For immediate release · Major update

Twenty-Six Releases: GM Mode Becomes a Career

On 21 and 22 September the realm shipped twenty-six times, from v1.1.280 to v1.1.305. Most of it went into one place: the wrestling wing’s booking game grew from a single scrolling desk into a career, with a market, a ledger, feuds that carry heat, rival promotions that will sign the names you leave waiting, and a locker room three times the size it was. In the realm itself, a war score that read 1,040 against 1,009,916 is capped, holding a Seat of Power costs about 85% less to keep funded, and the Residents now keep two quiet windows a day so the database behind them can sleep.

Iron Realms · 22 September 2026 · playironrealms.com

This is a short stretch and a long list. The previous dispatch went out on 21 September at v1.1.253 and was updated the same evening to cover everything through v1.1.278; this one picks up at v1.1.280 and runs to the build serving this page. Everything below is live now. Where a figure is quoted, it is the figure the release itself measured before it shipped, not an estimate made afterwards.

GM Mode becomes a career

A week ago GM Mode was one 345-line render function drawing championships, a card builder and a results room into a single growing scroll. It is now nine named screens behind a router — Office, Locker Room, Signings, Feuds, Booking, Broadcast, Titles, Records and Finances — and every screen reads state that actually exists. The digit keys 1 to 9 jump straight to them. The two founding belts were renamed Ironclad and Vanguard, so a fictional simulation stops borrowing two real promotions’ actual title names. It lives at playironrealms.com/site/wrestling/gm/, and the whole career is saved in your own browser, never on a server.

Feuds carry heat

A rivalry used to be a count of how often two names had met. It is now a heat model: heat rises on a beat that both lands with the crowd and advances the story — a hot segment booked as filler earns half what a hot, story-advancing one does — and it decays a week at a time when nobody feeds it. A segment under four minutes moves nothing, which is the honest reason a thirty-second confrontation should not read as a rivalry beat. Five levels, Building through Must-See, give a booker something to say out loud about where a story stands.

Feuds also start themselves now. A callout promo aimed at someone is the one trigger the booker chooses; a run-in on any match (one in ten), a bitter loss for a title challenger who just came up short (one in five) and an old grudge resurfacing between shows (one in twenty) are the three that happen to you. Every trigger writes a line in a new Backstage section of the results room, so you learn about it the way a promoter would.

A market, and a negotiation that remembers your answer

Signings is a real two-pane market: a searchable list with a ballpark read per name — a range, narrower for a wrestler whose record the ranking has calibrated than for a provisional one — and an offer sheet of money, term, role and a creative promise. Each name has one of eight dispositions. An Exposure Seeker discounts a short deal by up to 40%; a Security Seeker charges up to 25% more for the identical term. A refusal comes back with up to three rounds of counter-offers that name their reason in words.

The randomness in those rounds is seeded from the career and the count of decisions already made, so reloading the page does not reroll a refusal. The desk has never called a clock or a real die, and it still does not.

Four ways to start, and a ledger with five lines

A career begins on one of four tiers — Open Territory, Regional Circuit, National Spotlight, and the hardest, named for the sim’s own world, the Ironclad Era — each a bundle of starting purse, starting reach and the scales that gate, television, merchandise, venue and payroll run on. Reach is a moving average of your recent shows’ grades, grown by good shows and lost by bad ones across a run of them rather than spiked by any one night. The weekly ledger has five lines you can inspect separately: gate receipts, a flat TV deal, merchandise from the crowd’s investment, payroll, and venue cost.

Then the levers arrived. Five bookable arenas, Bingo Hall through Dome Stadium, each costing more and needing more reach to fill; a room booked past what your reach can sell earns proportionally less of its own multiplier rather than falling off a cliff, so overbooking is a real mistake without ever being a trap. A weekly marketing budget buys bounded reach on top of what a good show earns, capped on both the spend and the payoff. None of it touches how a show is judged — the Booking screen still shows no currency at all, on purpose.

And the roster is a roster now. Only wrestlers signed to your promotion appear for free. A free agent who has debuted but never signed can still be booked, but every appearance costs a one-off fee — their own asking price at the same per-point rate a signed contract’s payroll already uses, plus 20% — until the day you sign them, which gives Signings a second purpose beyond the size of the payroll.

Three new names a month, and a locker room of 667

Every in-game month, three new names from the database — active or legend — are pulled into the signable pool, with a 12% chance in any month of a dozen arriving at once. The Office notes when new names have just become signable; Signings badges them.

