Empires // A Full Civilization System for Hytale

Claims mods give you land. Empires gives you a nation, and now a religion, a war ledger, a black book, and a working government. 

Found a realm, choose the road it walks, tax your citizens, promote your officers, kneel to a god or refuse to, mint a grievance against a neighbour, declare the war it justifies, and take their knee. All from one hub. Built for servers where politics are supposed to matter.

Main command: /empire (aliases: /e, /emp, /settlement) Requires: Hytale server 0.6 + & Gilded Dreams (economy) strongly recommended for the economy,but not 100% needed

Live on our main server PyreTale alongside Gilded Dreams, the Armoury by LadyPaladra, and Hexcode - Magic by Design by Riprod. Join and see it running before you install it.

OVERVIEW

Empires is a civilization mod for Hytale servers. Not a claims plugin with extra steps. An actual political system.

Players found settlements, recruit citizens into a nine-rank hierarchy, tax them weekly into a shared treasury, claim chunk-by-chunk territory rendered live on the world map, and manage diplomacy from formal alliances down to open war. Settlements climb seven tiers along one of three roads: Sword, Coin or Faith. Each road ends in a different kind of nation, with its own title ladder, its own economy, and its own way of falling apart. Realms can swear other realms in as vassals, building feudal hierarchies with tribute flowing up the chain.

Above that sits a world that keeps its own records. Grievances must be minted before a war can be declared, and every fabricated claim is written into the Black Book where the whole server can read it. A Herald publishes the week in the world every Sunday across four desks: War, Crown, Coin, and World. A settlement can kneel to one of 39 selectable faiths drawn from a pantheon of 47, and those faiths have rivals, so a realm's creed sets its diplomacy before a word is spoken.

Designed from the ground up to pair with the Gilded Dreams economy mod: taxes are collected straight out of each citizen's gold bank, founding a town costs real gold, upkeep is charged in the same coin, and the treasury your empire builds is the currency players trade, shop, and fight over. Politics and economics run as one system instead of two plugins ignoring each other.

And as of 0.2.0, Empires also carries a complete server-essentials layer covering travel, waystones, moderation, kits, whispers, motd and playtime, so on most servers it is the only utility plugin you need to run.

Everything is managed through button-driven menus. Nobody memorises forty commands to run a kingdom, and citizens can see exactly where they stand.

 NEW IN 0.20: "REALM & ROAD"

If you ran 0.1.0, this is the short version of what landed. 596 new files, none removed. 55 commands → 129. Your settlements, claims, treasuries, laws and waypoints all carry over untouched.

• The Three Roads: settlements now climb Sword, Coin or Faith, with a fork at the fourth rung and a revolution price to turn back
• Two new governments: Lichdom and Blight Covenant, reached through the Ash Rite, a settlement-wide vote
• 56 realm titles: eight government ladders × seven tiers. A Theocracy is a Shrine before it is a Sanctum; a Lichdom is a Crypt before it is an Undying Throne
• Faith: 47 powers, 39 selectable, each with a creed, a doctrine, a named rite, a wrath, and a rival faith
• War: grievances, war goals, sieges, a war ledger, and the Black Book of infamy
• The Warehouse: settlements now keep goods as well as gold, on shelves owned by the realm
• Four tax models: flat, proportional, progressive, regressive, with a live per-resident preview
• Area permissions: carve named rooms out of your claims and grant them to individual members
• The Herald and the Codex: a weekly in-game newspaper and a twelve-chapter rulebook
• EmpireGuard is now the Aegis: 2 flags became 27 wards, with priority, parents, owners, members, and settlements as region subjects
• ~80 new top-level commands: a full essentials layer, native to the mod
• A public developer API for other mods to query settlements, claims and permissions

KEY FEATURES

Founding & Governance

• Found a settlement for 1,000 gold with a unique name, then customise its identity: motto, banner, and chat tag
• Seven tiers: base claim limits of 16, 36, 76, 116, 156, 316 and 632 chunks, with resident minimums of 1, 5, 10, 20, 30, 40 and 80. You never lose land by rising or falling. A tier change in either direction leaves every claimed chunk exactly where it was
• Eight government types, each with real economic weight:

• Nine ranks: Leader, Co-Leader, Treasurer, Diplomat, Marshal, Steward, Officer, Citizen, Recruit, plus custom per-player titles, and rank names that change with your government
• Twenty per-rank permissions: build, interact, claim, invite, kick, promote, set description, set government, manage treasury, deposit, withdraw, set tax, manage diplomacy, announce, toggle open, manage laws, waypoint teleport, deposit materials, withdraw materials, found market
• Eight settlement laws you toggle yourself: open borders, outsider build, recruit build, outsider containers, recruit containers, PvP inside your borders, outsider item pickup, outsider interact
• Recruitment modes: open, invite-only, or closed
• Succession: designate an heir, set an inactivity timeout in days, and leadership transfers automatically when a ruler goes dark
• Full dissolution cleans up claims and data when an empire falls

The Three Roads & The Evolution Tree

Every settlement begins as a Camp. Leaving it, you choose a road, and it is yours for good.

