off.

How your own round went, on your profile. Your page carries where you stand and out of how many, the villagers you hold, how many building levels you have raised and how many you have flattened, and what your attacks and defences came to — with the shape of all three over time beneath them. That is the part a total cannot tell you: four hundred levels razed is a number, and only a line says you did it in one night in week three. It keeps working after the round is archived, because the shape is copied into the chronicle as the world is swept. If the line is missing the figures are still exact — they come from the world itself, and only the picture is drawn from readings taken as the round ran.

The shape of the round, on the standings page. Under the boards there is a line showing how many villagers the whole archipelago holds — over a day, a week, or the round so far. It is the world’s total rather than yours: whether the world is still growing, when it stopped, and what a war cost everybody at once. Your own figures are on your own screens and are exact; this is a picture, drawn from readings taken every minute or so, and it begins short because it only knows what it has watched. If it says it cannot be drawn, nothing is wrong with your world — the record is kept beside the game rather than inside it, and it is the record that is unavailable.

Once a week

The Friday night

From 10pm to 1am, every Friday, up to six villages get up and walk. They are chosen from villages whose owners are not online at the time — nobody sitting at their own wall loses anything — and at the end of the three hours every one of them is handed back.

Your soldiers are not touched. What marches out is raised for the night and belongs to the world: a wave of thirty to fifty, roughly every minute, for three hours. Your own garrison stays exactly where you left it, is never sent anywhere and is never spent. You may come back to a village that was busy without you; you will not come back to an army you no longer have.

Signing in gives it straight back. If your village has risen and you open the game, it stops and returns to you at once — you do not have to wait out the night. That is the whole bargain: being there on a Friday is what keeps a village yours.

A capital is never taken, so if you hold only your first village you are never part of this at all, and neither is anybody still under beginner protection. If one of these hordes marches on you it is an ordinary assault and can be beaten like any other — and the village it came out of can be raided back while it stands.

A village that has been fought over rises bigger. Every soldier lost fighting at a village — whichever side lost them — is remembered, and click any village on the map to see the count. On the next Friday night that takes it, those dead rise on top of the horde its size alone would raise, so a village that has seen a lot of fighting is a real fight even if it is small, and a peaceful one stays a small night's work however big it has grown. The count is spent the moment it rises — it does not sit there building toward the week after.

Turning up is rewarded. Everybody who is signed in for long enough during the three hours — ten minutes by default, and the administrators can change it — is paid when the night ends: gold, and resources into your capital (or your largest village), up to what its storehouse can hold, as with anything arriving at a village. You are paid once for a night, you are sent a note saying what you received, and the names of those rewarded are posted in the Discord events channel. Opening the game for a moment does not count, and neither does a village that merely rose — it is being there that is paid. The amounts are the administrators’ to set, and the reward can be switched off.

The event calendar

The calendar icon in the top bar opens a month. Every day that has something on it carries a coloured dot, and pressing a day lists what is on it, with the time. It shows the Friday nights, the strongholds contest (and each time it repeats), the next wave of a war that has already begun, and the hour a bounty on a village is withdrawn. It looks sixty days ahead and steps forward a month at a time; it never goes back before this month. Times are in your time zone, so a Friday night that begins at 10pm in Malaysia is on the right day wherever you play from.

What it does not show is a war that has not begun. The Westward Compact gives its warning by the omen, six hours before the landing, and a date on a calendar would be a different game. A war already under way is on the calendar, because it is already public.

Going away

Zombie villages

A round runs for weeks, and people leave in the middle of one. If you have not signed in for a fortnight, the world takes what you left. How long that is exactly is set for each world — a fortnight is the usual, and the figure yours is played at is in the settings table under the pace, and what is set. Your villages stop being yours: they keep your buildings and your name over the gate, they stop growing entirely — nothing is produced in them and nothing is built — and whatever garrison was standing in them turns to banditry on its own account.

They show on the map in grey, marked zombie village, and they are neither a player nor a Lanun camp. They can be attacked, they can be taken, and they will raid their neighbours the way a camp does. The difference is that a camp grows its garrison back and a zombie village cannot: every party it sends out is one it is permanently weaker for, so a neighbour who keeps answering will eventually put it down for good.

