Town Centers and Keeps

Town Centers and Keeps are the fixed and built strongholds that anchor every player-held position in Calligo. They come in three forms: the Town Center that defines a public settlement, the Town Keep that sits at its core, and the Fortress Keep that can be raised anywhere on the map using a Caravan. Together they are the backbone of Settlements and the primary objective of the Military path under Victory Conditions.

Town Centers

Town Centers are placed in fixed locations on the world map and form the public hub of a player-owned town. Each Town Center spawns with a Town Keep at its core and exposes the public structure set that anchors a Trade and Economy hub: marketplace, tavern, workshop, blacksmithing area, and storehouse. A Town Center cannot be moved; the town grows or shrinks around it.

Players must pledge to a Town Center to use most of its inventories and structures. Pledging was exclusive for most of pre-alpha, with an avatar belonging to one town at a time. Since the MS 68 build, players can pledge to multiple Towns and Fortresses independently, and their status is maintained separately at each pledged location.

Pledge Ranks

Town Keep

The Town Keep is the structure at the centre of a Town Center. It serves three roles at once: respawn point for reinforcements, secure stockpile for weapons and consumables, and the fixed capture target during a Military victory push. Town Keeps have approximately 2880 health and Heavy Structure resistance, and they do not decay naturally; they only fall to direct attack.

The MS 67 build shipped the Town Keep redesign: built-in fort walls and gates for extra protection during a siege, a larger interior that holds more players, and dedicated spots for the bounty board and the avatar recruitment table, which makes it clearly distinct from the Fortress Keep. The keep is the primary spawn point for its town, storing five hundred Auxiliaries and up to a thousand named avatars, and only half of any pledge fee paid there is deposited into the town treasury.

Capture Conditions

Capturing a Town requires three conditions to be satisfied simultaneously, then a single interaction trigger:

When the trigger fires, every non-capturable structure within the town radius is destroyed, which includes all Homesteads attached to that town. Items from destroyed storage drop at the triggering player's feet; all Silver held by the town pools into a chest at the Town Keep's centre, where it can be looted by the capturing alliance.

The MS 67 build that opened Pre-Alpha Test 46 rebuilt towns around a new central keep with modular walls. Those walls can be destroyed and repaired while a fight is in progress, so a breach is a temporary state that defenders can answer rather than a permanent hole. Each town now has three fully functional gates instead of a single approach, which spreads an attacking force across more ground and gives defenders more to hold. This redesign is what makes the Town Keep visually and structurally distinct from the Fortress Keep.

Storage inside towns, fortresses and camps grew in the same build. House storage went from fifty to sixty slots, private storage from thirty-five to forty-two, and public storage to thirty-four. Town officials, meaning Lords and Thanes, can now draw items from public storage even when a Call to Arms is not running, and during a Call to Arms that public access lasts thirty minutes, extended from twenty in the MS 68 build. Triggering a Call to Arms requires an enemy player nearby and three players pressing the call button. Homesteads claimed by a house now carry their own icon on the world map, and the Town Workshop was moved next to the smithing area in every town.

Town Core Reworks

The MS 68 build rebuilt the services around the keep. The Town Workshop became the central crafting hub for the Town area, replacing the old Smithing Area: basic blades, weapons, armour, and tools are produced there with resources and Silver, a Repair Bench sits inside, and a range of higher-tier equipment moved out of Town production toward Homestead progression. The Town Tavern was enlarged and now centralises all food production in the Town area, since firepits can no longer be built near the centre; food and Auxiliary Rations are produced there, and eating inside grants a Rested buff that speeds stamina regeneration. The Marketplace was visually reworked with filter tabs, and Town structures received custom map and compass icons.

Homesteads inside a town’s reach also pay three quarters of their decay-prevention Silver to the nearest town as tax, which elected Thanes can withdraw from the public treasury.

Fortress Keep

The Fortress Keep is the military counterpart to the Town Keep and was split out from the older Town system during the major settlement update. Where Town Centers are fixed civic hubs, Fortress Keeps can be raised anywhere on the map using a Caravan, which makes them the standard tool for projecting force into contested territory or holding a forward staging area near a contested Sieges line.

Fortress Keeps decay over time without active maintenance. Decay timing depends on the tier; the figures observed in recent pre-alpha builds are:

Players keep a Fortress Keep alive by performing maintenance interactions and contributing the appropriate resources before the timer expires. A neglected Fortress Keep collapses on its own, sparing the defending alliance the cost of a full siege if it was already untenable.

Town Homesteads

Town Homesteads are smaller residential plots inside a Town Center and were introduced in the same settlement update that produced the Town-versus-Fortress split. They give individual players or small groups a private corner of a public town in which to build crafting structures and store equipment. Town Homesteads decay over time unless they are fed Silver by their owner; this mirrors the upkeep curve of Fortress Keeps and keeps inactive towns from filling up with abandoned plots.

Strategic Notes

Town Centers and their Keeps are the anchor of the Military victory path under Victory Conditions. Holding a Keep gives the alliance a defensible respawn and a Silver pool that scales with the town's economic output, while losing a Keep means losing the entire town's investment in a single push. Fortress Keeps are cheaper to lose because their reach is shorter and their decay is unforgiving, but they let an attacking alliance establish a beachhead on the doorstep of a defended Town Center without exposing the home town.

Defenders typically build outer walls, trenches, and arrow towers around the Town Keep, with a final ring of hard walls inside. Attackers usually break the outer perimeter with siege weapons before committing infantry to the inner courtyard and the Keep itself.