Estates

Aldwin, the Land Registrar stationed on Aldermark’s town square, handles deed sales, claiming a plot, and your tax account (protocol v55, v56). Rowan, the Estate Architect stationed elsewhere on the square, handles wooden fences, the landscaping toolbox, and landscaping palettes (protocol v57, v58).

Buying a deed and claiming land (protocol v55)

Aldwin sells Land Deed for a flat 5g, no haggling. Buying and carrying a deed has no level requirement, but using one requires character level 10+.

Double-click a deed in your bag while standing on the plot you want, and the game shows a terrain-following grid for your current 32×32m cell plus a “Claim this plot?” confirmation:

The server checks the claim conditions as soon as the preview opens — if they aren’t met, the grid turns red with a rejection reason and the claim button is hidden.
Moving while the preview is open refreshes the current cell and its eligibility about 0.35s after you stop; the claim button is disabled while that refresh is in flight.
Confirming re-checks every condition server-side; on success it registers the plot and consumes one deed in the same transaction. Cancelling or failing never consumes the deed — a failure shows a red grid with the reason, a success shows green.

Zoom in on the world map to see land grade and ownership as color overlays: crown land and reserved land (towns, dungeon entrances, and the sea) are filled blocks, homestead plots show only grid lines. Your own plots use an accent color, plots up for auction get a flag icon with a countdown, and unpaid/neglected/ruined plots fade your ownership color by stage.

Once you own a plot, both Rica and Wick sell a Scroll of Estate Return (8s), the same price as the regular return scroll. Using one sends your character to safe outdoor ground on your own homestead — it works from a dungeon or mid-combat, too. The server picks a spot near the center of your earliest-claimed plot that avoids buildings, obstacles, and water deeper than 0.1m, falling back to your other owned plots if none is found there. It isn’t consumed if you have no estate, are dead, have a pending trade, or no safe spot can be found, and it can’t send you to a plot owned by another character on the same account.

Plot limits and expansion

Each account (not each character) can own one homestead estate. Claiming a new cell merges it into your existing estate automatically as long as it shares an edge with it, up to a cap of 16 cells. You can’t claim a disconnected second plot on the same account — that needs a different account.

Tax account (protocol v56)

Clicking Aldwin now opens a dedicated Real Estate screen instead of a general shop — he won’t buy or haggle over anything else. The left side shows your deed; below it, your tax account balance, next due date (in-game date plus a live countdown), the amount coming due, and whether you’re overdue.

Click your carried gold to deposit into the tax account, or the account balance to withdraw. Amounts accept 1g20s30c-style input or a plain copper number. Deposits and withdrawals commit in the same database transaction as your character’s gold and bag, so nothing gets lost mid-transfer.
Land tax is 20 silver per plot per in-game month — a full 16-plot estate costs 3.2 gold a month.
Tax is collected at midnight on the first of the in-game big month, roughly every 3.75 real days. The first payment is waived.
The account balance has no cap, so you can pre-fund it before a long break.

What happens if you fall behind

The decay stages shown on screen are currently a design baseline, not fully enforced yet: missing your last login for 8 consecutive due dates (roughly 30 real days) counts as unpaid regardless of balance, and every further missed date adds to a running overdue count meant to step through “overdue,” “neglected,” “ruined,” and “reclaimed.” The actual building and furniture restrictions, ruin rendering, and cleanup on reclamation (deleting the house, mailing furniture back) are not implemented yet. Depositing the full arrears plus one extra month instantly restores good standing and waives the next payment.

Wooden fences (protocol v57)

Wooden Fence (1s, bought from Rowan in whatever quantity you ask for) are one-meter fence sections you place and recover along your estate’s cell edges. They stack, so even a hundred-plus takes one bag slot.

Double-click a fence in your bag to enter placement mode: your bag closes and any queued move is cancelled. The whole estate shows a faint, terrain-following 1m dotted grid, independent of your mouse or camera — it disappears when you leave the mode.
Hover the ground and the nearest 1m cell edge previews the real fence model: green means you can place it, orange means you can recover it, red means you can’t touch it.
Click an empty edge to spend one fence and place it; click a placed fence to remove it and refund one to your bag. The next click is ignored until the server responds, and your bag count follows the server’s answer.
Right-click to move without leaving placement mode; left-click places or recovers. Esc or Done exits — the mode stays active even at zero fences left so you can still recover what’s already down.
Outside the mode, right-clicking a placed fence within 5m re-enters it, even with an empty bag after relogging.

