Chronicle of Updates

Patch Notes

What changed in Thronestead, release by release — newest first. These notes are written by hand by the team at each release.

Last updated: · Currently live: Build 1.22.0

Latest release

Build 1.23.0 — The Great Rebalance

The economy rebalance arrives — a top-to-bottom retune of how kingdoms earn, spend, fight, and trade: a faster, safer first week with a bigger starting grant and a 3-deep build queue; armies that eat real food and desert when unfed; a counter cycle and raid loot rules that protect active players and punish hoarding; spoilage, storage pressure, and idle-accrual limits so wealth must move; deeper crafting rewards with cross-component demand that makes trade matter; and prestige monuments as the endgame for mature economies.

Published: · Severity: Major · Track: Live World · Build Hash: TS-1230-eco

Read the full 1.23.0 notes below

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Release archive

1.23.0 — The Great Rebalance (2026-07-08)

Major · Downtime: None · Migration required: Yes (rolling)

  • A faster first week — the starting grant was raised across the board (copper, wood, and especially stone), and the build queue now lets you bank up to 3 upgrades at once, including several levels of the same building. During your 4-day founding shield, every build targeting level 10 or below finishes in a single tick, so a once-a-day player can realistically reach Castle 10 in the first few days. A small food safety net feeds your kingdom through the whole 7-day protection window (4-day full shield, then a 3-day taper).
  • Armies now march on their stomachs — every unit bills upkeep in both copper and food, scaled to its power. Food production is the real army cap: an army your farms can't feed deserts, most expensive units first. Deployed and locked units (patrols, spy missions, war commitments) keep billing while away, and unfed ones desert on return — no more parking troops to dodge the bill.
  • Combat has a true counter cycle: Infantry > Cavalry > Ranged > Infantry, with Siege as the only wall-breaker. Composition and scouting now beat raw numbers; walls genuinely hold until siege engines arrive.
  • Raid loot was rebuilt to protect active players and punish hoarders. A protected floor equal to your recent production is un-lootable; raiders take a percentage only of the excess, capped per raid and per attacker over time; 15% of loot burns in transit; and attackers always take real casualties (with a carve-out so tiny or hopelessly outmatched garrisons can't be ground to nothing). Fresh alliance scouting reports raise the take — raiding disciplined defenders loses money, raiding idle hoards pays.
  • Wealth must move: stockpiles held far above a working buffer now spoil a little each tick, storage caps burn overflow, producer sprawl past a generous free allowance pays an escalating upkeep surcharge, and a kingdom that takes no economic action for an extended stretch while sitting on a huge treasury stops accruing until it spends again. Goods listed on the market still count against storage and still spoil — escrow is not a shelter.
  • Market guardrails — the 3% sales fee is unchanged (now with a 1-copper minimum burn so dust trades pay too), listing prices must sit inside a wide fairness band around a reference price, each buyer has a rolling per-resource purchase cap, and stale listings now expire after about a day with escrow automatically returned.
  • Crafting pays more the deeper you go — refining margins now rise with chain depth, so specialists out-earn generalists. Facility recipe tiers unlock at levels 1 / 3 / 8 / 15 / 22 (castle gates apply), and from level 16 producer and refinery upgrades demand crafted components like planks and blocks — trade for what you don't refine. Elite troops keep one signature crafted input each; the deepest luxury craftables now feed the new monuments instead.
  • Monuments — the new opt-in endgame. Kingdom-scope dynasty monuments and alliance-scope wonders consume massive batches of high-tier crafted goods across many stages for prestige only. Alliance wonders support shared funding with pooled member contributions; no monument grants combat or economic power.
  • Alliance economy round-out: the high-tier alliance PvE raid shelves are finally reachable (rewards recomposed to stop undercutting crafter trade), group raid splits are contribution-capped so at least two real participants are always required, and shared scout intel makes coordinated raiding meaningfully more profitable. Solo play stays viable everywhere — friends make you faster, never mandatory.
  • Fair-play hardening from the exploit audit: locked units pay upkeep, market escrow can't shelter hoards from spoilage or caps, self-trades can't reset the idle-accrual clock, and a batch of raid- and market-side loopholes was closed.