Two things do not go with the village. Soldiers somebody else had standing there march home — an ally who reinforced you a fortnight ago has abandoned nothing, and their troops do not become part of a garrison that then raids them. And anything on the benches stops there: a village with nobody home does not finish raising its palisade.

If you come back, you start again. Sign in and you are given fresh ground — one new village, as your capital, and the same protection from attack that a new player gets, because you are in the same position as one. What you had is not returned: by then it is walking about without you, or has been put down by whoever lives next to it.

However long it is set to, it is counted in real days and is not affected by the world’s speed. Everything else here is divided by the pace — a ten-times world builds ten times as fast — but this is a fortnight of your life rather than of the world’s, and it stays a fortnight however quickly the harvests come in.

Who you have been

Your Chronicle

A player's profile is their history, round by round. Under the name sits a row: Overall, then each year with its rounds. Overall is the lifetime — rounds played, battles won and lost, the highest population ever reached, villages founded and lost, renown — with every name the player has gone by and when. Pick a round and the page becomes that round: where they finished, their kingdom and champion, and three tabs — an Overview with their population over the round, the kingdoms they belonged to and who they fought most; Battles, every fight with filters and a record against any one opponent; and Villages, each one founded, taken, lost or given up, and when.

The Battles tab opens on a trend chart: every battle a point, on a Victory lane or a Defeat lane, joined in order so a run of wins or losses shows at a glance. Above it are the battles, victories, defeats, win rate and the current streak; below it, the filters (time: 24 hours, 7 days, 30 days, this round or all time; attacking or defending; victory or defeat), which change the chart and the table together. Point at a battle, or tap it, for the whole fight; click it to find its row in the table.

The Villages tab is the archive of every village the player held in that round — held, lost, handed over or given up — listed on the left. Pick one and the chart above shows its population over time (hourly, daily, weekly or monthly), with its events marked on the line, and the story on the right tells it from founding to the end: milestones reached, attacks sent from it, attacks it suffered and whether the walls held, who captured it and when. Click a marker to find its line in the story, or a line to light its marker. Village populations have been recorded since 4 October 2026, so a village's line begins then.

What everybody can see, and what they cannot. Your battle log is yours. On somebody else's profile you see only the battles between the two of you — when, where, who won, and the strength and losses on both sides — and nobody else's fights with them. Your army's size over time is shown to you alone. Population is public, as it is on the boards.

When the record begins. The game always kept each round's final standing, so every round you played shows where you finished. Battles are kept from round 4 onward — before then a world took its battle reports with it when it ended. Population and army over time, kingdom changes and village histories have been recorded since 3 October 2026. A panel with nothing before that says so, rather than drawing a line nobody recorded.

What you are known for

Medals

The leaderboards answer one question — who is biggest — and most players cannot win it. Nothing else recorded the camp cleared in week one or the raid held off at four in the morning. Your profile carries a case of twelve medals, each a different kind of play, at three tiers apiece.

They are worn where other people can see them: the ones you have earned sit as small marks under your name on your profile, beside your name on every leaderboard, and on your kingdom's roster — where everybody's name is known already and the marks are what says which of them clears camps and which holds walls — coloured by tier — iron, jade, then gold. A board answers who is biggest; the marks beside it say what somebody is actually known for, which is often a different person. Press or point at one to be told what it is and what it took — the answer appears underneath, which is the same on a phone as on a desk.

Feeding an army

Rice is what limits an army here, rather than villagers. A soldier does not take a villager's place, so the Paddy Field is not a ceiling on how many you may raise: train as many as you can pay for.

What stands in its place is the granary. A village may eat more rice than it grows — that is a plan, not a failure — for as long as the store lasts or a caravan keeps arriving from somewhere that grows more than it eats. Only an empty store costs you soldiers: each hour with nothing in it, the village loses troops eating a quarter of the rice it could not grow, shared out by what each kind eats. After about four hours of famine the army matches the harvest and the dying stops — you come back to the garrison your fields can feed, never to an empty village.

