What resources are there in Iron Realms?

Food, wood, stone and iron, produced continuously by your keep and gathered from nodes on the world map. A standing host eats: troop upkeep draws about 1.5 food per second per thousand swords, and the Food Ledger in your keep shows the net figure.

Is Iron Realms free to play?

Yes. Iron Realms is free to play in any browser with no download and no account required. Every building, troop tier and Seat of Power is reachable without spending money — purchases buy speed and cosmetics, never a higher ceiling.

Does spending money make you stronger in Iron Realms?

No. Nothing purchasable raises your power ceiling. A charter audit runs on every build and fails it if any offer would sell power. During the pre-alpha nothing is for sale at all — better than that, the store gives its goods away: everything in it is free to take, once a day per item, while the realm is being built. When payments do open, spending will compress time only: it clears timers, it never raises the summit.

Economy & Pacing

Quick answers

What resources are there in Iron Realms?: Food, wood, stone and iron, produced continuously by your keep and gathered from nodes on the world map. A standing host eats: troop upkeep draws about 1.5 food per second per thousand swords, and the Food Ledger in your keep shows the net figure.
Is Iron Realms free to play?: Yes. Iron Realms is free to play in any browser with no download and no account required. Every building, troop tier and Seat of Power is reachable without spending money — purchases buy speed and cosmetics, never a higher ceiling.
Does spending money make you stronger in Iron Realms?: No. Nothing purchasable raises your power ceiling. A charter audit runs on every build and fails it if any offer would sell power. During the pre-alpha nothing is for sale at all — better than that, the store gives its goods away: everything in it is free to take, once a day per item, while the realm is being built. When payments do open, spending will compress time only: it clears timers, it never raises the summit.
How long does it take to max a keep in Iron Realms?: Keeps cap at level 45 and troops at tier 13 — the same summit for everyone, and it is deliberately a campaign: about seven months free at roughly half an hour a day, counting the keep and the nineteen supporting plots that share its build queue. The intended spend tiers cut the same road to about three months and about two, and the Fair Play ledger inside the game reads the live figures straight out of the shipped constants.

Economy & Pacing — Iron Realms — Economy & Pacing in Iron Realms.

This is the guide that explains why Iron Realms feels different from other games in its genre. The economy is designed around one idea: fairness you can verify.

The four resources

Food, wood, stone, and iron drive everything — buildings, troops, and research. Production runs continuously from your buildings, boosted by season, research, and how the smallfolk regard your rule. Farms and sawmills each pay 2.0 per level per second; quarries and mines pay 1.4. Stone and iron are deliberately the tighter pair — they are what walls and swords are made of. Those are the base rates; the Intro Era currently multiplies every one of them by 2.5, so a farm you are looking at right now reads 5.0 a level per second and a quarry 3.5. The multiplier is a single flag and it will come off when the realm is populated enough not to need it — the base figures are the ones the game is balanced around.

A host eats, and a hoard has a lid

Two things bound the treasury, and neither used to exist:

Upkeep. Your standing army draws food — about 1.5 food per second per thousand troops, paced with production so a host costs the same share of the harvest at any speed. The Food Ledger in your keep shows production, upkeep and the net figure side by side, so a host you cannot feed is visible before it is a crisis rather than after.
Storage. Each resource is capped at max(200,000, six times your next Keep upgrade's food cost) + 50,000 per Depot level. The cap rises with your ambitions automatically, but overflow past it is discarded — a Depot is no longer only raid protection, it is headroom.

Time is the binding axis — but resources now push back

For most of the game you are waiting on a timer more than on a hoard: build times run far ahead of what your fields can starve you of, and that is checked automatically on every update. It means money can buy speed (clearing timers) but not a level of power a free player can never reach.

It is no longer only time, though. The 2026 rebalance cut passive production by roughly two and a half times, put a lid on storage, and moved research onto the resource economy. Early on — and any time you are running a large host, a full build queue and a study at once — you will genuinely be short of grain and iron. That is the intended texture: choices between three things you want, not a queue you feed automatically.

The pacing promise

The summit — Keep 45 — is meant to be genuinely aspirational, and its distance is honest because it is re-measured, not remembered: the pacing model reads the same shipped constants that set every build cost, remodelled after the rebalance. Counted the only honest way — the keep plus the nineteen supporting plots that share its build queue — the summit takes about seven months free at roughly half an hour a day, and the intended spend tiers cut the same road to about three months and about two. Around the numbers, the promise keeps its shape:

Everyone reaches the same summit. Keep 45, troop tier 13, every Seat of Power — no purchase raises that ceiling, and none ever will.
Money buys timers, not levels. Nothing in the store is a stat.
The store is FREE during the pre-alpha. Not shut — free. Everything in the catalogue can be taken for nothing, once a day per item, while the realm is being built. The prices shown are what these will cost after pre-alpha, published now so the model can be argued with before anyone is ever charged for it. When payments do open, the free store closes automatically — the two can never be open at once.

The Fair Play Ledger inside the game reads the current pacing straight out of the shipped constants, so it cannot drift from the build the way a written page can. When you want a number, take it from there.

Grinding to parity

Here is the promise that keeps it fair: a lord who plays about four active hours a day can grind to the same daily budget a top spender buys. Not close to it — level with it. Clearing camps, hunting, storming holdfasts, and taking seats all pay in saved build-time, decaying through the day so there is no reward for never sleeping and no advantage to a bot over a person. Time and money are simply two ways to pay.

The Fair Play Ledger

You never have to take our word for any of this. The in-game Fair Play Ledger audits the store's fairness in the open, and it is never hidden behind a level gate — a game asking for your trust should show its books.