For immediate release · Major update

The East Opens

Every seat in Essos can be taken. The realm counts 191 contestable holds rather than 170, Braavos and Volantis stand beside King's Landing as the world's only five-star seats, and the sea is the price of all of it — a crossing costs hulls, and the server now checks your harbour before it will hear the assault.

Iron Realms · 3 September 2026 · playironrealms.com

Twenty-one cities, and the count that had to move with them

Essos has been on the map since the crossing shipped — lit, named, sailed to, gathered from — and not one foot of it could be held. That ends today. All twenty-one eastern seats are contestable, which takes the realm from 170 contestable holds to 191.

That number is not a marketing figure. Until this release the site said 170 everywhere and a check failed the build if any page said otherwise, because the east was dark-launched and 191 would have been a boast about ground nobody could fight over. The same check now insists on 191, for the mirror-image reason: a site still saying 170 would be hiding twenty-one holds it ought to be advertising. Forty-four claims across twenty-nine pages moved in one commit, along with the star bands and the tier table, because a page that quietly disagrees with the game is worse than a page that says nothing at all.

Braavos and Volantis are five-star seats — the only two in the world outside King's Landing. Seventeen great castles now rather than fourteen, and ninety-two seats worth three stars or better.

An eastern seat is stormed, never claimed

There is no claim button on a Free City and there is not going to be one. A claim is a client saying “I fought this and won”, and a single message carrying twenty-one eastern ids would own a continent. Every eastern capture is arbitrated by the server — which had been ready for this for two releases, and was waiting on a game client that knew the east existed.

Holding one does everything holding does: the buffs go live, the tribute pays on the hour, the walls heal on the clock a Westerosi seat's heal on, and you may name a Castellan. That an eastern seat is worth no throne points is deliberate — the Iron Throne is a Westerosi title, and a hold on the Rhoyne does not vote in it.

The camps of the east pay three times, and in a coin the west does not mint

A camp across the water yields three times the haul of a western one at the same level, double the gems, and half again the commander experience. Three different multipliers rather than one, because they are three different kinds of reward: the haul has to pay for the ships, gems buy time and a faucet that scaled with the haul would make the east the way to buy the game rather than to play it, and a commander's level is power — so a lord who never sails must still be able to finish their roster.

And Valyrian steel, one ingot per twelve levels of the host you break. No hunt anywhere in Westeros drops a single ingot at any level, and none ever has. It is a trickle rather than a tap — a level-forty host yields three — so gathering iron and taking great seats remain the bulk sources.

Every crossing costs ships

Stamina refills for free. If the crossing cost nothing but stamina, Essos would simply be a better western board: triple spoils on the same bar, forever, from the day the harbour went up. So the sea takes hulls — more on a beaten retreat than on a won crossing, scaled by how full the decks were, and never your last ship. Hulls cost wood and iron, so eastern spoils buy the next crossing, and a careless lord runs out of ships rather than out of time.

The toll is printed on the battle report beside the haul it paid for, including on the reports that came home beaten. A cost you only see when you win is a cost you learn about from the fleet panel a day later.

The strike that used to walk across the water

Until this week a lord with no harbour, no ships and no fleet at all could strike any of the hundred and twenty eastern camps. Marches in this game are straight lines and know nothing of the sea, and the camp strike never asked where the camp stood. The crossing gated gathering from the day it was built, and gated nothing else.

It gates both now, and the refusal costs nothing: a barred strike spends no stamina, no troops and no ships, and it names the missing thing — no harbour, then no ships, then host too great — in the order you would build them. Nor does a crossing refuse a great army: it carries what the decks hold and leaves the rest at home.

One thing fixed on the way. A hundred and twenty eastern camps were standing on a map that could not draw them: the marker pool was sized for four hundred, the board became five hundred and twenty the day the east was seeded, and the library that draws them discards anything past its limit without a word.

Eighteen seats that promised a bonus and granted nothing

A seat card in Iron Realms is a promise — hold this, get that. Eighteen seats promised Scout range +12%, seventeen of them in Westeros and reachable today, and not one ever changed a single report. The bonus went into the total, the Realm Buffs panel printed it, and nothing downstream read the number.

It works now: sharper reports on a seat's garrison and a longer look at hosts on the road, from one buffed level so both kinds of sight improve together. Three more stats in the same condition — trade income, march capacity, and the one that slows an enemy's march — were wired at the same time.

This is the seventh promise of this kind we have found and the fourth release that has had to fix one, so what ships this time is a test rather than a patch. It reads every stat any seat in the world grants, reads what the game actually consults, and fails the build on the difference, by name. It was proved to bite before it was trusted.

The server counts your ships

Opening the east put the crossing check in the game client, which is the wrong side of the wire for a rule about who may take a city. Your harbour level and your berths now ride the same beat that already carries your power and your garrison, and the server refuses an eastern assault the published figures could not have reached — before it stamps any cooldown, so a refused assault costs nothing and cannot be used to burn a rival's next blow.

We will say plainly what that is and is not. It is the trust model the seat war has always run on: a modified client can publish a harbour it never built. What it can no longer do is publish nothing at all. The version that cannot be lied to — ships minted by the server into a ledger no client can author — is the next piece of the navy, and this one is shaped so that it slots in without moving anything built on top of it.

Also since the last dispatch

• Essos is a region, the eleventh, beside the Wall and the nine kingdoms — with its own martial tradition (the Free Companies, and their sellsword horse) and its own card on the world map.
• A charter door that never asked whose realm it was. The regional charter route accepted any region id, which meant the Wall — which answers to no crown and votes in no council — had been charterable since the day it became a region.
• The harbour reached the server's own building catalogue, which had never heard of it. That list feeds the rules service, the sourcebook the Residents read, and the fairness simulation — all three described a city with no harbour in it while lords were raising one.
• Nine more catalogue divergences recorded rather than quietly closed. Seven building kinds exist only in the game client and two only on the server; both lists are named in a test that lets them shrink and never grow.
• Forty-five drawers, every one opened by a test — after two of this year's three interface freezes turned out to be in panels no test had ever mounted.

What is still not open

This section is as load-bearing as the rest of the page, and it is shorter than it was this morning.

• Trade pacts do not pay out on the beat. Every city has an exchange rate and a ledger; the payment machinery is unfinished.
• You cannot sack a city, and no navy has ever fought another lord's navy.
• The relics minted on the far shore are not yet in a player's hands.

No date is promised for any of it. Every figure on this site is checked against the game's own shipped constants on every build, which is why the line between what is built and what is planned stays visible from outside the studio.

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. Purchases 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.