Everyone standing there starves together, including reinforcements somebody else sent: they eat the host's rice, so they share the host's hunger.

What a kingdom wears

A kingdom cannot earn a medal — a person cleared that camp — and the sum of its members' medals would only say "this kingdom is large", which the population board says already. So a kingdom wears honours, and an honour is comparative: it belongs to whichever kingdom leads the archipelago in something, and there is one of each at a time.

They are shown on the kingdom board and on a kingdom's own page. If two kingdoms are level at the top they both wear it, and an honour nobody has any of — a world where no landing has yet been broken — is worn by nobody rather than by whoever happens to sort first.

Talking

Letters

Where they are. Everything that reaches you is in the top right corner, together: your Kingdom and its chat, Letters and the bell. Letters has two tabs — Personal, your own conversations, and Global, the world chat everyone reads. The game's own screens are in the menu down the left, which folds to icons if you want the room. When something is waiting in one of the three, its icon changes — it turns ember, shows how many beside it, and bobs gently, higher and quicker the more there is. When the number goes up, it rolls up into place and a small +1 floats off the icon. Past 999 it says 999+. If your device is set to reduce motion, it stays still and the number says it all. On a phone, Settings, your profile and Sign out are under More, so the corner has room for the three.

What is waiting. The Personal tab wears the number of letters you have not read, and the Global tab the number of lines said in the world chat while you were away from it; the same two add up on the Letters button. Opening the Global tab clears its count. The world chat count is kept against this browser: when you open the game, or come back to it after your phone slept, it counts everything said by others since you last had the Global tab open. A browser that has never opened the chat starts caught up, so a new player is not met by a pile of lines. The Kingdom, Letters and the bell all move the same way when something is waiting: the icon bobs, faster the more there is, and the number rolls up when it grows.

A chime when something arrives. When a letter or a notification arrives, a soft two-note chime plays, so a letter that comes while this tab is in the background does not go unnoticed. World chat never chimes. Your browser only allows sound once you have clicked or pressed a key on the page, and you can switch the chime off in Settings, under Sound. On a narrow phone the corner now keeps the Kingdom, Letters and the bell on screen — the pace badge steps out of the way to make room.

You can write to any other player by name. Letters travel instantly — this is correspondence, not a caravan — and there is a flood guard: about 20 letters a minute in total, and no more than 5 to the same person in that window. Enough to rally a defence; not enough to be a nuisance.

Talking

World chat

One conversation for the whole archipelago, under Letters → Global. It is joined to the chat channel of the Cyberjaya Discord: what you say in the game appears there, and what people say there appears here, marked Discord. If you have linked your Discord account, your Discord lines are shown under your player name.

It keeps the same manners as everything else anybody reads — the same words refused as in names and letters — and a light flood guard of about eight lines in thirty seconds. Mentions such as @everyone do nothing when they cross over from the game.

Every six hours the bot also posts a short Server status: online line in that Discord channel — the round, how many players are on, and how long the server has been up — so anyone can tell the world is alive. It appears on Discord only, not in the game’s chat.

Talking

Your kingdom on Discord

Every kingdom has its own private channel on the Cyberjaya Discord, under the kingdoms category, and it is joined to your kingdom chat in the game: a line written in either place appears in both.

To see it, link your Discord account in Settings. Within a minute you are added to your kingdom’s channel. Nobody outside the kingdom can see it, and nobody who has not linked an account is let in. Your Discord account has to have joined the Cyberjaya Discord server first — the bot cannot let in somebody who is not there.

Everything written in the channel comes into the kingdom chat. A linked member of the kingdom appears under their name in the game, with their office; anybody else who writes there — one of the server’s staff, say — appears under their Discord name, marked Discord.

It follows the kingdom, not the other way round: leave and the channel disappears from your Discord; join another and its channel appears; a kingdom that ends takes its channel with it.

