For immediate release · Major update

The Map Redrawn

Twenty-eight castles join the map and the Wall becomes a region of its own. A seat's stars are read off what it grants rather than off the colour of its banner. The stamina bar holds a thousand and fills twice as fast, camps pay renown, and the two defects that rendered the realm and the sea black on a phone are fixed — and photographed.

THE SEVEN KINGDOMS, 3 September 2026 — Fifteen releases since the last dispatch, and most of them are about the map: what is on it, what a piece of it is worth, and whether it renders at all on the phone in your hand. What follows is what a lord will actually notice.

Twenty-eight castles, and a tenth region

The realm held 142 seats. It holds 170. Twenty-three are canon holds the map had simply never placed — Greywater Watch, the Bloody Gate, Oldstones, Starpike, the Crag, Ninestars, Harvest Hall, Ghost Hill, Iron Holt, the Lonely Light and the rest — and five more arrived with the decision that made them possible.

That decision is the tenth region. The Wall was three castles filed under the North, which is a fact about a map projection rather than about the world: the Night's Watch takes no part in the realm's wars and holds no lands in it. It is its own region now, with Castle Black at its head, the Shadow Tower and Eastwatch beside it, and the Nightfort, Deep Lake and Queensgate joining them along the ice. Hardhome and Craster's Keep stand north of it.

The Watch does not vote. The Crown Council is still nine seats and its quorum is still five, because the ninth region of the Seven Kingdoms is not the tenth region of the map. A region now says whether it answers to the crown, and the Wall says no — so it takes no council chair and grants no regional charter, and the arithmetic that decides a policy is exactly what it was.

Six seats also flew the wrong banner, and every one of them flew the banner of a castle in the list above — the Paps and Pebble under House Shett, Sunhouse under Hewett, Dunstonbury under Footly. They were invisible individually and obvious as a set, so the guard that now watches them tests the duplication: two seats flying one house is a question the build asks, with five named exceptions that each have to earn their place.

A star means something now

Every seat carries a rating from ★ to ★★★★★, and until this release it was decided by whether anyone had ever picked a hex colour for the holding house. That put 121 of the 170 seats at one star while 132 of them were held by a named House. The rating described the palette, not the map.

It is now read off two things a player can see on the seat card: what the seat grants, and whether its house has words. The spread that produces is 38 / 54 / 63 / 14 / 1 across one to five stars — 78 seats worth three stars or better, against 15 before. Every great castle is four stars now, Lord Paramount or not: the old rule separated Oldtown and Lannisport from Winterfell on the question of who sleeps there, which is politics rather than walls.

Stars pay. A seat's own bonus multiplies with its rating — ×1, ×1.25, ×1.5, ×2 and ×2.5 — so a hold that granted +12% grants +18% at three stars, and the fourteen great castles pay double what they author. That half shipped a release earlier; this is the half that decides which seats get it.

And they cost more, which is the honest half. A star has always set the garrison as well as the reward, so lifting sixty-three holds a rank would have made most of the map two to six times harder overnight if nothing else moved. The three-star garrison is re-baselined from 2,550 to 1,600 and re-described: it used to be five great castles, and it is now sixty-three holdfasts, so it is priced as the top of the holdfast band rather than the bottom of the castle band. Nothing got easier — every seat that sat in that row left it upward in the same change, and the four- and five-star rows did not move at all. The easy band is still five to thirteen seats deep in every one of the ten regions, so no lord is left without a first target near home.

No seat was ever rated down. That is a safety rule, not a courtesy: a seat's wall ceiling is computed from its stars on every read, so a seat that loses a star loses walls an alliance has already paid stone and iron to build. The old ladder is kept as a floor, two seats need it, and a check refuses the build if a third ever appears.

A thousand-deep bar, filling twice as fast

Stamina held 100 and regenerated at one a minute, which is a bar that fills in an hour and forty minutes and then wastes everything after it. That quietly demanded two or three visits a day and gave a working day nothing. The cap is 1,000 and the rate is 2 a minute, and the two numbers do different jobs: the cap buys forgiveness — a lord who visits once a day banks eight hours and twenty minutes of regeneration instead of a hundred minutes — and the rate buys volume, moving the day's total from 1,440 to 2,880. Costs are untouched and absolute, so what changes is the size of a sitting: a full bar was five strikes on a level 30 camp and is now fifty.

Camps pay renown. They never had, and the commanders guide had been telling players for months that a captured seat did too. Both are true now: a camp pays ⌊level/3⌋ from level 8, a captured seat pays 25 × its stars, and a keep level pays 40 rather than 25. Trials, tourneys, musters, riddles and the Sky Trial all moved up with them.

The renown is paid at the door that charges the energy, and that is deliberate. The obvious place was the creature reward — but the named-beast hunt costs no energy and has no cooldown, so a renown field there is a lord clicking one beast forever. Binding it to the rationed resource is what makes a stamina bar a pacing lever rather than a formality.

The store delivers what it prints

The packs had stopped holding their value for a reason nobody had guessed: they were not paying out. The purchase loop handled gems and resources and silently dropped everything else — eleven rewards across the catalogue, four speed-up bundles, five cosmetics and two builder slots, printed on the cards and never granted. A Lord's Inheritance advertised 150 hours of speed-ups, a second builder and the Dragonstone keep skin, and delivered none of the three. Three cosmetics did not exist at all, two of them the entire product of their SKU: buying the Winterhold keep skin left the keep its old colour.

All eleven are granted. A walk of the whole catalogue now refuses a reward whose id nothing can look up, and the loop fails the build rather than shrugging when a new kind of reward arrives.

