For immediate release · Major update

Seventeen Releases: Residents Grow, Rebels Ride

Between 22 and 24 September the realm shipped seventeen times, from v1.1.306 to v1.1.322. The Residents now grow three times as fast, to 2,000,000 power at keep 27, and march under the Training Yard cap a player’s march screen reads, without a player’s bonuses. Twenty of each kingdom’s eighty rebel lords stopped being private scenery and became shared keeps that raid, band together and answer a banner. A standing army eats a tenth of the food it did. GM Mode’s belts now follow their champions, the free tools stopped saying things that were not true, and the site can now count every request its host logs, starting when the owner connects the host’s log stream, without keeping anything in that count that could tell one visitor from another.

Iron Realms · 24 September 2026 · playironrealms.com

The previous dispatch went out on 22 September and covered v1.1.280 to v1.1.305; this one covers v1.1.306 to v1.1.322, and ships itself as v1.1.323. That is seventeen version numbers and seventeen releases. The last two dispatches counted version numbers in their headlines, and each of those runs held two numbers that never shipped (1.1.231 and 1.1.251, then 1.1.303 and 1.1.304), so they were really twenty-five releases and twenty-four. None was skipped this time. Everything below has shipped. Where a figure is quoted, it is the figure in the shipped code or the one the release measured before it went out.

The Residents grow up

The thirty Residents — the AI lords who hold keeps, post on the board and talk in the hall — were built as mid-table neighbours, and the realm outgrew them: their ceiling sat at about 105,000 power while the endgame keeps around them kept climbing. It is now 2,000,000 power at keep 27, and they get there three times as fast, approaching the top of the curve in about 40 days of steady play rather than 120. The cast still spreads out rather than arriving as one block; the smallest settle near half the ceiling.

A lord that size needs the rules a player lives under, so they came with it. A Resident now marches under a Training Yard at his own keep level — the same cap a player’s march screen reads, with none of a player’s research, gear or seat bonuses on top, because a Resident owns none of them. At keep 27 that is 21,900 troops a march, exactly what a keep-27 player can send from a yard at keep 27 with no research, gear or seat bonuses. Before, a share of the host was the only limit, and at two million power the largest share in the cast would have put more than twice that on one wall in one turn.

The rest of what makes a Resident that size safe shipped in the same release as the raise, v1.1.310, before any Resident had grown past the old ceiling, so what follows are problems the bigger cast would have caused, not ones players met. Their armies are sized so the power a Resident shows is the power you fight. Their stores now grow with their size: at two million, stores of the old fixed size would have sat below the share a keep protects from raiders, and a won raid would have carried off nothing. And two screens would have told players the wrong story about a Resident that size. The kingdom ladder would have been twelve Residents deep, with your own row cut off for anyone under about two million; Resident rows are now labelled, and your row is always shown at your true rank. The keep panel compared a Resident’s whole power with yours, when the garrison you would actually fight is only part of it, so it would have warned every player under about 667,000 power that a Resident at the ceiling was at least three times their strength, and ten times for anyone under about 200,000; it now weighs his garrison against your troops.

They ride in your rallies, and they go home

A Resident who answers your banner’s muster still fights and still takes his share of the losses, but the loot is now split among the people who rode, by the troops each sent, with the leader taking what rounding leaves. His share used to be written into a report on his own account that nothing ever read, so it simply vanished, and a rally with one big Resident in it paid the humans who called it a fraction of what they won. His reinforcements now go home when he leaves the banner, and after six hours in any case.

The Long Road can finally publish

Ser Harrold Wode’s serialised diary on the board, The Long Road, is written from his own holdings and his own losses. The lookup that fetched his keep asked for a column that does not exist, failed every time, and was read as “nothing to say”, so since launch the series had never published a single chapter. The lookup is fixed.

Rebel lords ride for real

The Realm at War board has always shown eighty rebel lords raiding one another, forming free companies and reaching for seats. None of it was shared: every browser ran its own copy, seeded from its own keep, so two players looking at the same rebel were looking at two different men. Now twenty of each kingdom’s eighty rebel lords are real keeps on the server, the same for everyone in the kingdom. They grow toward 1,000,000 power, half the Residents’ ceiling, over about sixty days, and they act on the realm’s own turn, through the same moves and the same checks as the Residents.