• Sword takes land: the widest holdings in the world, and the poorest per acre (up to +20% claims, -20% tax)
• Coin takes wealth: the smallest holdings, and the deepest treasury (up to +30% tax)
• Faith takes endurance: a realm that costs almost nothing to hold, and rarely falls (up to -35% upkeep)

At the fourth rung the road forks again, and you say whether power is shared among many or held by one. Past the trunk, your government type takes over from the road.

Turning back is a revolution: the full price of the tree, a tier surrendered, a quarter returned. The Evolution Tree, Fork and Change pages show every rung ahead before you commit, and every branch carries its own written ascension passage, so the Herald announces a Waystation becoming a Market Town differently from a Barrow becoming an Ossuary.

Faith, Cults & Heresy

/faith binds a realm to a power. The book holds 47 entries, 39 of them selectable, spanning a Pantheon, twelve Star gods, twelve Void gods, and the cults, schisms and heresies between them.

Each faith carries its own creed, doctrine, a named rite with its own observance, a wrath for those who neglect it, a rival faith, its own clerical title ladder, and its own settlement nouns. The Mantled hold that creation was an act of vandalism against a perfect and silent Void. Sillima gives by night and asks nothing. The Two Vigils insist that neither moon may rule the sky alone.

Faiths can be opposed, so your realm's creed sets its diplomacy before a word is spoken. New believers get a First Prayer page on their first choice, and a confirmation page before it becomes binding.

Taxes, Treasury & Warehouses

• Weekly tax collection (Sundays): each citizen pays a leader-set percentage rate (0–100%) straight from their Gilded Dreams gold bank into the settlement treasury
• Four tax models:
  • Flat: the same of every soul; the poor feel it hardest
  • Proportional: one share of every purse, so all are burdened alike
  • Progressive: climbs with wealth; the rich carry the realm
  • Regressive: falls with wealth; labour carries it instead Progressive and regressive require a government with offices enough to weigh a purse. Set your brackets and read the live preview beside them. It names what each individual resident would actually pay
• Indebted citizens: can't afford your taxes? You're marked INDEBTED and building is disabled for you until the debt is reconciled from your bank (checked hourly). Overtax and you inherit a ghost town.
• Upkeep costs every Sunday: two gold per claimed chunk and one per resident, multiplied by your rule. If the treasury cannot pay, all building freezes across the settlement. Four missed weeks in a row disbands it entirely.
• Vassal tribute: 10-40% of vassal income flows up to the overlord every week, set by the overlord's government.
• The Warehouse: a settlement keeps goods as well as gold, on shelves owned by the realm and not by any hand. 27 shelves at the first rung, and 27 more with every tier after. Bringing goods in and taking them out are separate rights, granted rank by rank, and every movement is written down with the name of the hand that made it
• Treasury ledger: every tax, deposit, withdrawal, tribute and upkeep payment logged and viewable in-game, with a legend HUD
• Manual deposits and withdrawals for rank-authorized members

Territory & Map Management

• Chunk-based claims (32×32). Stand in a chunk, claim it, done
• Claim limits scale with tier, road and government
• Live world-map overlay: your empire's colour painted over its territory, with a clean settlement label (name, government, member count) on each contiguous claim area
• Clickable capital & home markers with View Realm, to inspect any empire straight from the map
• Fog of war (optional): the map reveals only what players have explored, with configurable radius and a staff reset
• Shared settlement waypoints (default 12) plus optional personal waypoints, with a nearest-waypoint HUD bar
• Player radar, world border, marker & coordinate teleports, all server-configurable
• Per-player privacy toggles: hide other players, your death marker, or spawn markers on your own map

Area Permissions: Rooms inside your claims

Two new items ship with the mod:

• Chunk Ledger: left-click two corners to stretch a box, CTRL + left-click to save
• Royal Sceptre: bind it to a settlement member, then mark the corners of their room

Leadership carves named areas out of claimed land and rules who may act inside them. Rights cover building, breaking, interacting, containers, mechanisms, gathering, beasts and duels, granted to individual members, to the whole settlement, or to allies, trade partners and neutral realms separately.

Corners must lie inside your own claimed chunks, and an area may not span unclaimed ground. A permission tool grows cold after two hours; take a fresh one from the hub. War overrides all open rights, but named members keep theirs.

