Guilds — islands, bank, capital, wars
Canon
This page extends the shipped guild foundation — membership, ranks, chat,
and Great Works (mods/hfguilds, spec
docs/superpowers/specs/2026-07-13-hfguilds-design.md) — with the guild
world: the island, the bank, the capital ladder, the tree, and the
competitive layer. Personal-island substrate features from the V1 doc
(time/weather/themes, island upgrades, wonders, chronicles) are split
out to their own Island Substrate session — they belong to every
player, not to guilds.
The guild island is the guild's shared home: reached from the hub like a personal island, never gated, built together. Build, decorate, and storage rights follow guild rank permissions — the ranks hfguilds already has are the permission vocabulary; no second role system.
The guild bank is the shared treasury: a Coin balance and a resource
vault, with a donation log and withdrawal rights by rank. This resolves
the currency page's open question — the shared balance is guild-scoped
state in guilds.db (the sanctioned consumer), never a player
component. Guild tents (the D-MARKETS-06 socket) wire here too: a
guild tent's proceeds credit the guild bank, its rent draws from the
guild bank, and listing rights follow rank permissions.
The Guild Capital ladder — Camp → Village → Town → City → Kingdom — is the guild's visible progression: stages unlock guild NPCs, merchants, storage expansions, buff capacity, and decorations. Advancement is fed by Great Works completions and member contributions (weights in data).
The guild skill tree grants small guild-wide passive bonuses —
gathering, combat, storage, economy, travel, cosmetics. Every gameplay
bonus routes through provider rate hooks (XpBonusSource-style): guild
buffs are speed on paths everyone walks, never exclusive power.
Infrastructure nodes (storage, cosmetic unlocks) are guild-island
features.
Territory Wars are the competitive layer: guilds contest neutral islands in the events world (a Crystal Quarry, an Ancient Mine…) under the ruled event constraints — baseline damage, no levelling advantage, and combat there grants no progression. Holding a territory grants the guild passive bonuses and income (rate-hook routed, owner-tuned). No guild's own island is ever touched, and losing a war costs nothing a guild owned — only the contested ground. The guild museum (relic and trophy displays), bulletin board (events, requests, recruitment, boss runs), and blueprint building (hologram frames the guild fills with donated blocks — the Great Works mechanic made visible) round out the guild island.
Decisions
D-GUILDS-01 — this page extends hfguilds; substrate features split out (proposed)
Membership, ranks, chat, and Great Works stand as shipped and ratified; this page adds the guild world on top. The V1 doc's personal-island material goes to its own Island Substrate session.
Rejected: re-designing the shipped guild foundation (nothing in the V1 doc contradicts it); one combined guilds-plus-substrate page (two audiences, one page — over the size cap and muddled).
D-GUILDS-02 — the guild island, permissioned by guild rank (proposed)
A shared, ungated, hub-reachable guild home. Build/decorate/storage rights ride the existing hfguilds ranks — one permission vocabulary, no parallel visitor-role system for guild space.
Rejected: a separate guild-island role system (V1's visitor roles — duplicate of ranks); gating the guild island behind guild level (a guild's home is its home; the capital ladder gates unlocks, not entry).
D-GUILDS-03 — the guild bank lives in guilds.db; tents wire to it (proposed)
Shared Coin balance + resource vault + donation log, withdrawal by rank
— guild-scoped rows in the sanctioned guilds.db, never a player
component. Resolves the currency page's guild-balance question and the
D-MARKETS-06 tent socket: tent proceeds → guild bank, tent rent ← guild
bank, listing rights by rank.
Rejected: guild balance as a component on some officer's player (single-writer chaos, offline-guild problems); a fourth SQLite consumer (stop condition; guilds.db already owns guild state).
D-GUILDS-04 — the Guild Capital ladder: Camp → Village → Town → City → Kingdom (proposed)
Five stages of visible guild progression unlocking NPCs, merchants, storage, buff capacity, and decorations; advanced by Great Works and member contributions. The ladder is the guild-scale analogue of the island tiers: legibility, not a chain of gates.
Rejected: a numeric guild level with no named stages (V1's stage names carry identity a number doesn't); unlocks via purchases alone (capital should be earned guild play, not treasury spend — the bank funds Works, Works advance the capital).
D-GUILDS-05 — the guild skill tree: rate-hook bonuses only (proposed)
Small guild-wide passives funded by guild advancement. Gameplay bonuses route exclusively through provider rate hooks; infra and cosmetic nodes unlock guild-island features. No guild bonus is ever exclusive power — the P2A logic applied guild-scale.
Rejected: deferring the tree (it is the capital ladder's payoff surface — parking it leaves stages hollow); direct stat/progression writes from guild membership (violates the single-writer invariants and the wall).
D-GUILDS-06 — Territory Wars adopted; sieges parked; convoys and heists rejected (proposed)
Owner rulings. Territory Wars: neutral events-world islands, baseline damage, no progression grants from the fighting; holding pays guild bonuses/income. Sieges are parked — as the owner put it, there is nowhere to siege: guild capitals are not siegeable spaces today; revisit if that ever changes.
Rejected: Guild Heists (stealing a percentage of another guild's actual vault is loss of owned goods — collides with "deep but kind" head-on); Resource Convoys (softer, but unpicked — interception still manufactures loss and a scheduling layer for little identity beyond what Territory Wars provide).
D-GUILDS-07 — the V1 corpus fate table (proposed)
| V1 idea | Fate |
|---|---|
| Guild Projects (Airship, Harbor, Mage Tower…) | Adopted as Great Works content — the system already exists; these are its catalog |
| Guild museum, bulletin board, blueprint building | Adopted (canon above) |
| Guild reputation paths (Peaceful/Mercenary/Explorer/Merchant) | Rejected — no reputation system; alignment perks double-dip the guild tree |
| Weekly contribution leaderboard | Adopted via hfrecords boards (guild:-scoped) — no new system |
| Personal-island features (configs, themes, upgrades, wonders, chronicle, legacy statues, living NPCs) | Split → Island Substrate session (parking lot) |
| Pet sanctuary | Split → substrate session; htpets overlap noted |
| Functional/interactive custom assets | Split → substrate session (asset-pack territory) |
| Dynamic world events (Blood Moon, Ghost Ship, Dragon Migration…) | Deferred → events-world session |
| Collectibles (music discs, plushies, fossils…) | Deferred → Almanac/crates content passes |
| Forge energy system, constellation progression | Parked — future systems, no owner |
Rejected: designing split/parked items now.
Tuning
data/guilds.json— capital stage thresholds and unlocks, guild tree nodes and bonus magnitudes, bank withdrawal permission defaults, territory list and holding bonuses, tent rent/listing rules. Owner-edited; all values null or illustrative.
Implementation
Owning mod: mods/hfguilds (extension work — the lib-storage scaffold
and guilds.db already carry guild state). Guild-island world
provisioning is substrate work shared with personal islands. Rate-hook
bonuses consume the existing provider hooks (XpBonusSource et al.);
contribution boards ride hfrecords. Territory War combat mechanics block
on the events-world session.
Open questions
- Guild island acquisition (founded with the guild? unlocked at a capital stage? cost?) — owner call, data.
- Capital advancement weights (Great Works vs contributions) — owner tuning.
- Territory count, rotation, and war cadence — events-world session (the war lives there).
- Guild museum display mechanics (what qualifies as a trophy) — content pass with the Almanac vocabulary.
- Whether guild merchants (capital unlock) sell from the markets canon catalogs or a guild-specific one — markets content pass.