Ruler's Guide

Your WAVE name is your kingdom — one sovereign seat in a single shared, persistent world that every ruler plays in together. Nothing resets between visits: your kingdom keeps producing, building, and marching in real time, even while you're away, and settles the moment you return.

Your aim is to grow — raise your economy, field an army, explore the map, wage war or forge alliances, deck out your hero, and climb the seasonal leaderboard on prestige. There's no single win button; a great kingdom is a deep one.

The fastest way to learn is to follow your Quests — they hand you the opening moves one at a time and pay you for each. Beyond that, a good early loop:

1. Build your resource producers — Farm, Lumber Camp, Quarry.
2. Upgrade your Town Hall — it unlocks everything else (see below).
3. Send a scout from the map to lift the fog and find loot.
4. Train a few Militia so you can defend and hunt.
5. Check back later — production banks while you're gone.

Six resources fuel your kingdom, each produced by a building, each tick:

• food
• wood
• stone
• iron
• gold
• mana

Resources bank up to a storage cap (raised by the Warehouse) and stop there — spend or expand before you overflow. Your dashboard shows each resource's net rate per second.

That rate is net for a reason: a standing army charges upkeep every minute. Basic troops eat food; elite units also draw gold and mana. If a resource the army needs runs dry, unpaid units desert (see Your army). Grow the economy to match the army you field.

Happiness tracks how well you run the kingdom. Keep your food economy in surplus and your people stay content at 100% — full production, no penalty. Run a food deficit, starve, or get sacked and morale slides, throttling all production down to as low as 60% until you set things right. It recovers gradually once you do, so a healthy food buffer is quietly one of your best investments.

Your terrain cuts both ways. The biome you found on is a real trade, not a flavour pick: it tilts what your land produces and how hard your capital is to storm. Rich, open country feeds a bigger army but invites raiders; hard ground is poorer and colder, yet the terrain itself fights for your garrison (see War). There is no best biome — only the one that suits how you mean to play. It's locked for the season you're in, but a new season re-seats every realm on fresh ground, so you may declare a different seat for the next one from the Seasons page at any time.

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Every building levels up — but the Town Hall is the spine of your kingdom: no other building can exceed its level. Raising the Town Hall is what unlocks the next tier of everything, so it's almost always your highest-value upgrade. The Everspire Wonder is the capstone, unlocked at Town Hall 10 — it radiates prestige and widens your scouting reach (see Exploring the world).

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No building may exceed your Town Hall level — it's the progression spine, so it gates the level of everything else.

Troops come in three tiers, unlocked by your Barracks level (which also speeds all training). Build up the Barracks to reach the elite units.

The Barracks also decides how many orders you train at once. One lane to start; a second at Barracks 5, a third at Barracks 10. You can always stack orders up behind them — lanes are how fast the queue drains, not how deep it goes. More lanes spend your stockpile faster too, so a wide Barracks needs an economy to feed it.

Counters win battles, not just numbers. Every unit has a class in a rock-paper-scissors triangle: infantry gut a cavalry charge, cavalry ride down ranged, and ranged rake massed infantry — infantry → cavalry → ranged → infantry. A force that counters its foe hits markedly harder, so a smaller, well-matched army can beat a bigger blunt one. That makes composition a real decision — and scouting the enemy before you march (from the World map) is how you build the right answer. This applies to PvE too: humanoid camps (bandits, raiders) have a class makeup you can counter, while a monster is a class-less brute you just out-muscle.

Army capacity (shown as “Army 531 of 1,100 troops”on your dashboard) caps how many units you can field at once — despite the old name, it's a military ceiling, not townsfolk. Three things count against it: units in your garrison, units out on a march(raids/attacks not yet home), and units in the training queue. A unit only stops counting once it's truly gone — lost in battle or disbanded.

The cap is 100 base + 50 per Town Hall level + 50 per farm level, so fielding a bigger army means growing your economy — raise the Town Hall (housing) and build farms (food). Hit the ceiling and training is blocked until you raise the cap or free up room; reinforcing an ally is likewise limited by their capacity, so you can't overstuff a friend's garrison. (Your kingdom level is separate — it simply tracks your Town Hall level.)

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Upkeep & starvation: armies cost their upkeep every minute. If a required resource sits empty, roughly 5% of the unpaid units desert per minute until you fund them again — you'll see a warning on the dashboard and an entry in your activity feed. Only the units that need the empty resource leave (out of gold? your knights and paladins walk; your militia stay). Fix it by raising production or disbanding troops you can't afford.

The map starts under a fog of war. Send scouts from the map to reveal hexes, uncover resource nodes, and trigger encounters — some fights, some rewards. A scout travels out and back (further hexes take longer), and reports only once it returns home, so plan a little ahead. Click any fog hex — not just the immediate frontier — to send a scout toward it; it opens a corridor along its route, so you can push deliberately in a direction.