1.22.0 — Targeting, Battle Tactics & Crafting Clarity ()

Minor · Downtime: None · Migration required: Yes (rolling)

  • Nation Finder — the War Room now opens with a "Find a target" panel: browse every reachable realm, search by name or number, sort by strength, age, or name, and filter by chips (All / In range / At war / Unaligned / Hit you), then Scout or Declare War straight from a row.
  • Battle tactics — battles are no longer click-and-wait. Choose a stance, formation, and target priority, change your plan while a war is still in flight, set a standing defensive doctrine, and read an hourly battlefield report — and the after-action report explains how each choice shaped the result.
  • War rebalance: whether you can declare on a kingdom, and how much you can loot, now key off total kingdom score (military + economy + governance) instead of combat power alone — so a zero-military economy can no longer sit in a low band and become un-attackable while it snowballs. The ±25% war-band declare gate is now actually enforced.
  • Alliance wars now resolve reliably even at zero casualties — a war where the attacker never breaches the wall still opens and settles its record instead of stalling, so the outcome and naming always land.
  • Profile is now a first-login dashboard: the page you land on after signing in leads with a compact welcome band, a Kingdom Overview status grid, a Needs Attention list of real problems with fix buttons, your active build/research/training/crafting/healing queues, the daily reward, and concrete recommended next moves.
  • Profile customization and edit fixes — pick any heraldic color pair for your colors (the contrast restriction is gone), and a batch of edit bugs is closed: your Realm Chronicle, motto, and featured achievements can no longer be silently wiped by an unrelated save, lapsed-VIP rulers are no longer locked out of saving, and stuck "Checking…" tiles now resolve.
  • Forge and Recipe Book split — the Forge now shows only recipes you can craft right now (with an honest empty state for a fresh kingdom), and a new Recipe Book reference chart lists every recipe and spells out exactly what each locked one still needs ("Build the Lumber Mill", "Castle Lv 6 (have 2)").
  • Scriptorium (research) redesign — research is grouped by status (In progress / Available now / Locked), completed work moves to its own archive, every card shows cost, time, and a headline effect, locked cards name the exact next step, and the inspector shows what each node unlocks with clickable jump links.
  • Home now points at the right opening moves — the "next move" recommendation follows a designed build order (wood → stone → food → barracks → the wider producers) instead of surfacing the costliest affordable building.
  • Policy balance: enacting a governance doctrine is now a substantial treasury sink (80,000–480,000 copper) to soak up idle-economy copper hoarding.
  • FAQ and Codex rewritten (/faq, /lore) to match what the live build actually does, so a new player's expectations line up with the game.
  • Stability and polish: flag-ribbon mottos stay legible on any field color, the leaderboard's sort/filter/search controls now sit with the rankings table, and Declare War / Espionage deep-links from public profiles target the right nation.

1.21.0 — Identity, Safety & War Integrity ()

Minor · Downtime: None · Migration required: Yes (rolling)

  • Player and alliance identity overhaul — public profiles were revamped, and every player and alliance name now renders consistently across the whole game.
  • Alliance customization: alliance applications, a message of the day, heraldry (flag, crest, and background), custom roles with granular permissions, and richer public alliance pages.
  • War naming — wars now carry generated names, and the leader of the victorious alliance can seal a war's final name into the record.
  • Today-at-Court rulings finally matter: a court decision that shifts copper now applies a real economic modifier for the week instead of being silently discarded, and the panel shows the effect you'll actually receive. Most rulings previously did nothing.
  • Home's focal "Hold court" button now opens the pending court matter instead of scrolling in place, and it uses the clean canonical link.
  • Policy balance: Austerity Measures is no longer a trap pick whose own penalty undercut its benefit.
  • Community safety — automatic moderation now covers every chat message, private message, profile, and name, catching profanity, threats, personal-info leaks, and scams (including filter-evasion tricks), with warnings, timeouts, and bans for repeat offenders.
  • War reliability overhaul: fixed a class of bugs where wars declared in-game could stall and never resolve. Casualties, wounds, dispatches, loot, and war/battle scoring now record and settle correctly, and reports and notifications no longer leak or sit empty.
  • Reports, notifications, and admin controls now lead with the essentials and expand on demand instead of dumping raw data.
  • Moderation and admin tooling: a new Control Center for the team — message moderation, player oversight, a name-change ledger, and emergency freeze switches — plus a hardened, fail-closed admin dashboard with a step-up passphrase lock.
  • Stability sweep: fixed the "Admin dashboard failed to start" page, humanized error banners so an upstream hiccup no longer reads as a crash, and closed a month's worth of audited deferred defects across war, economy, identity, frontend, and infrastructure.

