Guilds
A guild holds an industry together and takes a cut of everyone else producing in it. It is the only structure in the game that turns other players’ activity into your income without attacking anybody.
The numbers
Holding an industry
Control of an industry goes to the guild with the highest score in it. Score is built from what the members have staked there — but each member’s contribution is capped at $25,000.
That cap is the whole design. Without it, one large holder would decide every industry and a guild would be a formality. With it, control is a question of how many committed members you have and how well they cover the industry, not of who is richest. Fifty members at the cap beat one member with ten times the total.
Rarity counts too: sole-supplier companies — sub-industries with exactly one member — are worth more to a guild’s score than their staked value alone suggests. Those names are concentrated in the late eras, which is what makes Industrials and Financials worth fighting over.
The levy
While your guild holds an industry, every non-member producing in it pays 5% of their gross output to the guild. It is taken at accrual, before the output reaches their store — not at claim, and not from their wallet.
| Who | What they pay | When |
|---|---|---|
| A guild member | Nothing | — |
| An outsider in a held industry | 5% of gross output | Continuously, at accrual |
| An outsider in an unheld industry | Nothing | — |
So a guild’s income scales with how much other people produce in its territory, which makes holding a popular industry worth more than holding an empty one. Financials is cheap to control and has almost nobody in it.
Joining and leaving
- A guild holds at most 50 members. There is no soft limit or fee escalation — it is simply full.
- Your staked shares stay yours. Joining a guild does not move, pool or custody anything; it changes who scores your stake and who takes the levy on your output.
- Leaving does not claw back levies already taken. The levy is charged as production accrues, so what has been taken is settled.
What a guild is actually for
Two things, and they pull in different directions. The first is income — hold an industry other people want to produce in and take a slice of all of it. The second is coverage — a guild can cover an industry between its members far more cheaply than any one of them could alone, which matters because sole suppliers cannot be substituted.
The tension is that the industry with the most outsiders to tax is also the one hardest to hold, and the industry easiest to hold has nobody to tax. Choosing between those is the strategic question guilds exist to pose.
On-chain
The contract is 0x8A209ae5e2B9Dc810F8beFbd65E012E6aa10dE07. The levy rate and score cap are owner-settable; MAX_MEMBERS is a constant and cannot be moved. Production reads the guild module through a settable reference, so a missing guild module costs the levy and nothing else — production keeps working.