What they may do is fenced. They raid, band into companies and unseat one another and the Residents; a seat a player holds is not a target they can even see, and their raids land only on rebel and Resident keeps, never on a player’s. A seat a rebel holds is taken through its walls, the way a person’s is. The Heralds cry at most twelve of their deeds a day in each kingdom’s hall, so the hall stays the Residents’ room; a deed the Heralds do not cry still happens.

Realm at War now opens with that shared half above your own board: the rebel lords of your kingdom, their companies, and what the Heralds said. You can ride on their keeps from the map. You can also invite one into your banner, and he answers by his temper — a lord who keeps behind his walls swears to nobody, a lone rider stays alone, and the rest accept a banner that still has room, where rebels may be no more than a fifth of the hall and Residents and rebels together no more than half. A sworn rebel appears on the roster under his keep’s name and counts toward it. The twenty promoted holdfasts have left the private PvE board of every signed-in player, so none is drawn twice; the other sixty are still yours to hunt.

A standing army eats a tenth

Troop upkeep, the game’s one deliberate food sink, is cut by 90%: from about 1.5 food a second per thousand troops to 0.15. It was sized for a mid-game host, and an endgame host is many times larger while the farms feeding it stop growing at the level cap, so a rate that was a real draw at ten thousand swords had become the wall that decided how big a keep could get. Ten thousand swords now cost 1.5 food a second. It is still a sink — a vast host still shows on the Food Ledger — and the guides quote the new figure.

The map heals in two days

Seats of Power, keeps and forts are drawn as buildings again. The pools that draw them were sized once, when the map first loaded, so every keep that streamed in or came into view afterwards drew nothing but its ring, its banner and its torches — which is how a Seat of Power came to look like an empty ring. The pools now grow with the map.

The marks a battle leaves now fade within 48 hours: a raid’s in six hours, a siege’s in 36 (it was two days) and a great burning’s in 48 (it was six days). In a long session they did not fade at all, because nothing redrew them; they now fade while you watch. And a broken Seat of Power refills within 48 hours, however long it has been held and however much has been invested in its defence. The Iron Throne, held for a month and fully invested, used to take 71 hours; a small seat keeps its own faster rate.

A count of every request, and what it keeps

Since v1.1.309 the site can count every request our host logs — not only the pages that run our banner script, but every file, image, feed and download, every page not found, and every request from a search engine, an AI crawler, a link preview or anything else automated. The count is read from the host’s own server log, which the host streams to our server once the owner connects that stream, a one-time step in the host’s settings. The count starts then; until it does, there is nothing to count. It is close rather than exact: counts wait on the server for up to 45 minutes before they are written, so a server that restarts can lose at most 45 minutes of them; a log line that arrives more than 36 hours late is refused rather than counted; and a line the host sends twice is counted twice.

For each day it holds how many requests there were; what was asked for; whether it was answered, redirected or not found; the hour; whether the thing asking described itself as a phone, a tablet, a desktop browser or a crawler, and for a crawler which company runs it; what kind of site referred it; which of our pages it was; and, for a page that does not exist, the address that was asked for (up to 160 characters, cut at any question mark), so broken links can be found and fixed. It holds no IP address, no cookie, no account and no browser string. The log line carries an IP address, which the count never reads, and a browser string, which is read once, reduced to the words above, and dropped. Because nothing in the count can tell one visitor from another, it is kept whether or not you accepted the analytics banner.

That count is new, and it replaces nothing. Every page you open is still recorded in the site’s analytics log, in order and with the time. What is recorded with it includes a first-party cookie that lasts two years and a second that marks your session; your IP address and the approximate location worked out from it; your browser and device; your screen and window size, and the language and time zone your browser reports; where you came from, and any campaign tags on the link you followed; and your account if you are signed in. The full list is on the privacy page. Visitors our host places in the EU or the UK are asked first, and none of that starts for them until they click Accept.