1.20.0 — Social, Live Chat & Clean URLs ()

Minor · Downtime: None · Migration required: No

  • Live chat shipped to the in-game HUD — global rooms split by language plus a dedicated alliance channel, with a dockable panel you can minimize without losing your place.
  • Social features, first wave: build Friends and Enemies lists and send peer Commendations to rulers you respect.
  • Public profiles expanded — every player name across the site is now clickable through to a public profile, and profiles show kingdom age in years, months, and days.
  • Clean, shareable URLs sitewide: pages now serve at paths like /castle_keep and /faq, legacy .html links redirect automatically, and signed-out deep links land on a clean sign-in page instead of a 404.
  • Mobile is now a proper installable app — add Thronestead to your home screen for a native feel with safe-area insets and tuned touch response. Content cards, market figures, and two-column grids no longer crush or overflow on phones.
  • The light-parchment "illuminated" reskin rolled across the live game UI, continuing the manuscript look from the public site into the kingdom HUD and panels.
  • Resource bar hovers now show production per tick on every resource, plus a Copper revenue breakdown, so you can read your economy at a glance.
  • Naming flow for Google sign-up: a prompt now lets you name your kingdom right after signing in.
  • Navigation streamlined — the standalone Statecraft door was retired and its surfaces folded into Alliance, Military, and Kingdom; the Hearth page was retired with its workforce breakdown moving to the HUD population hover.
  • Economy correctness: quest copper rewards now respect a 24-hour cap, farm-yield drift was closed, and building incentive math was audited and corrected.
  • Stability sweep: restored mouse-wheel scrolling on pages where a global fix had missed, fixed kingdom-rename errors and identity-edit data loss, hardened double-submit guards on social and alliance actions, and cleared a full dead-click / no-op pass across the UI.

1.19.0 — Illuminated Manuscript & Performance ()

Minor · Downtime: None · Migration required: No

  • Design system reshaped toward an illuminated-manuscript medieval look — shared manuscript layer, Cinzel Decorative and EB Garamond typography, four sitewide ornaments, and a cohesive vellum-sheet page surface replacing the per-panel card stack.
  • Three new hubs surfaced — The Keep, Statecraft, and Treasury — and Training, Military, and War Room consolidated into a single War Council hub for clearer command flow.
  • Persistent SWR cache shipped for slow-changing endpoints; cache invalidation now follows governance, market, alliance, and rename mutations so the UI sees fresh truth after writes.
  • Landing-page polish: proper wax-seal sigil, lighter hero scrim, explicit SVG dimensions to prevent layout shift, and honest meta copy.
  • Copy sweep across player-facing pages — defeat-state, sticky, tick-boundary jargon scrubbed; placeholder text cleaned; hub-page headings normalized; oversharing removed from the player view.
  • Foreign-key integrity hardened: auth.users deletions now SET NULL or CASCADE correctly across kingdom-scoped tables, FK indexes added where coverage was missing, and a validator runs in CI.
  • Tick-path savepoint hardening — tick resolution rolls back safely on partial failures rather than leaving derived state half-applied.
  • Cloudflare Workers configuration added for static frontend deploys.

1.18.0 — Engine, Combat & Sign-In Polish ()

Minor · Downtime: None · Migration required: No

  • Tick runner correctness and determinism hardened — turn resolution is more consistent under load and safer on retries.
  • War, combat, and defeat lifecycles closed several edge-case completeness gaps; allied dispatch records can no longer linger in limbo.
  • Resource ledger now enforces faucet authority and balanced transfers end-to-end, preventing rare conservation drift.
  • Login, signup, and email verification flows repaired: captcha bootstrap restored on signup, three login happy-path breaks fixed, post-signout no longer bounces to Overview, and verify-email no longer outruns its lifecycle cache.
  • Realtime WebSocket reconnect unblocked; public mobile menu drawer is now functional and the desktop layout no longer shows a redundant Menu button.

