Resources & Economy

The economy is not background noise. Gold sets the pace of orders, stone decides how hard the island is to crack, and lumber decides when the realm can reach the sea. A strong Governor does not simply gather more, they keep the right shortage from becoming the next crisis.

Settlement & Life

Tax policy, food supply, morale, and the pressures of a growing population.

Buildings

Structures that produce, store, and defend a settlement's wealth.

Bazaar

Coin spending when a shortage cannot wait for the mines.

Opening Reserves

Every new Governor arrives with a provision chest: 250 Gold, 250 Stone, and 250 Lumber, plus 600 coins and 200 food. A Main House stands ready at level 1. The chest is enough to start the first mines, not enough to spend evenly on every tempting order.

Treasurer Mora: The first shortage is information

Before the Storehouse exists, full stores stop new production from being kept. Before the Gold Mine grows, every better answer is unaffordable. Spend the opening chest to reveal which shortage is coming next.

The Three Materials

Gold is the flexible pressure: construction, research, troops, ships, and market decisions all ask for it.Stone is the defensive pressure: walls, infrastructure, and durable growth consume it steadily.Lumber is the naval pressure: ships, expansion, and late logistics punish any island that treated timber as a spare resource.

Each material has its own site: the Gold Mine, the Stone Quarry, and the Lumber Mill. Even untouched land gives a small passive trickle, but mine levels are what turn a holding from a camp into an economy.

Material	Early pressure	Later pressure
Gold	Orders compete for the same coin purse.	Research, ships, troops, and Bazaar timing.
Stone	Main House, Storehouse, walls, and civic works.	Fortified colonies and hard-to-raid islands.
Lumber	Mine balance and early construction.	Harbour, warships, merchants, and colony ships.

Coin, Food, and Morale

Raw materials build the island. Settlement life decides whether the island can keep working. Coins come from taxation and population; they buy supply crates at the Bazaar and cover choices raw materials cannot. The Main House determines treasury capacity. Coin overflow is retained temporarily, then decays each hour back toward the vault limit.

Food is consumed by population, and farms only help if they keep pace with growth. Food pressure becomes morale pressure: when stores run low, Happiness falls sharply. At the worst levels, mines and farms produce only half their normal output. The danger is not one bad hour, it is the feedback loop.

Master Quill: The loop to watch

High taxes can fix a coin shortage while creating a happiness shortage. Empty food stores can do the same. The economy is stable when the next order does not make the next problem worse.

Production Pace

Each mine level adds dependable hourly output. The visible rates show the base production for one level and the passive income that still arrives without a mine. The full level ladder matters when deciding whether the next build slot buys more economy or solves an immediate military need.

Storage, Overflow, and Plunder

Gold, stone, and lumber can only be held at full efficiency up to the limit that the Storehouse can contain. Surplus beyond capacity becomes temporary overflow: the stores remain usable, but they decay each hour until stock returns to cap. A better Storehouse also shields part of the reserve from raiders, which turns a lost raid from a collapse into a repair bill.

Lumen is the exception. It follows the Church cap, not Storehouse space, and surplus lumen is not protected by overflow grace.

Settlement and building screens show overflow amount and depletion rate. The resource bar is also a ledger: click a resource or coins to see total stock, net trend per hour, and each modifier pushing the value up or down.

Marshal Voss: Stores are defence

A raiding fleet takes what it can carry. Protected stores do not win the battle, but they decide whether the island can afford the recovery.

Island Wealth and Specialisation

Not all land is equal. Resource tiers are a permanent property of each island, visible when hovering over uninhabited shores on the chart. They describe the general wealth of the island, while Shore Survey reports describe how each individual resource compares to that island's own stores.

Beyond tier, each island favours one resource over the others. A lumber- or stone-dominant shore produces roughly 80% more of its dominant resource once settled, while the other two sit 40% below normal. Gold is deliberately tighter: a gold-dominant island produces only 30% more gold above its tier. Starter islands are exempt from this dominance bonus — their production stays uniform once settled, no matter what the chart hints. Raid plunder ceilings still scale with the full 80% figure.

Specialisation cannot be seen from the chart. Send spy ships to survey uninhabited shores before committing a colony fleet. The survey reveals each resource's abundance and names the dominant material. See Raiding for how this shapes the plunder economy.

Treasurer Mora: Departure counts

Shipments and trade contracts debit the treasury at departure. Raids are different: the fleet earns only what the landing wins and carries home. Verify the reserve before the order leaves the dock, not after the previous hour's income report.

Tideline Finds

Some mornings the tide leaves something on your capital's shore. A sealed crate. A stubborn goat. A merchant's ledger that no living merchant will be filing a claim against. Brann gathers what he finds above the wrack line and sets it before you with the morning's report.

• Finds appear on your capital island only, once per morning report cycle. Quiet shores most days; sometimes two or three things at once when the night's tide ran high.
• What washes up scales with your capital's prestige tier. A newcomer's Outpost receives a small offering; a Legendary Island's shore is treated with more weight.
• Each find waits eight hours for your ruling. Accept it from the morning report card, or open the Claims tab later. Unanswered finds wash back to the sea.
• Resource finds respect your Storehouse cap; goods respect your Workshop space. Overflow is wasted, not banked.
• A Forsaken or otherwise quiet capital receives no finds. The sea has its own opinions about whose shore deserves a gift.

Master Quill: A note from the steward

I report what the watch finds, no more. A vial with an intact seal is a vial with an intact seal; whether the village it was bound for still exists is not always for me to know at the time of writing. Read the labels before you read the report.

Common questions