System mechanic

Crime and Law

Why guards turn on you, what "wanted" means, and why getting caught is sometimes the better outcome

Attack a civilian or guard, or rob a bank, and you build up crime. Cross a threshold and every guard in the area turns hostile and starts hunting you. If they beat you down far enough while you're wanted, you don't die — you get arrested: teleported to a cell, healed, held for a while, and let go with your crime wiped and your cash completely untouched. Getting arrested is deliberately safer than dying while wanted, which normally costs a quarter of your cash on the spot. The law is a different, gentler kind of consequence than combat death, on purpose.

How crime works

• Civilians and guards only become real, hittable entities within about 90 units of you — beyond that range they're scenery.
• Killing someone adds crime, and the amount depends on who, and where.

Robbing a bank is, by a wide margin, the single biggest crime available — roughly three times worse than killing a guard in the open street.

• You become "wanted" at 40 crime. Below that, guards leave you alone even if you've drawn blood.
• Crime decays at 0.6 points a second — but only while you're outside a town. Standing in the square you just caused trouble in does not make anyone forget; you have to leave to be forgiven.
• Once wanted, nearby guards attack for about 4.5% of your maximum HP per hit rather than a flat number — equally dangerous to a brand-new character as to one who's played for a hundred hours.
• Inside your own town, guards find you at any range, not just nearby ones — a garrison is supposed to be exactly that. Outside a town, only guards actually close to you respond.

Getting arrested

If a guard's attacks bring you below about a third of your max HP while wanted, you're arrested instead of killed: teleported to a holding cell near the nearest settlement, fully healed, crime reset to zero, and held for a time based on how much crime you'd built up (half a second of jail per crime point, floor of 20 seconds, cap of 240). Your cash is completely untouched — the game says so directly: "Your purse is untouched." An ordinary death while carrying cash drops a quarter of it on the ground where you fell; arrest specifically avoids that. If you're going to lose a fight while wanted, being beaten down by guards is the better way to lose it.

Robbing a merchant directly

Separate from killing one (see Version History below) — stand beside any merchant and press [R] to rob them without a fight. This is a real, priced action, not a freebie: you take 60% of their purse and one random item from their stock, at the cost of 30 reputation with the merchants' guild, and that specific trader turns hostile toward you afterward. This isn't mentioned anywhere in the game's own controls list or guidebook — [R] is prompted contextually when you're actually standing next to a merchant, which is the only way most players would ever discover it.

Robbing a bank, specifically

Pays out of that bank's own float, which actually depletes when robbed and slowly refills over roughly a day of real time — not free money conjured from nothing. Empty the float and a second robbery minutes later gets nothing until it recovers. You cannot rob a bank in a city your own faction currently holds — that money is already yours, taken out with an ordinary withdrawal instead.

Version history

• Foundation — the version that made civilians and guards real, attackable entities in the first place, and built the crime/wanted/arrest loop at the same time, deliberately in the same cycle.
• Bank robbery added, along with a skill-tree branch able to modify how fast crime decays and how long a jail sentence holds — see Skill Tree.
• Bank robbery rebuilt from the ground up. The original version calculated your haul from your own lifetime stats with no actual bank balance behind it, printable on demand with no real cooldown beyond the law's own response — and because owning a captured city is possible, a player could capture a city and rob their own bank while their own garrison hunted them through streets they owned. Replaced with the real, depleting/refilling float described above, and self-robbery of an owned city closed outright.
• Fixed killing a merchant paying out double. Their death payout was reading the same money from two different places at once, so anything bought from them came back twice over on top of keeping the goods — the more you'd spent with a merchant, the more profitable murdering them afterward became, undercutting the point of murder's reputation penalty entirely. Killing a merchant still pays what they're actually carrying; it no longer duplicates your own money.
• Robbing a merchant directly, and repairing an aircraft mid-flight, were found to be completely undocumented in the game's own help panel and guidebook — an audit of every key binding against every reference the game provides found these were the only two of thirty-nine keys missing from both. Neither has changed as a result; this only confirms robbing a merchant has always worked exactly as described above, just never written down anywhere a player would read it in advance.

Trivia

• The guard-detection range fix (guards inside your own town finding you at any range) repeats a lesson the game had already learned once before, in an unrelated system (settlement sieges) — a wall of guards standing in a ring doesn't actually watch the middle of the square unless someone deliberately writes that rule in.
• Bank robbery's 260 crime is high enough alone to trigger "wanted" more than six times over compared to the 40-point threshold — there's no version of successfully robbing a bank that doesn't immediately bring every nearby guard down on you.