Factions

A faction is whatever you want to call it — guild, clan, team. If you band together, you're in a faction. Factions hold territory on the world map, fight each other for it, and can sign peace with their neighbours.

Joining and Leaving

Each of your characters belongs to one faction at a time. Your three character slots are independent — they can each be in a different faction, or none.

• A faction is joined by invitation only. Knowing its name or its id gets you nowhere; somebody inside has to ask you.
• Leaving is free and needs nobody's permission.
• To join a different faction, quit your current one first.
• To create one, you must not already be in a faction.

Any officer or leader can invite you. Invitations show up in your notifications; accept or decline at your leisure, and an invitation you accept is only spent once you are actually in — a join that fails for some other reason leaves the offer standing.

Seeing who owns what

Claimed ground is drawn on the map — everybody's, not only yours. Whoever is standing near a border can see it, from either side.

In the graphical client each faction's ground is tinted in its own colour, its headquarters outlined, and a contested tile is struck through with a diagonal. The terminal draws the same thing with the glyphs above, and prints a territory in view: line naming each faction, how much of its ground you can see, and how much of that is contested.

/ beats every other mark, headquarters included. A contested tile is the one place a faction war actually happens, so it is drawn as contested no matter who holds it or what else is on it.

You may refer to another faction by name wherever an id is asked for, which is just as well: a name is the only handle the game ever gives you for somebody else's faction.

Claiming ground costs the members

A faction takes territory on its own, a tile at a time, up to the capacity its size allows. That is paid for out of the members' stamina, everyone's together, and it happens while you are walking, resting or fighting rather than at a moment you chose.

You are told when it happens and what it cost. Watch for it: a founder alone in a new faction pays the whole bill personally, and stamina is what buys your escape from a fight you cannot win.

Ground goes back if nobody comes back

A faction nobody has logged into for a week starts giving its territory back to the world — the outermost tile first, the same one it would drop on losing a member, and never the HQ. It shrinks back to its headquarters and waits there. Log in and the clock resets; the ground regrows the same way it was claimed.

A decaying faction is marked as such on everybody's map — faded in the graphical client, and named in the terminal's territory in view: line. That is deliberate: raiding a faction that has stopped playing is a war against nobody, and you should be able to see that before you spend an hour on it.

A weekend away costs you nothing.

Death costs you your faction

When your character dies, you automatically leave. That isn't a penalty on top of dying — it's the same rule as leaving voluntarily, and it means your faction shrinks the moment you go down.

If you were the leader, leadership passes to whoever has been a member longest, even if they're offline. They take over on their next login. If nobody's left, the faction is destroyed.

Creating a Faction

Free, no minimum size, and available any time you're not already in one. The tile you're standing on becomes your HQ, so choose where you do it.

The tile has to be traversable, unowned, and not currently contested.

Your HQ is immune to raids and is the last tile you'll ever lose. Everything else can be taken.

Names are 3-32 characters, letters/numbers/hyphens/underscores, and must be unique.

Ranks

A leader can't simply step down — that would leave nobody in charge. Transfer leadership to someone instead, and you become an officer.

Disbanding requires standing on your HQ tile, so you can't do it by accident while exploring. It's immediate and irreversible: all territory goes neutral, everyone is kicked, every treaty ends.

Territory

How much you can hold

Capacity = floor(sqrt(members) * 16) + 1

That +1 is your HQ. Solo, that's 17 tiles. Four members gets you 33; sixteen gets you 65.

This is a count of tiles, not members — there's no cap on how many people can join.

The curve matters more than the number. A new member adds radius, not one tile:

So a death in a small faction is a territorial disaster, and the same death in a large one is a rounding error. Small factions swing wildly; big ones barely move.

Growing

Your zone grows as a circle outward from HQ. The game always claims the nearest unowned tile, filling each ring before starting the next.

Claiming costs faction stamina — a pool made of every member's current stamina, online or offline. Each claim drains everyone proportionally.

Two things will stall your growth:

• Escalating cost. Each claim today costs more than the last (base x 1.1^n). Claim a lot in one day and the next one gets expensive.
• The whole pool must cover it. If the cost exceeds the pool, the claim is refused outright — no partial drain. You wait and regenerate.

Members regenerate stamina by resting in Meditation Sanctums. Stamina only comes back while resting, so a faction that never rests eventually stops growing.

Shrinking

Lose a member and you lose tiles, furthest from HQ first. Your war gains go before your core, and contested tiles are released last.

A released tile just becomes neutral. Nobody gets teleported.

Why your zone isn't a circle

The disk is the default, not a rule. If you're raiding one neighbour hard, every defender death releases several of their tiles at once and you absorb them in one stroke — so your zone bulges that way. Stop pressing, and ordinary growth rounds it back out over time.

Rooms are also sealed off from the map's walkable paths, so a zone drawn around a sanctum can look like it has a bite taken out of it.

Raids and PvP

If you have room to grow but no unowned tile borders you, you automatically enter a raid against every faction you're pressed against. The tiles where you touch them become contested.

Contested tiles still belong to the defender. You have to take them.

Contested ground is marked on the map — / in the terminal, a diagonal struck across the square in the graphical client — so you can see where a raid is live before you walk into one, on either side of it.

• Walking onto a contested tile with a rival there starts a fight immediately. If you're already standing on a tile when it becomes contested, you're pulled in with no grace period.
• Anyone from either side can walk in and join a fight already underway.
• Only online players count. Offline members can't be attacked and can't help.

When a defender dies, their faction shrinks. The tile they died on goes first to whoever landed the killing blow. Other tiles released by the shrink go to whoever contested them earliest. If that faction can't afford the claim, the tile goes neutral and the next in line gets a chance.

Defenders win nothing for defending, beyond keeping their land. There are no raid windows or vulnerability timers either — if nobody's online to fight, no raids happen.

Meeting rivals elsewhere

Treaties

A treaty is a mutual no-expansion pact between two factions. While one is active, neither of you can contest the other: no contested tiles, no auto-fights, no flips.

Violating one is impossible, not merely punished — the server never creates contested regions between treaty partners. There's no surprise-attack path.

Treaties are bilateral and permanent until revoked, and you can hold one with each neighbour.

Making one: an officer or leader proposes, paying faction stamina upfront — no refund if it's rejected. The other faction has 1 hour to answer. On acceptance, all contested regions between you clear instantly, and any fight in progress between you is aborted with both sides ejected alive.

Breaking one: either side can revoke without the other's agreement, but not instantly.

1. You pay an escalating stamina cost — more than making peace cost.
2. A 24-hour grace period begins. The treaty is still enforced; the other faction is told immediately and has a day to prepare.
3. After 24 hours it lapses and contesting resumes.
4. Neither faction can propose a new treaty for 48 hours — but raids can happen during that window.

If either faction is destroyed, its treaties end immediately with no grace period.

You can see treaties involving you, and treaties between factions bordering you. Distant factions' arrangements stay invisible until you reach them.

Quick Reference

• One faction per character; quit before joining another.
• Creating is free; where you stand becomes your raid-immune HQ.
• Capacity is floor(sqrt(members) * 16) + 1 tiles — members are uncapped.
• Dying drops you from your faction and shrinks it.
• Growth costs pooled faction stamina, and gets pricier with each claim that day.
• Blocked from growing? You automatically start raiding whoever is in the way.
• Treaties can't be violated, only revoked — with 24 hours' warning.