This is how you give a citizen their own house without handing them the town.

Reigns & Vassals

• A realm of the fifth rung or above may take smaller realms into its reign
• A vassal keeps its name, capital, treasury, people and rank. It loses none of them. What it gives is tribute each week, and its road and rule are made to match the crown's
• There is no obligation to grow. A kingdom may sit under an empire for as long as it likes
• An overlord may see everything and set what is owed. It may not spend their gold or empty their shelves
• Breaking away costs coin and is announced to all, and the crown's rule is kept until it is bought back
• The Roads of a Reign: the capitals of one reign are joined by road. A journey takes ten seconds standing still; any blow or step breaks it. The road asks coin by the distance and will not be ridden twice inside five minutes
• Realm overview shows the whole tree; realm chat connects the chain

Protections

• Territory protection inside your borders: block breaking, placing, damaging, interacting, container access and item pickup all gated
• Law- and rank-aware: what someone can touch depends on their rank, your laws, and your diplomatic relationship with them
• Border access is resolved in a clear order: your own members answer to their rank and the border laws do not touch them; a realm you have named a standing with is decided by that standing alone; everyone else falls to the stranger laws. An ally you have closed the door to stays closed
• Admin safezones with buffer zones, marked on the map

EmpireGuard → The Aegis

The staff-only region system was rebuilt from the ground up. It was one cuboid per name with two flags. It is now a real protection engine.

• 27 wards instead of 2: build · block-break · block-place · interact · chest-access · door-access · use · crafting · item-pickup · item-drop · pvp · pve · mob-damage · mob-spawn · entry · exit · fall-damage · keep-inventory · fly · yield · greet-message · farewell-message · greet-title · farewell-title · deny-message · notify-enter · notify-leave
• Priority and parent inheritance: nest a shop inside a market and the nearest region speaks first
• Owners and members: and the piece no other protection plugin has: settlements are subjects. /empireguard addowner settlement:Ironhold market is one row that follows the roster forever. Officers and above read as owners, everyone else as members. Optional settlement auto-trust for regions that sit inside a town's claims
• build works as an umbrella: denying it denies break/place/interact/chest/door/use unless one is explicitly allowed
• Wand selection (wand, pos1, pos2, expandvert, clearpos, select), entry/exit control with safe ejection, greetings and titles, staff notices, and a staff bypass
• 26 subcommands, its own GUI hub, and a one-command importer for regions from other protection mods
• Your existing 0.1.0 regions import themselves once at first boot as build=deny, so containment-era protection is preserved rather than silently downgraded

Server Essentials, native and not bolted on

0.1.0 exposed six top-level commands. 0.2.0 raises around eighty, all in the mod's own voice and storage. On most servers this replaces your essentials plugin outright.

• Travel: /spawn /crossroads with a first-join point, /return /back (five steps deep; dying leaves a step, so it walks you to your corpse), /journey and /beckon travel pleas with /grant and /refuse, /wander for a random safe spot, /surface /top, and personal marks: /mark /home /sethome /homes /delhome
• Waystones & beacons: /waystone /warp /warps /setwarp /delwarp for public destinations with optional per-stone permissions and per-stone warmups, plus /beacon for player-raised personal destinations
• The Wardens: /warden /ban /tempban /unban /ipban /unipban /mute /tempmute /unmute /warn /warnings /clearwarnings /freeze /vanish /seen /whois /near /realname. All persistent with actor and timestamp, durations parse as 1d2h3m, and the ban gate fails closed. A broken store bars connections rather than letting an exile in, and says so in plain words in the log
• Steward's tools: /mend /aegis /wings /flyspeed /reforge (full durability fidelity) /discard /strip (both confirm twice) /herald broadcast /clearchat /peek (read-only inventory)
• The Herald's voice: /tidings shown on join, /law numbered and persistent, /msg and /r on the real whisper channel with reply memory, /shun and /heed, /afk, /deathmsg, /nightwatch sleep voting, /nick and /realname for roleplay names, and rotating timed announcements
• Provisions & tenure: /provision kits with per-kit cooldowns and full item fidelity (durability and metadata survive capture), plus /tenure playtime that pays Empire gold at configured thresholds, idempotently
• The roll: /muster and /list show who is online grouped by settlement with rank, honouring vanish and AFK; /stewardship is a paged, grouped index of every command the realm answers to
• /inherit: a read-only importer that brings homes, warps, player warps, kits and playtime across from a previous essentials-style plugin. Dry run is the default. It never writes to the old plugin's files, never overwrites an existing mark, suffixes collisions, and reports every skipped item by player rather than silently dropping it

