🏙 UrbanPact

Entering the Industrial Era

Town Hall Level 4 opens the Industrial Era — the point where a city stops gathering by the handful and starts producing on an industrial scale. It's not a bigger version of the same game; it's a step change. Reaching it takes a whole city's mastery, and it rewards you with a roughly 100× surge in raw output plus a new tier of upgrades to spend that surge on.

The one thing that stands between you and the era is the Town Hall Level 3 → 4 upgrade. Its entry cost is a deliberate gate that proves you've mastered the entire Level-3 economy — not just one resource — across four axes:

• Production — a large bundle of all your raw materials (tens of thousands of timber, grain, stone, and the rest). Proves your producers and gatherers are running.
• Exporting — a substantial Treasury cost you'll only reach comfortably by running the Export Market. A city that has never exported can still get there, but it takes far longer — the gate is a firm nudge to master exports.
• Hunting — a chunk of 🧥 leather, paid from your stores. Leather comes only from the hunt-and-tan chain, and it never floods, so this is the one part of the gate you can't shortcut with production.
• Luxury — 40 of each of your city's two produced luxury goods. Proof you've mastered what your specialty buildings make. Your city must have built both of its Tier 3 specialty buildings before the Town Hall can reach Level 4 at all — this part of the gate is about your own luxury industry, so it has to exist first.

Which of these binds you depends on your city — a material-rich, treasury-poor city is gated by exports; a wealthy but thinly-stocked one is gated by materials. Most built-out cities clear the whole gate in a few days of focused play. The entry cost is flat — it never scales with your population, so a small city pays exactly what a large one does.

The 100× Flood

With Town Hall 4, your resource buildings can finally reach Level 4, and a Level-4 producer's output leaps to roughly 100× its Level-3 rate. A Level-4 Sawmill pours out around 5,000 timber every hour; a Level-4 Quarry, around 5,000 stone. The relative balance between producers is preserved — the same economy, just with two more zeros.

The flood is deliberately targeted. Knowing what does and doesn't surge is the key to reading the build order below:

Because the flood is raw materials only, the whole point of the build-out is to convert that raw torrent into the crafted goods and upgrades that actually move your city forward. That conversion — and the order you unlock it in — is the build order.

Recommended Build Order

The Level-4 upgrades are priced to be unaffordable at Level-3 gathering rates — you simply cannot grind your way to them. You must have the flood running first. That single fact dictates the entire order: flood first, spend second. The dependency chain is a clean cascade, and every city walks it the same way.

Step 1 — The keystones: Sawmill & Quarry

Upgrade your Sawmill and Quarry to Level 4 first. Timber and stone are the materials everything else in the era is built from, and the two keystones are the cheapest Level-4 producers by design — affordable from your existing Level-3 stock plus a little gathering, with no chicken-and-egg deadlock. Once they're up, they flood timber and stone at ~5,000 each per hour, which funds the entire rest of the build-out. Nothing else should come before these two.

Step 2 — The five gated producers

With stone and timber pouring in, upgrade the remaining producers — Mine, Coal Shaft, Clay Pit, Farm, and Textile Mill — to Level 4. Each of these carries a heavy stone-and-timber bill (up to ~20,000 of each for the Mine and Coal Shaft), which would take days of hand-gathering at Level-3 rates but clears in just a few hours once your keystones are flooding. A producer is never gated on a resource that comes after it, so there's no bootstrap puzzle — build them in whatever order suits your city's needs. When all seven producers are Level 4, your entire raw economy is running at industrial scale.

Step 3 — The Masterwork

Your Craftworks upgrades once, into the Masterwork — the industrial engine that converts the raw flood into refined Tier-2 goods (planks, bricks, iron, steel, and the rest) at a flat, very high rate that no longer depends on your population. Build it before the capability buildings, because those are priced in bulk Tier-2 goods and the Masterwork is the only thing that can produce Tier-2 fast enough to afford them. Its own cost is raw-heavy (tens of thousands of stone and timber) precisely so you can build it straight from the producer flood, before you have any bulk Tier-2 at all.

Step 4 — The capability buildings

Now spend the boom. The five remaining Level-4 upgrades each carry a similar budget — roughly 48,000 Tier-2 goods plus stone, timber, about 200 leather, a couple of luxury goods your city doesn't produce, and some Treasury — so each takes about a day once the Masterwork is converting, and ~5 days for all five. Build them in whatever order matches your goals:

• Trading Post → the Master's Charter — usually the priority, because it's your personal endgame crafting unlock (details below).
• Library → Library Insight, Hunter's Lodge → Expedition Ground 4, and Bank / Market Level 4 — capability and income upgrades you can sequence to taste.

The Level-4 Upgrades

Here's what each of the Level-4 unlocks actually gives you.

⚒️ The Masterwork

The city-side refining engine. Its NPC workforce switches to a flat, very high output rate — a fixed industrial capacity that no longer scales with population — turning your raw flood into Tier-2 goods every hour. It's what makes the rest of the Level-4 upgrades affordable, which is why it comes before them. Recipe assignment and Labor Contracts work exactly as they did for the Craftworks; see Resources & Crafting for the mechanics. Masterwork output never counts toward City Score — it's automated throughput, not personal craftsmanship.

