Koria Vault runs continuously on one shared map that has no edge. You can close the tab. Your people carry on. Whether that sounds appealing or alarming depends on something we had to get right first, so let us start there.
Nothing ticks
There is no server loop stepping the world forward. Every rate in a holding is constant between events, so what your people did overnight is worked out when somebody looks, not simulated frame by frame while nobody does.
That is a technical fact with a plain consequence: the game is always running, and it is never running fast. A woodcutter who has been at it for nine hours has nine hours of timber. Not a decayed fraction, not a catch-up bonus. Nine hours.
The map is found, not stored
There is no world size because there is no world file. Every hill, seam and stand of timber is decided by where it is, so a place is the same place whether or not a living soul has ever stood on it. Ride in any direction long enough and there is more country — not a wall, not a loading boundary, just more.
Nothing is written down until somebody changes it. The database holds what has been built, taken or seen, and everything else is arithmetic on a coordinate. That is how the map can be endless and still cost nothing to keep, and it is why two players a thousand tiles apart are provably looking at the same ground.
New realms are founded a few hundred tiles from two existing neighbours, and that lattice walks outward forever. It is what holds a shared world together without a fence around it.
Being asleep is not the same as being helpless
You can be attacked while offline. In an asynchronous game that is unavoidable and pretending otherwise would be a lie. What is designed against is waking up with nothing.
Losses are partial rather than total. Buildings are damaged rather than deleted. An army carries a standing order and a rally point, so a war is lost by having authored the wrong plan — not by having been asleep when it happened. Being present is an advantage, because you can watch a battle and step into it. It is not a requirement, because a holding is a standing arrangement rather than a session.
The design target is checking in twice a day. No login streak. No five-minute window. No timed event you have to be awake for. The one real cost of being away is a depot that fills and stops gaining, and that is deliberate: a game where logging off for a week is the optimal move has no loop.
Neighbours you did not choose
Because the map is one continuous country rather than a set of instances, the people near you are simply near you. Distance costs time continuously — near is cheap, far is a decision, and there is no threshold where the price suddenly jumps. That gradient is the entire reason neighbours matter, and it is why the first thing you learn about a stranger is how far away they are.
Alliances follow from that rather than from a menu. A pact with someone four days’ march away is a different instrument from a pact with the holding across the river, and the game does not need to explain the difference to you. You will feel it the first time you try to send grain.
Armies are the largest system still to be built. Everything above about standing orders and rally points is designed and not yet playable, and the State of the Vault says so plainly.