You start with one scout and unlock more as you develop: a second and third from the Town Hall (levels 3 and 5), then a fourth, fifth, and sixth from the Everspire wonder (levels 1, 3, and 5) — up to six scouts out at once, so the endgame opens your world on many fronts.

You can only see and reach so far from your capital, so exploration is how your known world — and your list of potential targets and neighbours — grows.

Raids let you march on a rival capital within range and carry off loot; repeated assaults can even sack a city. You raid from the war/targets panel, and targets must be within your raid range and a valid, hostile target — distant kingdoms are out of reach until things change. War is gated on exploration: you can only declare war on, or raid, a kingdom once you've scouted your way to its capital — so open a corridor toward a rival before you can strike (the panel offers a “scout toward” for the undiscovered). When you send an army you can set a retreat posture — break off at 25/50/75% losses — so a bad matchup doesn't cost your whole army (you withdraw with survivors, but win no loot).

Holding ground. Beyond your capital you can claim quiet, scouted hexes as outposts — tap one on the map and detach a garrison to hold it. An outpost pays out in the resource its biome favours — forest wood, mountains stone, volcanic iron, desert gold — scaled by how rich the ground is, so taking a mountain is a different decision from taking another meadow. It's the biome that decides, not the deposit drawn on the hex: a mountain showing a gold seam still pays stone. How many you may hold rises with your Town Hall, and each must sit within raid range — ground you can't reach is ground you can't defend.

And it can be taken. Marching on someone's outpost fights its garrison, not a monster: win and the ground is yours, unless you're already holding all you can seat, in which case you burn it instead. An outpost defends a little better than open field but far worse than a capital — it's a palisade, not a fortress. The troops you leave there are out of your field army, so every claim is a real choice about where your strength sits — but not an irreversible one. Recall under Held ground brings troops back: take a few and the rest keep holding it, or pull everyone out and give the hex up. Nothing is lost but the ground.

All three take time. Claiming, reinforcing and recalling are marches, at the same pace as any army and with the same terrain penalty. So a garrison is not a reserve: you can see a raid coming and still not pull those troops home to meet it. Commit them knowing that. If the ground is taken while your troops are still marching, they turn around and come home rather than throwing themselves at whoever got there first.

Where the yield goes. Held ground doesn't pay into your treasury — it pays into a stockpile that has no storage cap, and you Collect from it when you have room. A developed kingdom sits at its ceiling most of the time, and income that vanished on arrival wasn't income; this way it waits for you. Collecting is capped like any other gain, so what won't fit simply stays in the stockpile. One rule to remember: an outpost pays only while troops are standing on it — ground held by nobody earns nothing.

And it pays in standing. A held outpost radiates prestige as well as resources, scaled by the same richness. That matters because resources stop mattering: a finished kingdom sits at its storage ceiling with every building maxed, and a rich outpost is a couple of percent of one of them. Prestige has no ceiling and it is the leaderboard — so for a kingdom that has built everything, territory is the growth that's left. Four rich outposts come to roughly a third of a stage-5 Wonder. Lose the ground, or pull the garrison, and the standing stops with it.

Every claim is public. Outposts show on the map like capitals do — yours ringed gold, everyone else's crimson — so held ground can always be found and contested. What stays hidden is the garrison: you see the flag flying, never the count of spears, and you still have to scout the hex before you can march on it. To hold what you took, tap your own outpost (or use Reinforce under Held ground) to send more troops — a garrison only ever shrinks in battle, so ground you never top up is ground you eventually lose.

Your arms, on-chain. A kingdom's banner — its two tinctures and its sigil — can be minted as a Radiant glyph from Settings. It is pure provenance: a permanent, wallet-held record that this kingdom bore these arms, dated by Realm year. It grants nothing in play and is never listable on the marketplace, because a banner is who you are rather than something to trade. Change your heraldry later and the new arms can be minted too, so a wallet ends up holding your kingdom's banners through the ages.

Incursions — the fight distance can't keep you from. Twice a week a monster tide rises against the whole shard and stands for two days. It has one shared pool of strength, and any kingdom may throw an army at it: no range check, no war, no target hex. It is the only thing in REALM that geography cannot put out of your reach, so a kingdom founded yesterday and four hundred hexes from anyone can still take part on day one.

It arrives, and then it goes out. A tide is not one lump of strength waiting to be deleted: it rolls in across the two days, so no army, however large, can finish it on the first morning — there is simply nothing more of it there yet to kill. Once it crests it begins to fall back on its own, which is what lets a shard that fought hard but came up short still finish the job late. Nobody is paid for the water that leaves by itself; you only ever score what you actually cut down, so there is never a reason to hold your army back and wait.

