IdleMMO Village Mastery Guide

Villages arrived in v0.74.0 as Village Mastery: a settlement you build and feed with a currency of its own, Village Resources (VR). The developer still labels the skill experimental: v0.75.2 warned that heavy balance changes will keep coming and will not be refunded. Nearly every patch since launch has touched the system, so this page tracks the current state, and the changelog at the bottom records what changed in each patch.

How a village earns VR

A new village starts with fixed base buildings (v0.76.0): 125 VR per minute of passive gathering, 625,000 VR of storage, 2 citizens and food for both. Base buildings never decay and need no workers. On top of that you have a manual gather button worth 25 VR per click on a 5 second cooldown; six one-time clicking upgrades (12,500 VR up to 30,000,000 VR) push that to +150 VR per click and cut the cooldown to a floor of 1 second.

Skill XP follows the resources: 1 XP per 10 VR gathered manually and 1 XP per 25 VR from passive production or tax. Before you build a clicking habit, know that manual-gather XP was halved in v0.76.0 and that v0.78.0 removed Village Mastery from every XP boost. The passive economy is the long game.

The opening build order

The loop the v0.74.0 notes describe: gather VR, house citizens, feed them, then put them to work in gathering houses. Every worked building needs assigned citizens, every citizen eats 1 food, and partial staffing cuts output proportionally: a 4-worker building staffed by 2 runs at 50%. Your first purchases, at wiki prices:

Gathering houses scale steeply from there: Simple (375,000 VR, 375 VR/min), Sturdy (2,400,000 VR, 1,000 VR/min), Advanced (15,750,000 VR, 2,250 VR/min) and Supreme (93,750,000 VR, 4,000 VR/min, reduced from launch in v0.76.0). Don't skimp on storage: uncollected resources stop accumulating after 30 days.

The upgrade cap

Villages don't use building slots. Instead your Village Mastery level sets a cap on total upgrades, and everything counts against it — active buildings, construction in progress, buildings under repair, even decayed ones. Base buildings are exempt.

Happiness and tax

Happiness moves slowly: it falls by about 4 per hour when above its target and recovers by about 2 per hour when below, with a floor of 25 for output efficiency. Food shortage drags the target down proportionally, so a food deficit hurts twice: starving citizens pay no tax, and the happiness target sinks with the shortage.

Tax converts well-fed citizens into VR (well-fed only since v0.76.0) at a rate of 0% to 30%. Each tax point costs 1 happiness immediately, and the long-term happiness target drops with the rate: 10% tax targets 90 happiness, 20% targets 70, 30% targets 25. What a well-fed citizen pays scales with your mastery level: 535 VR/hour at level 1, 2,250 at 50, 3,965 at 99. Keep tax low until food and happiness are stable, then raise it in steps you can sustain.

Decay and repairs

Buildings run a condition cycle of 45 days for free players and 60 days for members (v0.77.1). Below 80% condition a building loses output and becomes repairable; fully decayed buildings stop producing until repaired. A repair never costs more than the building's original price. Food buildings, dwellings, manual-gathering upgrades and base buildings are exempt; the decay pressure lands on your gathering, storage and military buildings.

The Trade Depot

The Trade Depot converts logs, ores, metal bars and construction materials into VR. It is the bridge between your character's gathering skills and your village. The math: item gold value ×513 as a starting VR value, which works out to roughly 38% of gold value for standard characters and about 45% for members, before sale pressure. An automatic price multiplier drifts between 25% and 100%, moving up to 5% per recalculation on a roughly 15-minute cache, so dumping huge stacks tanks your own rate. Each character has a daily gold-value cap (5,000 at level 1, 7,500 at 50, 15,000 at 99, reset at midnight UTC) and a request holds at most 100,000 items. If you're stockpiling for the Depot, the Woodcutting, Mining, Smelting and Construction calculators rank what's fastest to produce.

VR also converts straight to gold at 1,350 VR per gold (1,150 for members). Treat that rate as a floor under the economy, not a money-maker. For selling your gathered items at the best price, check Bartering.

Warfare

Warfare is opt-in, and opting in commits you for 30 days. You build attack, defence, scout and anti-scout buildings (four tiers each, up to ~7,000 in a stat), then raid NPC targets or other villages. The numbers that decide whether it's worth it:

• NPC targets: up to 5 active at once, expiring after 24 hours, in four difficulty bands (Easy to Dangerous).
• Active wars run 3 to 12 hours depending on battle balance; production continues while they run.
• Raid exposure: only 2.5% of a defender's stored VR is protected. Since v0.78.0 a village that has been attacked gets 24 hours of protection.
• Happiness swings: −5 to both sides at war start, +12 for a win, −5 for a loss.
• Farming weak targets doesn't pay: loot against much weaker villages drops to as little as 25% of the normal multiplier.
• Scout reports last 30 minutes. A defender can surrender, handing the attacker 50% of current resources — usually worse than eating the raid.

Until your gathering and storage economy runs itself, stay out. A village with fat storage and no defence is the target the system is designed to punish.

Patch changelog

What each patch changed for villages, newest first — this section is updated as new patches land:

Frequently asked questions