📜 The Master's Charter

Your personal endgame crafting unlock — a one-time, 50,000 gold purchase at /vendor, available to any resident of a city whose Trading Post has reached Level 4. Buy it once and it's yours for life. It does two things:

• Raises your tool cap from Level 5 to Level 10. Higher tools are portable personal power — they craft and gather more in any city, Industrial Era or not. Reaching Level 10 is a real grind (roughly 525 uses per tool), but the payoff is a maxed artisan.
• Lets you lease any Masterwork for high-volume crafting. Your crafts run through the host city's Masterwork workers, so the volume scales with that building. The Charter is the portable right to lease; the scale belongs to whatever city you're standing in — so a new, undeveloped city gives you nothing to lease until it builds its own Masterwork.

High-volume leased crafting is grain-fed: every leased craft consumes grain equal to its output, on top of the recipe's normal inputs — you're feeding the workers you've hired. Run low on grain and the line slows or stops. Your hour report lists that grain on its own 👷 Fed the leased Masterworks crew line, separate from the recipe's own ingredients, so it's always clear which is which. As with all crafting, the finished goods flow to the city stockpile; your reward is reputation, City Score, and the permanent capability.

🔦 Library Insight

Unlocked at Library Level 4, this adds a 🔦 Library Insight button to your /queue and /craft panels. One tap fills your open slots with exactly what your city needs right now — the active project's unmet requirements first, then a top-up of whatever is closest to running out. That last part means what it says: it measures how long each resource will last at the rate your city is consuming it, not which pile happens to be smallest — a big stack being drained fast is scarcer than a small one nothing touches. It tells you what it queued, too, so you can see whether it read your city the way you would have. It's a snapshot taken the moment you press it (the actions run as queued even if needs shift later), and it only ever queues gathers and crafts — never your strategic moves like visits, Market Runs, or hunts, so your queue stays a thinking surface.

The Library has its own panel — open your city screen and tap 🔦 Library. It shows what the building is doing for you (the reputation every active member earns each hour), which of its two rungs you have reached, and it carries the one-tap fill as well. Once your city's Library reaches Level 5, the button on your /queue screen becomes 🔦 The Library and opens that panel — there is no reason to send you to the smaller version once you have paid for the bigger one, and the one-tap fill is still the first button waiting there. The gather and craft sub-menus keep their own fill buttons at every level, because those fill your queue with one kind of action only, which the panel's fill does not do.

At Library Level 5 it starts advising as well as acting. Instead of only filling your slots on request, the Librarian reads the whole picture and recommends what to do next — go and gather something the city is nearly out of, craft something it's short of, mount an expedition when leather is running low, take a Market Run when your Letters of Credit are low, or go and visit a landmark when nothing is short at all. Each recommendation is a button, and nothing is queued unless you tap it — the reading is the Library's, the decision stays yours. Tapping one keeps you on the Library panel, so you can work down the list and fill your queue in the order you want rather than being sent elsewhere after the first pick. It will tell you what your city is running low on, never how many hours are left.

Level 5 adds the advice. It never takes the Level 4 fill away — both live on the same panel.

🏹 Expedition Ground 4

Unlocked at Hunter's Lodge Level 4, this opens deeper hunting grounds with a new provision bundle — richer expeditions for the hunters keeping your leather flowing.

💵 The Promissory Note (Bank Level 5)

Once your city's Bank reaches Level 5, you can borrow gold against your own future earnings. Open /profile → 💵. Pick one of the ready-made amounts, or tap ✏️ Type an amount and name any figure you like — shorthand works, so 45k is fine.

You can only owe about a week of what you actually earn. That ceiling is measured from your recent earnings, not from the gold in your pocket — two of the realm's strongest earners hold the smallest balances, because they spend as fast as they make it, and a balance-based limit would have served exactly the wrong people.

A note repays itself out of your income, and a bigger loan takes a bigger bite. You choose how fast: an aggressive note takes a large share of everything you earn and costs the least in fees; a relaxed one leaves more in your pocket each hour but costs more if you carry it a long time. The share scales with the size of the loan — borrowing 45,000 in one note takes exactly as much of your income as borrowing it in 45 small ones would have. That's deliberate: the amount you type is a convenience, not a discount.

Borrow enough and the share reaches 100% — every coin you earn goes to the note until it clears. The screen tells you before you sign, along with the fee and the total. Nothing is committed until you confirm it.

Paying it off early always costs something. The fee shrinks the sooner you clear it, but never to nothing — borrowing is never free. And the note is a contract: the terms you signed are the terms you keep, even if the Bank's rates change afterwards.

🏦 Bank & 🏪 Market Level 4

Stronger dividend and wage payouts. These are the only levers that turn city activity into personal gold, so their Level-4 boost is measured and incremental — not flooded. They still carry the full expensive Level-4 cost; they simply keep personal income on the same honest scale it's always been.

Fair by Design

The flood is a city boom, not a personal one — and the game is built so it stays that way:

• Your income is untouched. Wages, Bank dividends, and the Estate track run on exactly the same scale as before. Industry can't shortcut the personal economy, so the climb from Tent to Estate stays a real chase.
• The leaderboards stay fair. City Score still tracks active production — your gathers, hand-crafts, pelts, and premium visits — always counted at their un-amplified base amount. An industrialized city doesn't automatically dominate the board, and idle industry wins nothing. A city that industrializes and then goes quiet stops climbing.
• Luxury stays scarce. Tier-3 goods never flood, so premium visits and the whole Tycoon luxury trade keep their value in the industrial age.