The tide meets whatever force you bring — a small kingdom fights a small wave — and only your losses stay lost; survivors are home the same instant. You may strike once every half hour, so how much you contribute is a question of how often you show up. Damage is tracked per kingdom, and when the tide falls the spoils (resources, prestige and essence) are split by share of the fighting. The essence matters: salvaging your own artifacts is otherwise the only source, and since a reforge costs three of its rarity's salvage, improving a legendary would mean destroying three of them. A tide is the one tap that doesn't ask you to break what you already own. Break it and the purse is full; let it run its course and everyone who fought takes half. Kingdoms that sent no one at all lose a little happiness — but only if the tide got through. Repel it and nobody pays.

You have to look. A rival's public profile shows who and where they are — name, banner, capital, level, prestige, their court by name — and nothing you could plan an attack with. Their army, treasury, buildings, artifacts and held ground are not public. The only way to learn a capital's strength is to send a scout, and what you get back is what your scout saw, when they saw it: intel goes stale, and the raid panel says so.

The crown is always in reach. Raids normally need a target within your raid range — but the kingdom at the top of the prestige ladder can be marched on from anywhere on the map, however far away they sit. Leading isn't meant to be a place you can hide: if the best-placed challenger happens to be on the far side of the world, the lead stops being contestable, and that isn't a race. It works one way only — wearing the crown doesn't let you strike further, it lets everyone come for you.

Defenders fight on home ground. A garrison defending its own capital always fights at an advantage — and the terrain scales it. Storming a seat in the mountains or the tundra costs a raider far more than taking the same army onto open plains; swamp and forest sit in between. Check a target's biome before you commit: the same force that rolls over a lowland rival can break itself on a highland one. The full table is in Resources — rugged land is poorer to hold, which is exactly what pays for the walls.

Hard country is also slow to march into. Hauling an assault up a mountainside or through a swamp adds to the journey — the raid panel shows each target's real march time, terrain included, before you commit. Coming home is unaffected: the ground taxes the attack, not the survivors leaving. That delay is the defender's to spend — more warning to recall a marching army or get an ally's reinforcements through the gates before the enemy arrives. Marching on a highland neighbour, expect to be seen coming.

Personal wars: you don't need an alliance to fight. From any kingdom's profile you can declare war on it directly — even a kingdom in no alliance. A personal war is mutual (they can raid you back), so it's a real commitment rather than a free hit, and you can't declare on a kingdom still under new-player protection. Once a war has stood its minimum span you can sue for peace from the Active wars panel on your dashboard, which also lists everyone you're fighting. Several kingdoms can raid one target at once — a besieged kingdom's best answer is to join an alliance and call for reinforcements.

Alliances let kingdoms band together — and defend each other. Reactive defence: you'll be warned when an enemy army is marching on your capital (with its size and an ETA), so you can recall a marching army home to meet it, or an ally can reinforce you — sending troops that join your garrison (a committed gift; they don't return). Reinforce from the map's alliance panel — it shows each ally's distance and how soon troops would arrive. Reinforcement reaches a little past your raid range, but not across the whole map: an ally too far away sits out of range, since troops would land long after the battle. Pick allies near you and you can actually cover each other.

Diplomacy ties alliances together. Between two alliances, raids open only once they are at war, so the friendlier states are real shields: non-aggression, trade partner, and allied keep the peace, and an allied pact also lets you reinforce each other across alliances. Friendly pacts can't be imposed — an officer proposes them and the other alliance must accept. Declaring war is immediate, but tearing up a standing pact to do it is treachery and costs you prestige.

Vacation mode is your shield when you step away: while it's active you can't be raided (and can't raid). Note that upkeep still drains your treasury on vacation — but your army is protected from desertion, so you'll never come back to a vanished garrison.

Your hero leads your armies and grows stronger with battle. They equip artifacts across seven slots — weapon, helm, armour, gloves, boots, cloak, and amulet — found as loot across seven rarities: Common → Uncommon → Rare → Epic → Legendary → Mythic → Genesis. Rarity scales an item's power (a Genesis piece is worth many Commons), so equip your best to boost your army in combat.

Salvage & reforge. Loot you'll never wear is worth more broken up: salvaging an un-minted artifact yields essence, scaled by its rarity — and a stack of duplicates salvages in one go. Spend essence to reforge a piece, rerolling its stats within its rarity band for three times what that rarity salvages for. Rarity never changes: a reforge is a gamble on the numbers, not a ladder to climb, so an epic stays an epic however much you pour in. Minted artifacts can be neither salvaged nor reforged — they're real on-chain objects, and their stats are fixed the moment they're minted.

A court, not a champion. You begin with the hero your realm was founded on, but a Tavern lets you hire more. How many you may keep rises with your Town Hall — one to start, a second at level 4, a third at level 8 — and each hire costs more gold than the last. A recruit arrives at level 1 with empty hands: they're another commander, not a shortcut past progression.

