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VIP & the Battle Pass
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.
Iron Realms rewards showing up. Two separate tracks stack small daily boons into a large payoff, and both have a genuine free lane — because the game's promise is that time, not money, is the binding axis. This page gives the actual numbers on both.
VIP — earned by logging in, not by paying
VIP is a loyalty track, and this is the important sentence: you earn 12 loyalty a day simply for showing up. It is not a subscription tier. There are fifteen levels, and the perks scale cleanly all the way up.
The first three rungs are deliberately close together, because a ladder whose every perk chip reads "+0%" for your opening week is a ladder you never notice exists: VIP 1 at 12 loyalty (day one), VIP 2 at 36 (day three), VIP 3 at 72 (day six). VIP 2 matters more than its perks suggest — it is one of the two ways to unlock your second build slot and second research desk (the other is 800 prestige). A second march slot is not one of its gifts — march slots come from Keep level, two to start and one more every five.
| VIP | Build speed | Train speed | Gathering | March speed |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | +2% | +2% | +1.5% | +1% |
| 5 | +10% | +10% | +7.5% | +5% |
| 10 | +20% | +20% | +15% | +10% |
| 15 | +30% | +30% | +22.5% | +15% |
VIP 15 is a serious bonus — roughly a third off every build and every training order — and it is the same VIP 15 whether you reached it by paying or by turning up. Nothing in the store is required to get there.
The daily claim
Alongside loyalty runs a seven-day daily reward cycle that escalates sharply: day one pays 500 food and 400 wood; day seven's base is 2,500 food, 2,200 wood, 1,200 stone, 1,000 iron, 40 gems and 120 research — and those are base figures. An unbroken streak multiplies every claim by +4% per day, to a +120% ceiling on day thirty-one, so a thirty-day lord's day-seven claim is 5,500 food, not 2,500. That multiplier is the reason the streak is worth protecting. Miss a day and you drop back down the ladder, which is the entire reason the streak is worth protecting.
The Battle Pass — "The Conqueror's Path"
A 30-tier seasonal track that runs for 28 days. You earn 8 XP for every pass reward you claim through ordinary play, and tier 30 sits at 26,100 XP — the same rhythm that grows your keep, counted twice.
What the free lane actually pays
Not a token. Carrying the free track to tier 30 over a season pays out, in total:
- 38,400 food and 32,880 wood
- 8,640 stone and 7,920 iron
- 90 gems
- 120 minutes of speed-ups
What the premium lane adds
The Conqueror's Path is priced at $1.99 — a published intention rather than a charge, since nothing is for sale during the pre-alpha and no payment is accepted. It adds a parallel lane on top of — never instead of — the free one:
- 15,840 stone and 10,560 iron
- 240 gems
- 600 minutes of speed-ups — ten hours
- The Season's Champion Banner at tier 30, worn only by lords who carried a pass to its final tier.
Read what that is and is not. The premium lane is roughly ten hours of building compressed and a banner. It is not a stat, not a tier, not a level. A free lord who finishes the same track finishes the same season with the same ceiling — just with ten fewer hours of the waiting bought off.
Getting to tier 30
- Pass XP comes from claiming rewards, so a quest you complete but never collect is XP you did not earn. Sweep the claim buttons before you log off.
- Twenty-eight days is a long season and 26,100 XP is a lot of claims — start on day one rather than day ten, because the track does not accelerate to catch you up.
- The seven-day daily cycle and the pass reinforce each other: protecting the login streak is also the cheapest pass XP in the game.