patron
Patronage buys responsibility. Not victory.
A patron takes responsibility for a place: a homestead, a steward, a cellar, and the work of keeping useful goods moving. They do not buy the better sword.
A patron helps anchor production. Everyone keeps the hunt, the market, public crafting, core progression, and the right to become elite.
Combat advantages sold
Cold Storage entries
Cumulative cold days, maximum
Why a homestead exists
A home should put something back into the road.
Homesteads give patronage an address. They make room for farming, storage, production, organizing, and the unglamorous work of making sure somebody has soup when the dungeon did not go to plan.
That creates demand instead of removing it. A patron still needs hunters, harvesters, foresters, miners, farmers, cooks, elemancers, traders, and neighbors. A good homestead becomes a customer, a workshop, and a reason to visit.
An address and a steward
The patron holds the entitlement. The steward is the homestead’s address and recovery authority. One owns the promise. The other makes sure the door still leads somewhere.
A cellar, not a larger bank
Cold Storage begins with 16 entries. It can hold any item, but only consumables gain preservation. It remains separate from the free Main Bank.
Work earned at home
Private Cooking and Elemancy stations are earned through agricultural turn-ins. They use the same recipes and make the same outputs as public stations. The benefit is proximity. Not a secret better flask.
The source rule
Useful things should come from somewhere.
Creature bodies. Forestry. Mining. Deliberate quest-gap materials. Farming combines what the world already provides. It does not open a fifth portal full of orphan commodities.
The Work page keeps the ledger. The homestead gives that ledger a hungry address.
The work moves
One carcass can employ half a street.
Hunt
A hunter brings back the whole carcass and decides whether to use it, sell it, or hand it to somebody better prepared.
Process
A harvester breaks it down into cuts, stock, hide, sinew, fat, bone, glands, innards, and other honest parts. Nothing useful appears from nowhere.
Cook
Cooking joins cuts, stock, produce, and seasoning into vita goods with a shelf life. Fresh work matters because it does not remain fresh forever.
Practice Elemancy
Elemancy works through exact reagents. Glands, bone, plants, minerals, and elemental material become mana goods and other disciplined answers.
Farm
Farming joins seeds, land, water, and materials already present in the world. It is synthesis, not a second world of unrelated supplies.
Trade
Players move what they have toward the player who needs it. Decay keeps the market from becoming a museum of immortal soup.
The carcass becomes a meal, reagent, material, listing, or order. Then the clock begins.
Cold Storage
Cold buys time. It does not buy freshness.
A consumable enters with whatever shelf life it still has. Cold Storage preserves that remaining time for no more than 14 cumulative real days. It never restores what has already decayed.
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1
Freshness begins outside
Cooking, Elemancy, and the item itself decide the ordinary shelf life. The cellar does not rewrite it.
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2
The cellar holds what remains
Preservation starts when the consumable enters Cold Storage. Old stew does not become young stew.
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3
The clock follows the lot
Take it out, put it back, split it, move it, lapse, or return. None of that restarts its refrigeration history.
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4
Fourteen days means fourteen days
At the cumulative limit, the consumable becomes freezer-burnt. The item remains. The loophole does not.
If patronage ends
Your cellar does not eat your things.
The contents seal if patronage ends. Nothing is deleted, duplicated, or quietly moved. When one complete claim fits in your inventory, the account’s steward returns it exactly, in groups of no more than 16 entries.
Renewing patronage does not scrub the cold history. Your goods remember the cellar even if the account took a season away.
Free to win
Everybody keeps the game.
Everyone can work
Free players can hunt, gather, use public crafting, buy, sell, send, receive, progress, and become elite.
Public stations stay whole
Homestead stations use the same recipes and outputs. Patronage shortens the walk. It does not improve the result.
The road opens together
Shared progression gates answer to the world’s restoration. Payment does not lift them.
The point
A patron is useful when other players become more useful too.
A homestead should buy carcasses from hunters, need harvesters to process them, order crops from farmers, stock work from cooks and elemancers, and give traders a reason to make the trip.
The reward is not being above the economy. It is having a place inside it worth keeping.
The Marketplace finds the hands. The homestead keeps the need. The Dev Log keeps the rules honest when either one changes.
