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 a campaign: about seven months of steady play at half an hour a day, counting keep 45 and the nineteen plots that gate it. The Fair Play ledger inside the game reads that figure straight out of the shipped constants, so it is never a month behind the build.

Maximizing Resources

Quick answers

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 a campaign: about seven months of steady play at half an hour a day, counting keep 45 and the nineteen plots that gate it. The Fair Play ledger inside the game reads that figure straight out of the shipped constants, so it is never a month behind the build.

Maximizing Resources — Iron Realms — Maximizing Resources in Iron Realms.

📌 Kept current by design. This guide teaches the mechanics, not the exact figures — the game shows live numbers in every panel, and they are tuned over time. The relationships below hold even when a value changes.

Your resource income is not one number — it is a stack of multipliers laid over your base production. Understanding the stack is how a mid-size keep out-produces a bigger, sloppier one.

The production stack

Passive income from your buildings is multiplied, roughly in this order, by:

Building levels & count. The base: a farm or sawmill pays 2.0 per level per second, a quarry or mine 1.4 — and the Intro Era's ×2.5 multiplier makes those 5.0 and 3.5 for as long as it is on. Raise all four — and remember the second plots of each unlock at Keep 15, nearly doubling the floor.
Season. Summer pours out food and speeds gathering; winter cuts both hard. Time big gathering pushes for the warm seasons and stockpile before winter (see Seasons & Weather).
Smallfolk favour. How your people regard your rule swings output up or down. A just, generous lord's fields work harder; a hated one's go slack. Your rulings at court are not decoration — they show up here.
Research. The Agriculture line and its branches raise production directly. See Research & the Academy.
New-lord catch-up. For your first fourteen days you enjoy a production bonus that decays as your house grows — a fortnight, not a couple of days, so lean into it hard and early.

Because these multiply, the biggest gains come from raising your weakest multiplier, not your strongest. A maxed farm with hostile smallfolk still bleeds output.

Active gathering

Passive income is only half the story. Send parties out to gather far more than your keep makes at rest:

Gathering parties march to resource tiles on the map and return laden. Bigger parties and better commanders carry more; the right terrain and route matter.
Weekly caravans appear on set days of the week as special map nodes — high-value runs worth planning your week around, including the rare Valyrian steel caravan.
Maester Expeditions are timed idle missions: send them off, do something else, collect. Free income for players who cannot sit at the screen.

Storage & protection

Income means nothing if it is raided away — or if it never lands. Your stores are capped at max(200,000, six times your next Keep upgrade's food) + 50,000 per Depot level, and anything produced past that cap is discarded, so a Depot buys headroom as well as protection. Keep it ahead of your hoard, and note that a share of your resources is protected from raids — visible in the resource bar. Don't sit on a pile far above your protection when at war.

The priority, in one line

Raise your lowest multiplier, keep parties in the field, and spend before winter. A lord who does those three out-earns one who only clicks “upgrade farm.”