One name in both places. Once your Discord is linked, Settings → Your name asks which name leads. Follow KAMPUNG, the default, sets your nickname in the Cyberjaya Discord to your name in the game, and keeps it so. Follow Discord does the opposite: your name in the game becomes what the server calls you — your nickname there, or your Discord display name. A name from Discord obeys every rule a name typed into Settings does: letters and numbers, three to twenty of them, nobody else already called it, and the usual wait between changes. One it cannot take leaves your name as it is, and Settings says why. A change made on Discord arrives within ten minutes. The bot cannot rename the server's owner, or anybody whose role ranks above its own; Settings says that too.

Who gets in

The gate

New registrations are read for the marks of a script before an account is made. A world is worth defending from someone who signs up forty times to farm their own villages, vote their own kingdom up a board, or sit on ground you wanted — and the cheapest moment to stop that is the moment the account is made.

What it looks at is shape and behaviour, not spelling: a name and an address that were obviously generated together, a throwaway mail service, a rush of sign-ups from one place in a few hours. No single one of those refuses anybody. It takes two independent things being wrong at once, because the alternative is turning away real people with unusual names, and a name being unusual to us is not a fact about the person holding it.

A held registration founds no village and takes no ground — there is nothing of it on the map. If it happens to you, it is reversible and it is not an accusation: a person opens the door by hand, and your name is kept for you in the meantime.

If that happens to you, write to nurayuze@cyberjaya.pro with the name you tried to use and an administrator will open the door by hand.

Some worlds also ask new arrivals to pass a Cloudflare check before signing up. If yours does, it appears on the registration form and takes a moment.

Your say

Being asked

Some decisions about a world are put to the people playing in it. When one is open, a strip appears across the top of every screen with the question, the answers, and — where the question is about the next round — exactly what that next world would be played under.

That list is not a promise somebody typed. It is read from the settings actually staged for the next world, so if something is unstaged the list stops claiming it.

The strip does not close. Everything else that appears up there can be dismissed; this cannot, because it is a question rather than news, and the way to make it go away is to answer it. One vote each, and you can see how the vote is going once you have cast yours — not before, because a running total shown to somebody still deciding is an argument rather than information.

A vote is not a switch. Nothing happens the moment a result lands: it is read by a person, who decides. A world ending is irreversible for everybody at once and is not the sort of thing a majority should be able to trigger by accident.

When you are away

Sitters

A world runs whether or not you are looking at it. If you are going to be away, you can name a sitter — somebody you trust to play your account while you are gone.

A sitter is not your password. They sign in as themselves and step into your seat, which matters in three ways: everything they do is recorded as theirs, you can end it in one press without changing anything about how you sign in, and it lapses on its own even if you forget. You can name two at a time, for up to three weeks each.

They can play. Build, train, march, trade, answer your kingdom — the ordinary game, from your villages.

There are three things they cannot do, and they are worth knowing before you decide:

• They cannot touch the account itself — not your name, not your sign-in. A sitter who could set a password would not be a sitter, they would be the new owner.
• They cannot name sitters. Otherwise trust would be transferable, and you could end up with somebody in your seat you had never met.
• They cannot send anything of yours to their own villages — no soldiers, no goods, and they cannot take their own market offer from your seat. This is the one that protects everybody else's game rather than your account: the way sitting is abused is not smashing a village up, it is quietly walking your rice and your army into the sitter's own, which looks like ordinary play in any record that does not know who sent it.

Not across a war. While your kingdom and the owner's are at war, nobody on either side can sit for the other: you cannot name a sitter from a kingdom you are fighting, a sitter named before the war cannot take the seat, and anybody already in it is sent back to their own account at once. Nothing is cancelled. When the war ends, the arrangement works again.

Going back to your own account. While you sit for somebody, a strip across the top of every screen says whose seat you are in, with Return to my account. Press it and you are back in your own villages, with no need to sign in again. Signing out while sitting does the same, and so does the owner ending the sitting while you are in it.

Either of you can end it at any moment, and it stops immediately — not when some token expires. The sitter can stand down too, because somebody handed responsibility for your round should be able to put it down rather than simply stop looking.

Find it under Sitters in the footer, next to Report a problem.