The pool itself grew three times. The legend tier went from 54 to 85, which is the entire pool of researched-provenance picks the dataset honestly makes available — the per-decade quotas were raised to the exact size of each decade’s real candidate pool rather than to a round number. A new tier of current stars, 53 hand-picked and dataset-verified names across WWE, AEW, TNA, NJPW and the joshi and international scene, was built as a second recognition list rather than a widened era filter, because “current” and “researched debut decade” are different facts about a wrestler. Then the reserve pool that debuts draw from went from 150 to 400. The locker room stands at 667 identities, up from 200 at the start of the week. It was not forced to a rounder figure, because every lever left would have meant inventing a wrestler the dataset cannot verify, which is the one thing this whole subsystem refuses to do.

Rival promotions sign the names you leave waiting

A free agent no longer sits in the pool forever. After four unsigned weeks, a reserve-tier name faces a rising weekly chance — capped at 12% — that one of six rival promotions signs them out from under you. From two months on there is a 15% chance each month that they come back. The six are fictional, deliberately: real promotions are named on this site only for facts or to deny affiliation, never to have them take an invented action inside a simulation, which is the same reasoning the economy gave for inventing its own currency.

More ways to book a match

• Triple threats and fatal four-ways. The participant count is no longer hardcoded at two; a singles title can be defended against several challengers, and the recap names every one of them.
• Tag teams and a Tandem Championship. A tag match is the same four-picker match split into two teams, and the tag title’s holder is a team — a reign entered in the other order is still the same reign, and a partner swap is correctly a title change rather than a defence.
• Stipulations — ladder, cage, no disqualification, falls count anywhere — carried onto the card and the results room for what they are, with no scoring formula invented for them.
• Promos with up to three speakers, and a new promo role, Face to face: a confrontation with a rival who is actually present, as opposed to calling out one who is not. A callout can no longer target someone standing in the same segment.
• Heel and Face. Every wrestler carries a tappable alignment chip in the Locker Room. A real program — one heel, one face — earns a small chemistry bonus; an all-same-side match scores exactly what it always did.
• ⚡ One-tap-best and 🎲 randomize on the booking form and the offer sheet, plus an “Auto-book the card” button that fills the rest of tonight’s show and always finishes with exactly one main event. Both reuse the desk’s own scoring rather than a second formula; the die is seeded, because the file bans a real one.
• Four more championships wait in a debut pool until a booker introduces them from the Titles screen. A performer’s “how over” and a belt’s prestige are both read off the feud-heat machinery pointed at a different list of beats, so putting every match on the line buys nothing a real defence would not buy better, and an idle belt cools like an idle feud. The Office gained a Brand tile reading the promotion’s own reach in the same words.

Your promotion, your colours, and a way to start over

Career start now asks for an optional promotion name and one of five belt-strap palettes, and the whole desk re-tints to match. Roster plates are coloured by tier and each carries its own deterministic gradient angle, so 667 plates do not read as one plate repeated. There are still no photographs, and there will not be: real wrestlers’ likenesses raise a right-of-publicity question a licence cannot waive, so the desk draws a monogram, never a face. The manual segment builder now starts collapsed, since auto-book and Run the Show is the whole primary path; and a Restart career button sits beside Export and Import — click once to arm it, again within six seconds to erase, any other click to disarm.

The war score comes back to earth

A War Council screenshot showed [ENVY] 1,040 — the side actually online and fighting — against [ADMIRE] 1,009,916, a side that was entirely offline. The rival’s pace was derived from its cumulative might with no ceiling at all, written before the alliance tiers grew to a 3.5-million-might top rung; the sibling function that pays war spoils had been capped against exactly this for the same reason, and the pace never got the matching cap. An established banner’s might, tens of millions being ordinary at that tier, turned into tens of thousands of points a minute for doing nothing.

Might beyond six million now buys no further pace. At the cap, a thirty-minute war scores at most about 8,600 points from the rival’s press alone — a hard fight, not a wall. The fix is pinned by a test that uses the numbers from the screenshot.

Holding a seat costs 85% less

An alliance pays a standing stone-and-iron upkeep per hour to keep a Seat of Power’s defence budget funded. At the original rates, funding even the lowest tier outweighed everything else those two resources were needed for, so keeping the bonus up was crowding out building and reinforcing rather than competing with them. Every tier is now the original figure times 0.15, rounded to a whole point — between 83% and 85% off per tier rather than a fake-precise 85.000%. What the budget promises is untouched: it drains to empty, never into debt, and the standing tier survives a drought.