The Herald & The Codex

• /herald publishes the week in the world every Sunday, across four desks: War, Crown, Coin and World. Numbered editions, archived by week. Quiet weeks say so
• The Codex is a twelve-chapter in-game rulebook: Settlement Tiers · Land & Claims · Treasury & Coin · The Three Roads · Government · Taxation · The Warehouse · Reigns & Vassals · The Roads of a Reign · Diplomatic Relations · Border Access · Area Permissions. Written in the mod's own voice, so you stop answering the same five questions in chat forever
• The Sunday resolution runs four phases in order (infamy decay, grievances, wars, herald publish), anchored to a fixed weekly tick. Staff can inspect or force it

Diplomacy, Rivalry & War

Seven formal relation states: Neutral, Alliance, Non-Aggression Pact, Trade Partner, Rivalry, War, Vassal, with a full offer / accept / deny flow. Diplomacy is negotiated, not imposed.

War now requires a reason. You mint a grievance first, and it matures before it can be spent:

Then you declare, with a goal, and the goal is what you actually win:

• The Black Book (/blackbook) tracks infamy. Fabricate claims and the world judges you, and a realm the world has judged hands everyone else a valid grievance against it. Infamy decays weekly
• Wars carry attacker/defender sides, a muster window, and a war ledger recording every event
• A siege report page shows the state of a war at a glance
• No road runs into or out of a realm at war. A siege should be a siege
• War overrides every open right in your area permissions: except members you named individually, so name only those you trust
• In-game letters: write, send and read mail between settlements. Declare intentions on paper before you declare them in the field

The fighting itself is still yours to do. Empires runs the politics, the paperwork and the consequences.

Chat System

• Full multi-channel chat: Global, Settlement, Officer, Alliance, Kingdom, Empire and Trade, plus ranged local Say / Whisper / Shout / Emote
• Roleplay names: /nick sets the name you wear in roleplay channels; /realname and the Wardens' truename reveal the soul behind it
• Settlement chat tags and titles shown in channels
• Leader announcements broadcast to every member
• Staff and Admin channels, plus staff moderation tools

The Hubs

• Empire Hub (/empire hub): ranks, treasury, warehouse, laws, government, diplomacy, letters, faith, the evolution tree and management, in one button-driven menu
• Map Hub (/empiremap): personal map settings, HUD toggles, marker privacy and waypoints
• War pages: Ledger of War, Book of Grievances, Black Book, Declare, siege report
• Chunk Tool hub: areas, rows, per-right toggles, room management
• Admin hubs: full admin panel, admin map hub (live config: fog of war, world border, teleport rules, map scales, exploration resets), and the EmpireGuard region hub
• Same UI language as the Gilded Dreams shop hub, so the whole package plays like one game, not a stack of plugins

For Developers

Empires now exposes a public API so other mods can build on top of it instead of guessing:

• EmpireApi: look up a player's settlement, list settlements, open the settlement info page
• EmpireMarketApi: resolve the settlement at any world coordinate, check whether a chunk is claimed, test a rank permission, check canFoundMarket, and subscribe to settlement deleted / renamed / claim-changed events

This is the seam Gilded Dreams' shops hook into. Yours can too.

Built as an Ecosystem

• Gilded Dreams: full gold economy, player shops, banking. Strongly recommended: taxes, founding costs, upkeep and treasuries all run on it. Empires still loads without it, but runs best with it.

 COMMAND REFERENCES

Empires is built to be played through hubs, dropdowns and buttons. The commands are an option for players, not a requirement.

Citizenship & Governance

Economy

Territory, Map & Travel

Diplomacy, War & Realms

Travel & Essentials (new in 0.2.0)

Admin & Staff

Grant regular players empire.use only. Grant staff the empire.warden.*, empire.steward.*, empire.herald.* and empireguard.* trees, and admins empireadmin.*. Do not give players a broad empire.* wildcard.

GETTING STARTED

1. Install Empires (and Gilded Dreams for the full economic loop)
2. Grant your default player group empire.use, and your staff group the trees above
3. Earn 1,000 gold through mob farming or trading with wandering traders, then /empire create <name>
4. /empire hub to invite citizens, set your ranks, laws and tax rate
5. /empire claim your borders, /empire setcapital, and open the world map to watch your colour spread
6. Leave Camp and choose your road: Sword, Coin or Faith. It is yours for good
7. Read /empire hub → Codex once. It explains the whole system in twelve chapters
8. Start making history

SUPPORT & COMMUNITY

Bug reports, feature requests, and the fastest answers: https://discord.com/invite/pyretale 

Want to see Empires at full scale? It runs live on PyreTale, our dark medieval Hytale server, set in the world of the upcoming novel Pyre. IP and details in the Discord.