For immediate release · Major update

The Hall Defends Together

Allies who cluster in one region now raise a wall over it. One button takes time off every bannermate’s build queue at once. A veteran can ride under somebody else’s banner for an hour. And two sea defects — a shipyard that had never heard of the harbour, and white surf painted over open ocean in the shape of Westeros upside down — are fixed and measured.

Iron Realms · 8 September 2026 · playironrealms.com

A hall that holds a region holds it together

Alliances have been able to reinforce one keep for a long time. What they could not do was benefit from being concentrated — two banners in the Riverlands and two in Dorne defended exactly as well as four scattered across the map, which is not how a border works.

Allied Seats of Power in the same region now defend each other. Every allied holding in that region beyond the first adds +5% to the defender, to a published ceiling of +30%. The seat under attack counts itself, so the second holding is the first that pays.

Three details that matter more than the number. The bonus is the server’s: it is computed where the battle is arbitrated, not offered by the defender’s browser. Both sides see it — the holder on their seat card and the attacker before they commit, because a wall nobody can see is a trap rather than a deterrent. And a seat held by a Resident raises no wall for you; the Residents are not your bannermen.

The ceiling exists for the same reason every ceiling in this game exists. A region an alliance could make arithmetically impregnable stops being a border and becomes a wall around the map.

One press, thirty halls

“Help” in this genre usually means a button your allies press for you. This is the other direction: 🤝 Help the hall takes sixty seconds off the longest-running build of every ally at once, up to thirty minutes of help in a single press, and then rests four hours.

It is deliberately the one button in the game whose entire effect happens to somebody else. Some rules keep it honest:

• An empty hall is refused before the rest is written. A press with nobody to reach would otherwise cost four hours and help no one, which is a trap a lord alone in a new banner would hit on their first day.
• It never spends the recipient’s own helps. The ordinary per-build help allowance a lord accumulates is theirs; this is a separate gift and does not eat it.
• Residents are skipped. Twenty-seven Residents in a hall would otherwise absorb most of a press, and they do not need the help.

Thirty allies at sixty seconds each is where the half-hour ceiling comes from: it is exactly a full hall, not a round number chosen to look generous.

A veteran in another lord’s saddle

You may now lend one commander to a bannermate for an hour. It is the first time anything a lord owns can be handed to another player.

The cost is real and is the point. While a commander is lent you cannot field them in either march slot — not the attack, not the defence — so the loan is a decision about your own hour, not a free favour. The borrower fights them at 80% of their strength, because a veteran who has never drilled with these troops is not the veteran who drilled with yours. One loan per lender at a time. And there is no recall: the hour runs. A loan you can cancel the moment it becomes inconvenient is not a loan, and a bannermate who has to plan around one is worse off than one who was never offered.

The betrothal panel keeps its promises

The betrothal panel had told lords for some time that breaking a betrothal costs thirty renown. It did not. Breaking a betrothal now costs the 30 renown the panel always said it did — the promise was the design, and the arithmetic was simply missing.

A sealed pact is worth +4% per pact, to a ceiling of +12%, and it is narrower than it sounds on purpose: it applies on attack only. Defence never sees a penny of it — a marriage is an alliance you can march with, not a wall you can hide behind.

The east keeps the promises it made

Relics have been findable in the east since the eastern seats opened. Two doors that clearly ought to have paid one did not.

A won reave now rolls once for a relic at grade II or below; a won sack rolls once at grade III or below. Each is once per lord, per door, per 24 hours — the same floor a seat capture has always had, and for the same reason: a relic that can be farmed on a three-hour raid cooldown is not a relic.

The ceiling is a ceiling, not a redistribution. The bands above the cap are trimmed, and the probability they carried is not handed down to the bands below — so a reave is genuinely a worse relic door than a seat, rather than the same door wearing a smaller hat. Pity does not advance on a capped roll either, for the same reason.

Two things about the blockade were also put right. It names the alliance banner and never a lord, which is the same rule that keeps a public leaderboard from being a target list. And its strength is re-read live at the moment it bites, so a peace shield raised after the order was given is honoured — a shield that only worked if you raised it before somebody decided to besiege you is not a shield.

Finally, the crossing refuses in a fixed and sensible order: harbour, then hulls, then a fleet already at sea, then berths. A lord with no ships at all should be told about the ships; a lord whose ships are simply elsewhere should be told that, rather than that their host is too great for a fleet that is not at the quay to be measured. An eastern seat asks the same questions in the same order before it changes hands.

Renown counts what it pays

Camps have paid renown since the wilds were repaced, and a captured seat has paid 25 renown per star. Neither counted.

Career renown — the figure the renown achievements read, and the one the Allegiance career line prints — was fed by some sources and not others, so a lord could grind the wilds for a week and watch a number that was supposed to describe their career sit still. Camp renown and seat-capture renown now both count toward it, and spending camp renown no longer lowers it: a career is what you earned, not what you have left.

No amount changed. It is still a third of its level rounded down from a level-8 camp, 25 per star for a captured seat, and 40 per keep level. This release moved nothing but the bookkeeping, which is exactly what it should have moved.

