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The Governor
June 11, 2026 at 02:06 PM
Initial article: Governor role, pen-and-sword framing, duties, Governor's Desk and Mansion, gameplay loop, endgame plans, loop rework history (2026-06-11)
In My Time at Evershine, the player is the Governor of a new frontier settlement, recruited into the Alliance of Free Cities' North Development Plan by its Director, Mr. Gaudi. It is the first time the My Time series has not cast the player as a Builder, and Pathea treats the change as the defining feature of the game. The game is unreleased; everything here comes from official pre-release material and may change.
Previous series protagonists ran a personal workshop: they took commissions, crafted what was asked, and watched a fixed town carry on around them. The Governor's job is the town. Pathea has described the shift as moving from "I crafted this item to help a friend" to "I helped an entire town come alive", and the announcement put it more bluntly: with great power comes great responsibility.
The change also redistributes the workload. Where the Builder did everything personally, the Governor leads a community that shares the load. Settlers work jobs, followers lend a hand in the field, and the player spends more time deciding what the settlement needs next.
The Alliance has a specific requirement for the post: a Governor must be "a master of both the pen and the sword". In practice the role swings between desk work and fieldwork. One moment you are sketching out the next expansion of the town, the next you are rallying companions to drive off a bandit raid threatening your supply lines. Combat is not a side activity here; the settlement sits at the very edge of the line holding back the Duvos Empire, and defending it is part of the job.
Placing and approving buildings. The Governor decides where everything goes and signs off on construction requests through the building system.
Recruiting and assigning settlers. Characters met while traveling can be invited to settle, then put to work at the jobs they suit; see settlers and recruitment.
Keeping people happy. Settlers complain about bad food, poor sleep, and dull entertainment, and angry workers hurt the settlement.
Managing followers. Up to three followers accompany the Governor in battle, resource acquisition, and construction.
Defense. Bandit raids threaten the town and the supply route it anchors.
Town management runs through the Governor's Desk, where the player approves upgrades and building requests. Approving an upgrade kicks off visible growth: simple tents become wooden houses, and wooden houses eventually grow into stone buildings. Pathea's stated aim is for the Desk to absorb the busywork so the player can spend their days actually living in the town, sharing a meal at the restaurant or soaking in the hot springs, rather than micromanaging it.
A March 2026 development update lays out the Governor's core cycle plainly: production feeds trade, trade earns money, money pays for town upgrades, and upgrades expand production. The settlement sits at a crossroads between the peaceful Alliance heartlands and the untamed frontier, and the update frames it as the heartbeat of a crucial supply route. What the town produces and ships is meant to ripple outward through the region's balance of power.
The player's home is planned to be far larger than a standard house and fully customizable. Pathea is also building a system that automatically saves the furniture layout when the mansion upgrades, so each level up does not mean re-placing every chair and lamp. This was described in a development update as work in progress.
Pathea has sketched an endgame in which the Governor represents the settlement at Alliance Meetings and competes with other settlements through a ranking system. Climbing the ranks and taking high level missions is planned to award rare rewards such as Energy Cores, described as the essential component for crafting the most powerful gear in the game. All of this is announced, in-development content, not a finished system.
The Governor concept went through a rough patch. The original design paired personal role-playing with a settlement strategy layer driven by stats such as money, health, comfort, and hunger. When Pathea combined the finished parts into one build at the end of 2024, the two halves fought each other: the RPG side pushed the player out into the field while the strategy side wanted them home, and tracking everyone's stats in third person turned into a chore. In September 2025 the studio said it had spent ten months simplifying the strategy elements and tilting the game toward open world exploration and RPG play, reworking parts of the main story to match. Some characters became more important in the process while others had their roles trimmed.