Seven new packs join them, sized against the existing ladder rather than by feel, and a wineskin that sells hunting time the way the market has always sold building time — priced from the regeneration rate itself, so it costs exactly the wait it replaces and re-prices itself if that rate ever moves again. Four new bag items, four market listings and five gear pieces land beside them.

The Ransom of Kings is not a loot box, and the difference is stated rather than asserted. What is occasional is the shelf, never the contents: it holds the same published goods every time it appears, once per lord ever. And the one-in-twenty-five is a rate rather than a roll — every lord gets a stable offset from their own founding and sees it on every twenty-fifth visit, so it is exactly one in twenty-five for everybody and reproducible after the fact. No countdown, no stock number, no urgency.

The realm was black, and so was the sea

Two separate defects, both visible on a phone, both fixed, and both settled in a rendered frame rather than argued from source — which matters, because three earlier diagnoses of this map were wrong.

1,642 instances rendered black at the home pose. Fourteen instanced pools — the seats' keeps down to the base, wall, drum, strip, trim, dome, finial, turret and cap, plus the camp markers, the rebel holdfasts and the resource markers — had two colour systems switched on at once. One of them reads a colour attribute off the geometry, and none of these geometries has one, so the shader multiplied every surface by zero: unaffected by light, shadow, fog or tone mapping, at every quality tier and on every device. The only part of a keep still visible was its windows, which are the one pool that never asked for it. That is exactly what the reports showed.

The sea was a black starfield. Three materials write their own output — the ocean, the peace shield and the banner — which puts them outside the pipeline that tone-maps and encodes everything else, so a linear colour went straight into an sRGB canvas about four times too dark. It was invisible on a desktop because the post-processing pass at the highest quality tier performs that encode itself and accidentally covers for them. Every iPhone runs a tier below that, where there is no such pass; on a phone the sea, alone among the surfaces on screen, was written raw.

Both fixes carry a source check that refuses the combination, because neither failure is visible to a test that cannot open a GL context.

The harbour was standing in the godswood

Its plot sat one unit from the heart tree, against a tree kerb nearly three across. The weirwood grew through the quay, the two name labels landed on each other, and from Keep 10 the heart tree's tap target — which is the entire Godswood Shrine — was underneath a building. It has moved to the seaward flank, clear of the grass.

All four second plots overlapped as well, and the courtyard itself now grows: the yard, the curtain wall and every plot derive from one number, and the name chips space themselves in screen terms rather than world terms, because a chip is a fixed width no matter how far apart the stone is. A pairwise separation check runs over the layout at every level, so no plot can quietly grow into its neighbour again.

The east answers a tap

Tapping a Free City opened a bronze card that named the place and offered a "Sail on" button. Every eastern city now hands its tap up exactly as a Westerosi seat does and draws a real panel — a separate panel, because the western one offers attack, rally, reinforce, repair and the bestowing of a title, and a row of disabled buttons reads as a broken screen rather than as a frontier.

The eastern card answers the two questions a lord standing off that coast actually has: what the city grants whoever holds it, and whether this lord's own harbour and hulls could carry a host there. The second is read from the same check the gathering screen and the launch itself use, so the three can never disagree.

What is still not open, said plainly: you cannot take an eastern seat. The east is on the map, lit, named, tapped and gathered from, and it remains uncontestable — so 170 contestable holds is the honest count, and a check fails the build the hour that stops being true. No date is promised.

Two new guides

The navy has been playable for some time and had no page. The Navy and the Crossing is the whole sea in one place: three hulls and what each is for, the three-hour reave cooldown and the four coasts worth raiding, the alliance armada and the blockade's published ceiling, and the harbour arithmetic that decides whether a host can sail east at all.

Essos is the other one — what stands on the far shore today, what a lord may actually do with it, and, at equal length, what they may not.

Fixes

Forty-five drawers, five of them ever opened by a test. Three times a panel has shipped with a selector that will not hold still, which React answers by re-rendering until it gives up; the Keep & Market drawer was dead on every device for four days that way. Every drawer is now opened by the build, against the state a new lord is actually in, and the sweep found a fourth on its first run — in the seat rail, the panel that opens on every seat tap in the game. It never crashed; it simply re-rendered the whole rail every time anything in the realm ticked.

Every vendored asset names its maker. A licence check refuses any art whose terms this project may not use, and refuses them by name rather than by looking for the acceptable ones first — because "CC BY" is a substring of "CC BY-NC", and a guard that searches for the good string accepts the bad licence.

Ninety-nine seats granted nothing. A seat's bonus was written in one place and read in another, and the two had drifted; the text on the card, the figure in the guide and the number the battle applies are composed from one source now.

Also since the last dispatch

• Three guide pages said the realm held 142 seats while the page's own summary said 170. The phrasing that escaped every check has been added to it, and it found two more.
• The seats guide's tier table said 127 holdfasts against a catalogue holding 155 — three lines under a total that was right. The breakdown is checked against the catalogue now, not just the total.
• Granted energy survives the ceiling: a lord at 900 handed a draught of 2,000 keeps it. Regeneration still stops at the cap; a grant is no longer destroyed by it.
• A queued build can be called off.
• A build stuck at "0:01 remaining" for ten hours was a queued build wearing a running build's clock.
• The bestiary promised "a full bar overnight regardless", which was already false before the cap moved. Both energy guides are pinned to the constants now, including the time to fill.

What this dispatch does not claim

The east cannot be taken. The navy cannot yet fight another lord's navy. The relics minted on the far shore are not in a player's hands. Nothing here is a promise about when any of that arrives, and every page on this site is checked against the shipped constants precisely so that the difference between what is built and what is planned stays visible from the outside.