Vassals

Every deed reaches the point where there is more work than there are hours. A Vassal Contract is the answer. Seal it, name your worker, choose where they will call home, and a real character walks onto your land carrying tools and ready for instruction.

Right click your vassal and open Manage. Give them a trade and point them at their storage, and from that moment they work without you. A mason turns your shards into bricks and slabs and knows a rock shard from slate. A carpenter cuts planks, shafts, beams and kindling from your logs. A potter shapes clay bricks bare handed. A farmer tends your fields, and you can hand each farmer their own fields so two never end up fighting over the same crop.

They work whether you are online or not. Stock their bins and come back to full ones. When materials run dry they go idle and wait rather than wandering off, and they tell you so plainly. The status column never gives you a vague “working” when the truth is out of clay or heading home.

Best of all, they improve. A vassal has real skills that climb with every attempt, failures included, exactly as a player’s would. A new carpenter fumbles a good many planks. A seasoned one barely wastes a log. Watch the whole skill tree grow in their own window, read their work log, and see what they have been doing while you were away.

And their learning is your learning. A vassal shares the experience it earns back with you, so every brick your mason cuts and every field your farmer tends feeds your own skills as well as theirs. Nothing about it is fabricated. Your worker swings a real rake and a real chisel, the game grants the skill exactly as it would to a player, and a share of that gain comes to you. Better still, it does not stop when you log off. Everything your household earns while you are away is held for you and paid out the moment you come back, so a week at sea still leaves you further along than you were.