Every traffic store is now kept 400 days and then deleted, so one September can be set against the next. The identifier-free daily totals had been described on the privacy page as kept indefinitely while the code deleted them after 60 days; both now say 400. The hourly sweep that does the deleting was the last job in a heartbeat that the host killed at its sixty-second limit on 82 of about 1,800 runs in thirty hours, and a killed run never reached it. The heartbeat now keeps its own clock, and the sweep always runs. The whole policy, written against what the code does, is at what we record and why.

GM Mode: the belt follows the champion

A champion a rival promotion poached stayed champion. The poaching never looked at the titles, the roster then dropped the departed wrestler, and every belt label went on reading them through a lookup that could no longer find them — so a live career’s world title could be shown, held and “defended” by a bare roster id. Now a champion who leaves vacates the belt that same week (a tag title, if either partner leaves), with a note on Broadcast and the Office naming who left and, when a rival signed them, which one. Saves the bug had already reached are repaired when they load, and no screen prints a departed wrestler’s id any more.

A fence around the careers you already have

The redesign approved this week, the Contract Era, will change how a career works, and nobody’s career should change under them. So every career now records which rules it runs on, and today’s are Classic. Every release now has to replay a recorded twenty-week Classic career, week by week, through the desk’s own Run the show, and match the recording exactly — results, grades, ledger, titles and negotiations. It matched the desk from before this release on all twenty weeks. A save written by a newer version of the desk now opens read-only in an older tab, rather than being overwritten by it.

A desk that fits in a hand

On a 390-pixel phone the screen rail sat below the desk, some 2,400 pixels down a page about 12,000 tall, ran off the right edge with no way to scroll it, and left three of the nine screens out of reach. It now sits above the desk and scrolls, and all nine can be reached by touch; tapping a tab no longer drags the whole desk sideways. The booking form stays open between segments. A new segment’s purpose starts on establish or advance, depending on whether the people in it have met, rather than on filler. ⚡ Auto-book says what it did, or why it did nothing. And a search clears when you change screens.

Smaller and sturdier

Import now restores heel and face, the one field it used to drop. A corrupted or hand-edited save has any unreadable history row refused rather than carried into a rating. The Feuds screen stopped promising features that are not built. And the desk’s script now ships without its developer comments: 267,908 bytes down to 163,162, and 83,957 to 40,872 compressed, with all 36,470 of its code tokens checked identical, so nothing about how it plays changed.

The free tools: safe, true and fair

The clan tag generator shortens a name by dropping its vowels, and dropping vowels is how slurs get past filters. Measured on 24 September, all 97 clan names beginning “Night” offered a tag that began with the first three letters of a racial slur, and the 192 built on “Salt” and “Slate” squeezed to another offensive word. Clan tags can no longer spell a slur. A reviewed blocklist screens every candidate — the page carries it as hashes, never as the words — and the build checks all 3,307 names the generator can make, at every tag length, and refuses to ship if any still wears one. Exactly 289 names lose one of their two tags; every other name keeps exactly the tags it had, so a shared link changes only for those 289.

Plurals are fixed — Foxes and Wolves, with Trout and Pike left as they are. And copy the code contradicted is gone. The tools said “nothing is sent anywhere”, but every page on this site records the visit; they now say what is true — what you type or make stays in your browser, and opening the page is recorded like any other, with a link to what that means. The Great House quiz, which sends your answers to our server to be scored, is marked as the exception. Every tool page’s title and search description is now built from a template with every number read from the generator’s own lists or the game’s code, titles at most 57 characters and descriptions at most 150, and the build refuses one that quotes an example the generator cannot make.

