Every persistent game eventually has to answer the same question: when this ends, what did it mean? Our answer is a small one, and we would rather publish it early than discover it late.
The rule money follows
There are two kinds of thing you can hold. One is earned by playing and belongs to the realm you earned it in. The other is permanent, crosses whatever boundary the world turns out to have, and buys appearance, titles and keepsakes — never resources, never build time, never an edge in a live contest.
That split is the whole answer to whether this is pay-to-win, and it is structural rather than a promise. The currency money touches is the one that only buys things which survive a reset, and nothing that survives a reset affects play. A keepsake has value because everything else is spent.
None of it is implemented yet. There is no currency in the schema today and no balance to show you. When one arrives it gets its own announcement, and this paragraph gets deleted.
Badges are a record, not a reward
A badge in Koria Vault marks something that actually happened: the realm you held, how long it stood, what came out of it. They are minted against the season’s number rather than pointing at it, so an honour stays legible long after everything else about that season has been filed away — a decision taken in the very first database migration, before this website existed.
We are deliberately not building achievement lists that reward attendance. A badge for logging in eleven days running is a badge about us, not about you.
The Archive is public on purpose
A world that quietly forgets its own past is a world nothing that happened in it mattered to. If a realm closes, the register is where it stays legible — who held ground, how long it ran, what was carried out of it. Written down in one place, by the game, without anyone having to remember to.
That is the same instinct the fiction runs on. The Old Work is four centuries gone and still perfectly readable in the ground, and the whole mood of this world comes from the difference between a thing that was destroyed and a thing that was finished.
One idea for much later, clearly labelled
Since keepsakes are already going to be objects with provenance — this badge, from that realm, held by that steward — there is an obvious second life for them, and we would rather say it out loud than pretend we have not thought about it.
We are interested in a collectible card game built out of the strategy game’s own history: cards drawn from real peoples, buildings and closed realms, a duel you can play against another steward, and a collection that can be traded between accounts. A quiet thing you do between checking on your holding, not a second job.
To be completely clear about where that sits: it is after the game. Not after launch — after the strategy game is finished, played and worth decorating. Armies are not built. The far country is not built. A card game shipped before either of those would be an admission that we lost interest in the thing we asked you to build a holding in.
It is written down here for one reason. The keepsakes we mint in the first realm should still make sense on the day that idea arrives, and the only way to be sure of that is to design them now against a use we have already described in public.