No ship without a harbour

The owner, looking at the game on 8 September: “Set up the system to build ships. It doesn’t seem to be connected to the harbor at all.” It was not connected at all, on either side.

Keels were laid from a section at the foot of the Marches drawer — not a room, not a door, just the last thing in somebody else’s panel — and it had never once read your harbour level. The Harbour’s own panel had a single button, “Send foragers east”, and at level 0 had none at all. On the server the shipyard route was alone among the navy’s routes in never asking about the harbour: seat battles ask, reaves ask, sacks ask. So a Keep-3 lord with no harbour could lay a war galley, and then be refused at the fleet ceiling with a sentence about a building the route had never looked at.

The Harbour is the shipyard now. It holds the keel list, the timer and the count. A harbour gives 800 berths per level from Keep 10 and permits ten keels laid per level — and the harbour is asked before the count, so a lord with neither hears the reason that actually matters. The Marches slipway is a signpost that opens the Harbour. The server reads the same crossing row the crossing gate reads, so there is one answer rather than two channels that can disagree, and it fails closed on a row it cannot read.

The cap binds when a keel is laid and never trims a fleet already afloat. Ships you own are ships you own.

The white shapes on the open sea were Westeros, upside down

Two iPhone screenshots on 8 September showed the open ocean carrying black patches, a flat cyan fill and a scatter of white outlines — an X, a ring of hexagons — miles from any coast.

The surf on this map is baked once as a distance field: a small square of data in which every point records how far it is from the nearest land, which the ocean shader reads to decide where to break white. It is not a picture, but it was being uploaded as one — and graphics libraries flip pictures vertically on upload, because an image’s first row is its top while the graphics pipeline’s first row is its bottom. For a photograph that is what you want. For a map of where the land is, it means every lookup returned the distance to land at the mirrored latitude.

So the sea wore a reflection of the coastline. At the exact coordinate in the screenshot, the true distance to the nearest land is 21.15 map units — open water by any measure — and the mirrored lookup landed on a shoreline at 0.00, which is full-strength breaking surf. The white X and the ring of white hexagons were Westeros and its offshore isles, upside down.

A second leak was found in the same pass: beyond the map’s own edge the field had nothing to return and was repeating its edge value across about six per cent of the visible quad. The foam is now bounded to the map’s own extent and the open sea outside it is simply sea. Both are pinned by a test that rebuilds the bake and the shader arithmetic and fails if the mirrored read ever comes back — it asserts that the mirrored lookup would light the owner’s coordinate, so the test cannot quietly pass over a feature that has been deleted.

One thing this release does not claim: the near-black ground in the same screenshots did not reproduce on the machine the fix was measured on, and the causes still under suspicion are named in the notes rather than declared fixed.

The sea reads as a sea, and the ground is the mesh

Three earlier graphics releases are worth recording together.

• The wave field moved into the shader on a flat plane. The sea used to be a dense grid of moving vertices, which at some zooms read as specks and at others as blobs. It is now computed per pixel, so it is a sea at every zoom — and when a newer build is waiting, the update toast says so. A black sea means a stale tab: reload.
• The sixteen landmark cairns are three stacked stones each — real models, freely licensed, measured on both sides of the change, with their author named on the in-game Credits screen.
• Rivers and roads lie on the ground. They were tubes with a radius, standing proud of the terrain: at close zoom the Mander read as a glossy blue pipe. They now lie flat on the mesh and taper from their springs.

Two data rights, promised and now performed

The privacy page has said since the analytics went in that you may ask for a copy of your data and ask for it to be erased. Both routes existed. Neither had heard of the visit records.

Export now includes your visits — the page, the referrer, the campaign tags, the coarse location, the device fields, the address and the browser string, each named on the privacy page rather than summarised — capped at the most recent five thousand, with the total and the fact of truncation both stated in the file, because an export that silently stops is worse than one that admits where it stopped. Erasure now unlinks every visit record from you, which is the honest verb: the row survives as an anonymous view for the aggregate counts, and it is no longer connected to an account.

This is the standing rule of this project’s analytics, and it cuts in the direction people do not expect: the public copy may never promise less collection than the code performs. It is not permission to collect more.

Also since the last dispatch

• The companion site stopped describing a realm that no longer exists. Four sweeps in a row took the site’s hand-typed figures away and derived them from the game’s own shipped constants instead — the pacing numbers, the eastern rules, the Hall’s three new tools, the seat and coast counts. Where a figure now appears on a guide, a test reads it from the code and fails the build if the two disagree.
• The stamina bar is a thousand and fills twice as fast, and the guides say so in the same words the game does.
• The operator’s console was split into rooms and every orphaned panel given a door. Nothing a player touches.

What is still not open

The same list as last time, one item shorter.

• No lord has ever raided another lord’s coast. The blockade reaches an alliance; a raid still reaches only the catalogued shores. Lord against lord at sea is the next piece.
• The plunder from a raid is still granted by your own client from the server’s answer, because there is no server purse to credit it into. The resolution is the server’s; the crediting is not yet.
• Your harbour level is still something your client tells the server, on the same honest-limit footing as your power — though every route that cares now reads the same published row rather than inventing its own.

No date is promised for any of it. Every figure on this page 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.