1.17.0 — Deploy Stability & v5 Foundation ()

Minor · Downtime: Brief rolling redeploys · Migration required: Auto-heal on boot

  • End-to-end deploy chain stabilized — API, tick runner, cron workers, and the static frontend boot cleanly on every release path.
  • Migration runner self-heals checksum and re-apply drift, so production restarts no longer stall on previously-applied policy updates.
  • Realtime publish, outbox, and fanout pipeline hardened from server to client — fewer dropped events under load.
  • Persistence completeness sweep: write paths that were silently rolling back now actually commit, and silent-fallback modes outside the tick engine surface clear diagnostics.
  • Foundation for the v5 design system scaffolded behind isolation — no visible changes yet, but the runway for the next visual refresh is shipped.
  • Landing polish: hover flicker on lane chips, the world-tick pill, and the tick-loom wheel removed.

1.16.1 — Auth Lifecycle & VIP Launch ()

Patch · Downtime: None · Migration required: No

  • Cross-subdomain login reconciled — navigation between the web app and the API no longer drops sessions, and bearer/cookie surfaces are aligned.
  • Full auth/session audit closed across cookie, bearer, and admin paths; logout ordering and same-origin probe handling repaired.
  • VIP subscription tier shipped alongside a public donate page; one-time supporter flow preserved.
  • Statecraft Preview door added so Diplomacy, Espionage, Patrol Watch, and Peace Negotiation surfaces are reachable from the unified action dispatcher.

1.16.0 — Action Surface Activation ()

Minor · Downtime: None · Migration required: Yes (rolling)

  • Alliance, Vault, Treaties, and Officer actions are now actionable — not just viewable — through the unified action dispatcher.
  • World navigation exposes entry points to Bank, Community, Achievements, Population, Production, and World News that were previously orphaned.
  • War Room adds a dedicated Battle Command surface, a force-composition picker at war declare time, and a "Help My Ally" reinforcement loop visible across Alliance, War Room, and Battles.
  • Profile and Settings now persist to the server: kingdom rename, sigil/portrait/title/flag heraldry pickers, and UI/gameplay preferences all save reliably.
  • Market Buy now verifies coin affordability and warehouse capacity up front instead of failing silently later in the tick.

1.15.0 — Public-Site Cohesion & Stability Sweep ()

Minor · Downtime: None · Migration required: No

  • Patch Notes now uses the same public-site visual system as homepage and login-style surfaces.
  • Service Status banner spacing and border treatment now resolve through shared page-surface CSS.
  • Patch Notes fallback copy updated to show clear user-facing error guidance when live status cannot be fetched.
  • Release archive normalized to newest-first ordering.

1.14.1 — Alliance Command & Policy Completion ()

Minor · Downtime: None · Migration required: No

  • Unified Alliance surface shipped with Overview, Members, Vault, Treaties, War Coordination, Changelog, and Shared Objectives tabs.
  • Terms, Privacy, and Code of Conduct expanded to full production legal-policy scope.
  • Alliance UI accessibility and fallback handling improved for slow endpoints.

1.13.2 — Public Landing and Readiness Polish ()

Patch · Downtime: None · Migration required: No

  • Public-facing onboarding copy and first-session signposting refined.
  • Homepage teaser and patch metadata affordances aligned with canonical public APIs.
  • Route normalization and surface readiness checks tightened before release gates.

1.13.0 — War Timeline Contract Expansion ()

Minor · Downtime: 5-minute maintenance window · Migration required: No

  • War timeline stage names standardized across UI and backend contracts.
  • Support, recon, and recall timing aligned with deterministic phase transitions.
  • Alliance-level alert categories expanded for event delivery.

Known issues

Curated by hand alongside each release. Check here before filing a bug — if yours isn't listed, please report it.

  • Partial tab hydration: Under high latency, one or more Alliance tabs may briefly show fallback cards before live data arrives.
  • Large roster scrolling: Member lists exceeding 80 entries may cause scroll stutter on low-memory mobile devices.
  • Support confirmation delay: Ticket confirmations for legal and privacy categories may be slow during major policy deployments.
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