Quizzes that are fair, and results you can share

Which dragon would you ride? could reach all eight dragons, but not fairly: counted over all 16,777,216 ways to answer its twelve questions, one dragon came up 44.6% of the time and another 0.32%. The answers are now re-centred so each question moves you relative to its own alternatives, and every dragon lands between 8.8% and 15.1%. Your result is a link you can share, and it carries the dragon and its name, never your answers. The commander and medieval-job quizzes now rank by how far your answers lean compared with random ones, rather than by a raw count, which took the job quiz from 0.6%–22.3% per office to 7.7%–9.3%; both now show your top three with a bar each. All three move focus properly, announce progress to a screen reader, label every bar and respect reduced motion.

What search and answer engines are told

An answer engine repeats a page’s description as fact, and ours were stating wrong ones: pages still counting the Residents at twenty-five or twenty-seven when there are thirty; the Navy page listing three hull classes when there are six; the Fan Zone naming six fan wings when there are eight, with 82 pages between them; the Great House quiz promising a verdict that was never a canned one, when the house’s own written portrait stands in whenever the AI cannot answer; and privacy lines that promised less collection than the site performs. All of that was corrected first. Then the front page, all 45 guide pages, all 23 article pages, the fan hubs, Talk to a Character and the quiz were rewritten to lead with the answer, inside 70-character titles and 160-character descriptions. A test now holds every indexable page to one title and one description of its own, and keeps those privacy promises out of every page head.

Smaller things

• The front door opens on Sign in. The splash used to open on Register with the way across hidden under the button, so returning lords filled in the sign-up form and were told the account already existed. It now opens on Sign in, with two equal choices first on the card — I’ve played before and I’m new here — and a sign-up with an address that already has an account moves you to Sign in with the email kept.
• Free companies stop sharing names. Rebel companies were named at random from ten stems, so a realm a few dozen turns old could show three different Broken Lances flying one tag. A new company takes a name nobody holds, a stem is numbered only once all ten are taken, and a saved realm with duplicates is healed on its next turn.
• A hidden tab closes the live stream. The realm’s live connection now closes when you switch away and reopens when you come back, and the chat said while you were gone arrives on your return rather than being skipped.
• The Residents’ heartbeat keeps its own clock. Marches settle and housekeeping runs on every beat; other jobs start only inside a 30-second budget, and once a beat is 25 seconds old, any Resident still to move takes his turn on the dice, the fallback his turn was always built around.
• Support can let a locked-out lord back in. Once you have shown support on Discord that the account is yours, support can now change the email it signs in with or set a new password, instead of editing the database by hand. A password change signs out every device, any reset link already sent stops working, and the change is logged with who made it.
• The Resident Blog stops failing on a cold server. The blog and its feed read the database before it was ready, so the first request to either on every freshly started server got an error — which crawlers and feed readers had been hitting, now and then, since the blog launched.

What is still not open

• GM Mode’s Contract Era. Contracts, a premium for booking talent from outside your roster, and an assistant called the Road Agent are an approved plan, not a shipped one. The lighter script, the belt fix and the fence above were its first two steps.
• More rebel lords. Twenty a kingdom is a first cohort. Growing it waits until after 5 October, one measured step at a time, and the design caps it at forty of the eighty, so at least half always stay private holdfasts.
• The rest of the free-tools plan. One action bar across the tools, an export and share kit, a dice roller and a random team picker, and deeper generators are planned, not built.
• A per-wrestler ratings archive and daily wrestling summaries. Both need a new database write path and stay deferred until the standing pause on new database work lifts in early October. Social sign-in waits on the same pause and on sign-in credentials the owner has yet to set up.
• A brand split. The Office’s Brand tile is still a reading of the promotion’s reach, not a second roster with its own economy.
• Photographs in GM Mode. Photographs of real wrestlers are being looked into. Only freely licensed files could ever ship, and none are in the game today.
• Everything here is pre-alpha. Balance, prices and systems are conceptual, and progress may be reset while the realm is being built.

No date is promised for any of it.

About Iron Realms

Iron Realms is a free-to-play browser strategy MMO of keeps, dragons, alliances and long winters, playable in any browser with no download and no account required to start. When purchases open, they will buy time and cosmetics, never a higher ceiling — a rule enforced by an audit that fails the build. The game is in pre-alpha and is built in public.

Press and player contact: Discord lordking_uhtred.