Placing and recovering follow different rules:

Placing requires at least one of the edge’s two neighboring cells to be your own plot, with no unpaid tax; edges on your estate’s outer boundary are allowed too. Terrain-wise, water deeper than 0.1m or a height difference over 0.5m between the endpoints or midpoint blocks placement.
Recovering only works for the plot’s current owner, even while overdue on tax. If your bag is too heavy to take it, the fence stays put instead of being force-fit into your bag.

Estate landscaping (protocol v58)

Buy a Landscaper's Toolbox from Rowan (50s) and use it once from your bag to open the landscaping panel — the toolbox itself is not consumed and can be reused any time. The panel now bundles four tabs (as of protocol v62, fences and storage chests share one “Objects” tab, and the request to enter a tab was unified into a single message the server authorizes per-tab):

Ground: the existing splat-brush material painter.
Path: the existing road tool, painting a path between two points.
Objects: place or recover wooden fences, and place an estate storage chest.
House: place or demolish a house built from a house scroll.

(A planting tab for grass, flowers, and saplings isn’t built yet.)

The toolbox comes with two base materials built in — Meadow Grass and Rocky Trail — paintable as soon as you buy it. Six more landscaping palettes are sold separately, each 10s, also from Rowan; using one permanently unlocks its material so you never buy it again: Landscaping Sample Book: Sandy Gravel, Landscaping Sample Book: Red Laterite Soil Stones, Landscaping Sample Book: Gravel Road, Landscaping Sample Book: Ganges River Pebbles, Landscaping Sample Book: Stone Pathway, and Landscaping Sample Book: Patterned Paving. Unlocks are bound to the character; a palette you’ve already learned is never consumed again.

Brush and path widths are chosen in 1-meter steps, which the server converts to an actual 0.5–10m radius (as of protocol v59 the radius supports fractions, so even the narrowest one-cell brush lines up cleanly with the grid). Painting only ever affects your own land — a brush that overlaps someone else’s or unclaimed ground only applies to the part inside your plot, and a path only paints the stretch that runs through your own land. Admin characters skip the ownership and boundary checks when editing ground or paths, but still need to be carrying the toolbox, have the material unlocked, and be alive like anyone else.

Terrain edits clear grass and trees under the existing rules, but repainting the ground does not grow cleared vegetation back — that’s what the future planting tab is for.

House building (protocol v60)

Rowan sells 5 fixed house scrolls for building on your own estate:

Small House Scroll (1g) — a small house, previewable at Karl’s home.
Medium House Scroll (1g 20s) — a medium house, previewable at Rowan’s home.
Small Two-Story House Scroll (1g 50s) — a small two-story house, previewable at Aldwin’s home.
Medium Two-Story House Scroll (2g) — a medium two-story house, previewable at Rica’s shop.
Large Two-Story House Scroll (5g) — a large two-story house, previewable at the Aldermark Inn.

Pick a house scroll from your bag on the toolbox’s House tab to open a translucent preview; clicking to confirm has the server re-check that the spot is within 30m, on dry ground, has no more than 1m of height difference across the footprint, and doesn’t overlap an existing house before it consumes the scroll and spawns the house. The same tab lets you click your own house to demolish it — no materials are refunded.

Estate storage (protocol v61)

Buy a Wooden Storage Chest from Aldwin (12s) and use it straight from your bag to open the placement UI. It can only go on an estate you own with no back taxes, and inside a building it’s placed on whatever floor you’re currently standing on. There’s one capacity tier right now, 50kg, and no cap on how many chests an estate can hold.

The storage screen reuses the trade window’s two-column layout — chest on the left, your bag on the right — with both sides showing the resulting weight live. Bound or untradeable items, and chests themselves, can’t go in. An empty chest can be picked back up: it returns to your bag if there’s room, or drops on the ground if not. If the estate lapses, chests are left behind and anyone can open them. A house holding a chest can’t be demolished until every chest on every floor has been emptied and recovered.