Heroes are an allocation. Each one can lead a single army, and you choose who rides out when you send a march. Whoever is out earns that battle's experience — the rest of the court earns nothing from it, so spreading your wars around levels more of them. Meanwhile any hero left at home stiffens your garrison against raids (the best one there, not all of them added together). So a hero is always either winning you a battle abroad or holding your walls — never both, and never idle for free. Loot is the realm's, though: artifacts drop into your inventory for any hero to equip, and a piece equipped on one hero moves when you hand it to another.

Where loot comes from. Artifacts drop from clearing hostile tiles you scout out, and richer tiles improve the odds:

• Bandit camps — drop something roughly 55% of the time, but mostly Common or Uncommon; a Rare here is a lucky find (~1 in 15 clears).
• Raider warbands — mid-tier, ~55% drop of Uncommon → Epic (your first steady source of mint-worthy gear). They're cavalry-heavy, so scout them and bring infantry — spears gut a charge.
• Monster lairs — drop about 50% of the time, and everything they yield is Rare or better (Epic, the odd Legendary, and rarely a Mythic). These are your source of high-end gear — a lone brute you simply out-muscle with a big army. A lair on a richer, deeper tile fields a tougher beast and pays better, so pick your target.
• Genesis — the top tier never drops in the wild. It's the season champion's trophy.

Each clear rolls fresh loot, so the same site can give a different artifact every time — but a target you keep hitting takes longer and longer to recover before you can raid it again, and monster lairs recover about twice as slowly as bandit camps (their loot is the good stuff). Leave a site alone for a while and it fully resets. So scouting out fresh lairs always beats grinding one into the ground.

Rare-and-above artifacts can be minted on-chain — turning a piece of loot into a real, ownable object tied to your wallet that you can trade with other players (see The marketplace below). Common and Uncommon stay off-chain in your vault. Your inventory has sorting and filtering once it grows, so a big haul stays manageable.

Once an artifact is minted on-chain it becomes a real, ownable object you can trade with other players for RXD on the Marketplace. Only minted artifacts trade here — ordinary loot stays in your vault until you mint it.

Trading is non-custodial: REALM never holds your artifact or your coins. Every step is signed in your own Photonic wallet — the game only indexes the listing and confirms the transfer on-chain.

• Selling — pick a minted artifact, name a price, and your wallet reserves it and signs the offer. It goes up as a live listing for anyone to buy. Listing an equipped artifact unequips it automatically, and a listed artifact can't be equipped until you cancel the listing.
• Buying — browse the listings and buy; your wallet completes the swap and broadcasts it, and the artifact transfers to you on-chain. A purchase may show “confirming on-chain” for a moment while the network catches up, then it lands in your vault.

There is no marketplace fee — the seller keeps the full price and the buyer pays exactly what's listed. A sold artifact leaves the seller and is tied to the buyer's wallet; anything you own you can equip, minted or not.

Price history: every completed sale is recorded, so each listing shows what that artifact last sold for, and a Recently soldfeed tracks the market's latest trades — useful for pricing your own listings. Only sales made through REALM are known; wallet-to-wallet trades outside the game aren't indexed.

Quests guide and reward you; Feats are achievements earned automatically as you hit milestones. Both pay out resources and prestige. Prestige (plus your level, buildings, army, and battles won) is your season score and drives the leaderboard.

Standing is earned by acting. The biggest single award is sacking a rival capital; after that, taking hostile ground — which pays in proportion to what the ground actually mustered against you, so a camp that fields an army is worth far more than one that fields a handful. Breaking an incursion pays the whole shard. Holding an outpost radiates prestige for as long as you keep troops standing on it, and the Everspire radiates it passively — but between them, ground you can lose out-pays the building you can't.

The Everspire is powerful but not a set-and-forget win button. Its output diminishes at higher levels — later stages add less — so a passive engine can't outrun a kingdom that's actually fighting. And it's vulnerable: while your capital is under siege — its integrity knocked down, and especially after a sack — the Everspire falls silent and stops radiating until your seat recovers. On top of that, a sack now burns a share of the victim's prestige hoard (not a token amount), so a runaway leader can be dragged back toward the pack by a determined rival — or a coalition. Leading the season paints a target on your back: hold your capital, or watch your lead bleed.

REALM runs in seasons. A season lasts a set length and ends on its own: the leaderboard resolves, the champion is crowned into the permanent Chronicle, and the world resets to a fresh, new map — new terrain, new neighbours, everyone back to a single Town Hall. So each season is a clean, winnable race; no one can entrench and run away with it.

What resets is the competition — economy, army, and your prestige score. What carries on is your legacy: your kingdom's identity, your hero, your artifact collection (including anything minted on-chain), the titles you win, and your place in the hall of fame. You can win a season, but you never finish the game — you play for the next crown, and your legend grows across the ages.