Wiki/Playing Here
Cities and Building
What a city costs here, how fast it goes up, and why it never sends you a bill
Updated 2026-08-17
The idea
A city in stock Shadowbane is a guild-sized project measured in months: a finished town cost roughly 159 million gold against a 10 million player carry cap, and one building climbing from rank 1 to rank 7 took six real days. Here you pay 5% of the stock gold and wait 1% of the stock time. A handful of people can plant a tree, watch the town finish ranking, and spend the rest of the day using the buildings instead of saving up for them.
What it costs
Placing anything that is not a wall costs the deed and nothing else. Walls are the exception: their deed is a permanent unlock that is never consumed, and every piece you set down costs gold. Ranking a building up costs gold only, never stone or lumber.
| Item | Stock | Here |
|---|---|---|
| Guild Seed (the Tree of Life deed) | 1,500,000 | 75,000 |
| Tree of Life, rank 6 to rank 7 | 5,720,000 | 286,000 |
| Tree of Life, full climb rank 1 to 7 | 21,120,000 | 1,056,000 |
| Wall, straight outer section | 100,000 | 5,000 |
| Wall, stairs / tower / gate / small gatehouse | 150,000 | 7,500 |
| Wall, concave / convex / artillery tower / junction | 300,000 | 15,000 |
| Realm claim, gold | 5,000,000 | 250,000 |
| Realm claim, stone and lumber | 8,000 each | 400 each |
| Realm claim, galvor and wormwood | 15 each | 1 each |
Smaller deeds scale identically: a forge is 25,000, a house 18,750. A complete town, deeds and rank-ups together, runs about 8 million gold.
How long it takes
Construction and rank-up run at 1% of stock, with a ten-second floor on any single step.
| Step | Stock | Here |
|---|---|---|
| Planting the tree | 2 h | 72 s |
| Rank 0 to rank 1, any building | 4 h | 2 min 24 s |
| Rank 1 to rank 2 | 7 h | 4 min 12 s |
| Rank 6 to rank 7 | 42 h | 25 min 12 s |
| Full climb, rank 1 to rank 7 | 147 h (6.1 days) | about 1 h 28 min |
| Hireling, rank 1 to rank 7 | 168 h (7 days) | about 1 h 41 min |
Hireling rank-ups are paid from the host building's strongbox rather than your purse, about 112,000 gold for the full climb against 2,242,350 in stock, and guard minions train free. Forge timers run at half length too — see rates and progression for the rest of the pacing.
Upkeep: there is none
Weekly maintenance is switched off. Not discounted, not deferred — off. Your city costs nothing to keep, and buildings cannot decay, derank, or be destroyed by an unpaid bill, however long you leave the town alone.
This is the most misunderstood point on the shard, because the numbers are still on screen. The asset-management window quotes about 22,500 a week for a rank-7 Tree of Life, 1,740 for a spire, 3,500 for a hireling salary. Those figures are display only and nothing is ever charged against them. The weekly tax line beside them is display only as well.
The one real recurring gold drain in the game is an active siege spire: 250 gold to switch it on, 250 more for every five minutes it stays up, or 3,000 an hour. It disables itself when the gold runs out. That is the whole list.
How many cities you may hold
Your guild may have three Trees of Life planted; stock allowed one. The limit is per guild rather than per nation, so a nation can hold more through several member guilds — but sharing a nation gives you no build or manage rights in another guild's town. It is checked at planting, so it does not limit towns you take by capture.
Your first tree is your capital permanently, and there is no command to move it. The guild window shows only the capital; towns two and three appear on the world map and the teleport and repledge screens instead. A nation can now abandon any town it owns except its capital.
Two older restrictions read like bugs when you hit them: trees need roughly 1,750 units of clearance from one another ("Too close to another tree"), and each realm has its own city cap, with Oblivion, Uthgaard, Maelstrom and Terminus closed outright ("This territory is full").
Mines
Every mine opens every hour. Stock tied a guild-owned mine to its nation's declared war window, one hour a day chosen in advance; that scheduling mechanic is gone. Openings announce on the system channel, and a claim announces server-wide. Mines stay attached to your capital, so three towns do not give you three times the mines.
Rank 8 trees
Rank 8 is not on the upgrade button; the way in is the realm claim, at the prices above, plus the guild leader, a rank-7 tree, three sage blessings, a warehouse and a Realm Charter. Galvor and wormwood still come only from two specific expansion mines, one gold and one lumber, which you must capture and reconfigure. The payoff is 70,000 more tree hit points and two fewer vendor slots.
Sieges
Banes and sieges are untouched, and a bane remains a minimum two-day real-time commitment: the defender picks a time within a day of placement, or it fires on its own two days after placement, at 22:00. No city protection timer is configurable here, and shrine decay is stock, the top two losing 10% a day.
Setting names and live values are in the settings reference.