Permanent account and seasonal worlds
The account and player identity are permanent: credentials, access rights, Premium, cosmetic preferences, distinctions and compatible history stay attached to the player. Each world instead has its own competitive participation with its bastions, resources, buildings, units, research, territories, objectives, alliance, reputation and ranking. Progress earned in one world therefore grants no power advantage in another.
When the first bastion is created, a welcome report summarizes this seasonal cycle and provides direct access to the season calendar, wiki and updates. These resources are also grouped with account management under Settings.
Every detailed report carries an illustrated banner for its family: system, progression, intelligence, offense, defense, territory, logistics, protection, or alliance and Ash. This visual identity helps players recognize its nature without replacing its title or text label; only major events, such as entering a season, may receive their own illustration. A new report is written in the language currently saved on its recipient’s account, including when an action completes automatically in the background.
A world moves through four phases: preparation, open, epilogue and archived. Only the open phase accepts progression and game actions. During epilogue or after archiving, the map, reports, ranking and chronicles remain available to browse, while production, queues, missions and automatic resolutions are frozen.
Within its open period, a seasonal world follows four distinct stages: settlement, regional expansion, fronts and conflicts, then the finale. Each world defines its calendar and stage durations and keeps them in its rules snapshot. This seasonal clock does not by itself enable a mechanic that is not configured for that world.
During settlement, progression remains local. Travel through regional passages opens with expansion. Passage conquest and Ash Front operations begin during the conflicts phase. Heart of Ash mechanics remain reserved for the finale. A locked action names its required phase, and the seasonal schedule is available from the world interface.
Players can retain access to older games and switch between worlds in which they participate. Returning to an archive restores that world’s exact context without replacing the permanent account identity or mixing its data with the active season.
The Lobby catalog separates worlds to join, active participations, and archives. It shows their age, human population, speeds, seasonal stage, Atlas size, registration window, and capacity. NPCs count toward neither the public population nor human capacity.
Administrators can remove an archive from the Lobby when it should no longer clutter the catalog. This setting hides only its Lobby card: it deletes neither the world, its participations, nor its preserved reports and snapshots.
The Lobby is now the gateway to this catalog. After verifying their address, a new account chooses its first world there; an existing player can join a new season, resume a participation, or browse an archive. Settings > Worlds keeps the game and archive history plus a Lobby button, without offering a new start. A frozen-world banner also provides a way back.
A new start is allowed only in an open world with registration enabled, within its registration window, below its human capacity, and with an available starting region. The server always enforces these conditions; an internal world is never offered as a new destination.
Joining a world follows four steps: world, people, starting region, then confirmation. Choices form a draft that resumes after signing back in, with back and cancel actions available. When only one world is actually available, it is selected automatically. Every new participation chooses between the Ember Clans, Ash Guilds, and Free Marches.
At the starting-region step, each option displays a miniature of the geography actually generated for that season. This preview contains terrain only: players, bastions, available positions, resources, structures, ownership, strategic passages, and movements remain hidden.
Only ordinary regions explicitly opened to new starts are offered. Each has an admin-managed human capacity and recommendation weight. NPCs use no place: recommendation compares weighted human occupancy only, and a full region disappears from both selection and the world catalog.
Before a world opens, an admin-managed process generates its regions and maps, reserves and validates player positions, then places three NPCs in every starting region, one for each people. Each instance receives a distinct regional identity and bastion name while retaining its faction doctrine. Every such position remains in the main passable component and avoids resources, passages, landmarks and other starts. Two starts remain strictly more than seven tiles apart, meaning at least eight tiles, while NPCs occupy three distinct sectors and remain at least eighteen tiles apart. Every player position retains at least two reachable NPCs within a reasonable regional distance and at least one exploitable resource inside its initial territorial range. At every registration, unassigned reservations are checked again against all current territorial influence, including NPC bastions, towers and outposts; any reservation now covered is regenerated elsewhere. Repairing a legacy world adopts existing NPCs into their regional people instead of duplicating them and preserves their progression. It also recovers recognizable legacy profiles whose key is missing, replaces their technical neutral reservations without conflicts, and recreates any missing player positions without reusing an existing identifier. Existing human bastions are never moved to satisfy a newer starting rule; only unassigned reservations are regenerated and, when a legacy map can no longer fit its configured capacity, that capacity is adjusted to the number of valid starts retained. The official seasonal ranking compares players only; NPCs remain available in a separate regional-forces ranking. The world cannot open until these checks succeed.
Your people is an immutable seasonal choice. Ember Clans raid 10% faster and carry 15% more raid loot, but construct 6% more slowly. Ash Guilds construct 10% faster and produce 8% more resources, but their raids are 8% slower. Free Marches, recommended for newcomers, construct and raid 3% faster with 2% more production, at the cost of 5% less raid cargo.
No participation or bastion exists before final confirmation. At that point, the server locks the world, checks its window and capacity again, reserves a free position in the selected region, then creates the participation, bastion, resources, buildings, units, protection, and welcome report together. A repeated submission therefore cannot create a second start.
Every new official season starts from a map generated with a new random seed. Regions, terrain, resources, passages, starting positions, and finale elements are generated and validated before opening. During administrative creation, a window automatically follows every step through validation and can then open the world directly, with an explicit choice over registrations. The approved map is then frozen: no automatic regeneration can change the geography of an announced or open season.
Administrators can nevertheless expand a world in preparation or already open up to six standard regions. The process adds only the new maps, their player starts, nearby resources, three NPC forces, and Atlas passages, then validates them before making them available. Existing regions, bastions, positions, and NPCs are neither regenerated nor moved.
For Chronicle Zero, the cosmetic Founder badge requires at least 14 distinct active days during the season. A day counts from the first successful meaningful game action, such as building, researching, training, launching a mission, acting on the map, trading, or contributing to an alliance action. Signing in, navigating, refreshing, reading or sending messages, changing a preference, or cancelling an action is not enough. Multiple actions on the same day still count as one active day.
The initial 3 + 5 + 5 + 3-week split remains configurable. Chronicle Zero is an invitation-only closed beta: preparation, announcement, and opening are three separate approvals, and saving a date never opens the world or sends invitations automatically.