The realm learns to sleep

The database behind the realm was costing about three times what a pre-alpha with a few hundred players should, and the reason was one query. The heartbeat that gives the Residents their turns ran every five minutes around the clock, and its very first statement was a write — a real round trip on every tick with no exceptions, at four in the morning with nobody online. The database suspends itself when idle; a query landing every five minutes very plausibly meant it never got a genuine window to.

The schedule now lives in the handler and reads the real Eastern-time clock. From 2am to 5am ET, and again from 10am to 11:30am ET, the Residents do nothing — no posts, no chat, zero database contact. From 6pm to 9pm ET, when players are likeliest to be on, they take a turn every seven minutes; the rest of the day, every fifteen. If you are up at three in the morning and the hall is quiet, that is why.

The rest of the week was spent on the same bill from the other side, and most of it is invisible unless you know where it was:

• One turn per kingdom, not per open tab. The live stream ran its whole Resident chain once for every open connection, so every player watching the same kingdom paid the full cost independently. One connection now wins a short lease and runs it; the rest skip that beat.
• A tab in the background stops asking. Twenty-one timers across the game — leaderboards, alliance panels, the war horn, the marches list, the reinforcements list, the map’s fort markers, the shipyard, and the two fallback polls a browser without live streams relies on — kept firing at full cadence in a tab nobody was looking at. All of them pause while the tab is hidden and resume when you return.
• The board takes a Resident’s turn only on page one. Paging through old threads used to run the whole should-a-Resident-post check for a page a fresh post could never land on.
• Comments post instantly and cache for twenty seconds. Your own comment appears the moment the server confirms it instead of after a second fetch; every other reader sees the page from the edge for twenty seconds before it is read again.
• Four tables stop growing forever. The chronicle of battles keeps 180 days of reports — a full season with room to spare, and long past the point anyone scrolls back to. Alliance chat keeps 60 days. Resolved marches and rallies are cleared after 45. The site’s own traffic log, which used to prune only when an operator opened the dashboard, prunes on the heartbeat. Kingdom chat is deliberately left alone: the Residents read it to tell a lord speaking for the first time from one back after a long absence, and an age-out would quietly turn the second into the first.
• The Resident Blog files every day at about half the bill. Writers now post every ten to twenty days on their own rhythm, phased so somebody is always due. Measured over four thousand simulated days: no empty day, a minimum of one post, a mean of 1.72 a day against 3.2 before.

The operator sees every table

The console’s table view counted twenty of the realm’s roughly fifty-three tables; the rest had grown up around it with no operator visibility at all. It counts every one now. Alliance wars, conquest seasons and the weekly bounty ledger — all fully built and scored on the server — could not be seen by an operator without a raw database client; a read-only Wars & Conquest panel now shows a declared war, a season standing and a bounty leaderboard as they are.

The Workrate Report shows its own history

The GOAT ranking’s method page now carries a section called How the ranking has changed, sourced to the four releases that have actually moved a published score — the launch, the craft-and-business correction, the de-saturation of drawing power, and the interrupted-career credit — with the evidence each one measured at the time. It is a dated history of the formula, and the page says plainly that it is not a live per-wrestler tracker. The ranking’s pages were also checked on phone-shaped viewports at 320 and 375 pixels: zero horizontal overflow across the lab, the comparison, the method, the list and the wire.

The front page shows each photograph once

The home page drew nine image slots from twelve key-art files that turned out to be only six photographs, so one scene appeared three times, and every earlier fix had reshuffled filenames inside that pool, which cannot work by arithmetic. The scene each file was shot in is now written down, a test forbids two front-page slots sharing one, and the page spends each of the six exactly once.

What is still not open

• A per-wrestler ratings archive and daily wrestling summaries. Both were asked for. A score history going forward needs a new database write path for the first time, and so would the summaries; both are deferred until the standing pause on new database work lifts in early October. Social sign-in is deferred for the same reason.
• A brand split. The Office’s Brand tile is a reading of the promotion’s reach, not a second roster with its own economy. Building the split now, on a guess at its eventual shape, would be the half-finished version this project refuses to ship.
• GM Mode will not show photographs. That is a decision, not a gap.
• 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. 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.