When something is wrong

Telling us

If something is broken, confusing, or simply not what you expected, there is a Report a problem link in the footer of every screen. It goes to the people who can change it.

You do not have to explain where you were. The form sends the screen you were on, the village you had open and the version you are running along with what you write, so what you type can be the one thing only you know: what happened, and what you expected instead.

There is room to say it properly: a report holds up to 20,000 characters, so an idea with ten parts can go in one report rather than five. Numbered points are easiest to act on — each is read as its own request.

You will get an answer on that same page and in your notifications. Up to five of yours can be waiting at once — a limit, not a discouragement, and answered ones do not count against it.

This is worth using. The two faults fixed on this world in the week before it was written were both found by somebody playing, not by anybody testing.

The roadmap. Where a report goes next is on the Roadmap page, linked from the footer of every screen and readable without an account. Each line there is a fix or an enhancement the administrators have chosen to publish, with the stage it is at — Received, Looking into it, Being built, Being tested, Live, or Waiting on a decision — and, when you open it, the steps it went through with a note at each and the version it went live in. It never shows what you wrote or who you are, only how many reports a line came from. Lines of the administrators’ own, ideas they are working out, sit beside them. The Timeline tab lays the same lines out like a project plan: a row for each, in the order they began, with the days across the top and a stretch of colour for every stage a line spent time in — a diamond where it went live, and a bar running up to the line for now while it is still in hand. A line that was only written down after the fact, in a single step, is shown as a diamond and nothing more, because there is no stretch of time to draw. Since 1.251.0 it covers every version from 1.0 to today, one row each: the subject on the left, up to three lines of it, with the version under it and how many player reports it came from, and a Live or Waiting mark beside a small icon; the progression bar scrolls sideways on the right, with each row’s date written upright beside its marker and the time just after it. Click a subject for what was done in that version; click a bar for when it was reported, how long it was in hand, and whether it has been released to production. A search box and the filters Live, In hand and Waiting narrow the list, and the page fits a phone as well as a wide screen.

An old page. A game tab left open keeps the version it was opened with until it is reloaded. When a newer one is live, a small notice at the bottom of the screen says so and offers Reload; it is checked every few minutes and whenever you come back to the tab, and it never reloads by itself.

Odds and ends

Quick answers

Neighbours

Bringing somebody in

Settings carries a link of your own — /?ref= and six characters — with a few posts written for you to paste wherever you talk to people. Anybody who founds a village through it is recorded as yours.

The same link is also a QR code. Beside the link in Settings is a square code made from it: a friend sitting next to you can point their phone's camera at it and land on the sign-up page with your link already on it. Show it large fills the screen with it, so it reads from across a table; tap anywhere to put it away. It is drawn dark on white whatever the colours of the game, because that is what a phone camera reads best.

It pays a medal and nothing else. No resources, no troops, no head start: the moment an invitation paid anything you could spend, the quickest way to earn it would be a second account on the same phone, and this world would be about that instead of about the strait. The medal is Pembawa Orang, at one, five and twenty.

Whoever brought you in is named on your profile. Beside the day you settled, as a link back to them — a credit rather than a label, and the only thing an invitation records about you. Nobody who found the game on their own has anything there.

They count once they have really started. A village of 200 villagers — an afternoon of ordinary play — rather than the moment an account is made, because a board that counted sign-ups would rank whoever can make the most empty ones. Your own panel shows both numbers: everybody who came, and the ones who stayed. The Brought in board on the rankings page shows the second.

With thanks

Who found it

Most of what is fixed here was noticed by somebody playing and written up in a report. These are the players whose reports became changes to the game, and how many each of them has. It is not a score and it buys nothing — it is a thank-you with the arithmetic done.

• Everett Monica 25 changes
• Yukiya 21 changes
• Mat Purple 18 changes
• parameswara 17 changes
• Sang Sing Song 10 changes
• Andromeda 8 changes
• Pokcik 6 changes
• Rigel Ferris 5 changes
• Kayu Berguna 4 changes
• Syafiqjaafar 2 changes
• Zack kib 1 change
• Thunderock 1 change
• aurora 1 change