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The hourly tick, your wages, and what happens while you are away.
Once you're in a city, every hour the game runs a tick that processes everything in order:
⏱ You don't have to be online for any of this. Queue your actions ahead of time and the game runs without you.
After each tick completes, the bot sends you a summary of everything that happened that hour:
You'll receive this message whether you were online or not — check in at any time to see what changed while you were away.
You choose what goes into your report. Open ⚙️ Settings → 📋 Customize hour report and every section has its own Show/Hide button: keep the parts you read and hide the rest.
Warnings always show, even in a section you've hidden. A shelf that sold out or is running low, visitors turned away, a district running short, a building project or commercial zone that's stalled, a Lodge hunt cut short by thin supplies, a trade offer waiting on your answer, an empty queue, or anything the tick couldn't do for you will still appear, so hiding a section never hides a problem.
For your first day of full reports, a short reminder at the bottom points you to this menu. It goes away on its own, or as soon as you change a section.
Everything starts switched on, and any report choices you'd already made (hiding the AI tip or reminders, turning off visit stories, showing your queue) carried over. Compact (a one-line report) and Quiet (no hourly report) are still on the main Settings page; your section choices shape the full report.
Beyond the one-line tick tip, you can request a full strategic review anytime: open /help (or tap 📜 Help) and hit the 💡 Get AI Tips button. The AI advisor looks at your complete current state — queue, tools and levels, city stockpile, active project shortfalls, buildings, consumables, rested charges — and returns 3–5 numbered tips tailored to your numbers.
Tips are cached for 1 hour; the button shows ✓ cached when your last review is still fresh and refreshes automatically once the hour is up.
A city whose Library has reached Level 6 gains a step of its own in the hour, sitting between its production and its districts: it pays its researchers. The wage bill is a flat 500💸 from the city treasury, every hour, and in exchange the researchers add 10 Research Pages to the city's bank — the currency every piece of research is bought with.
That wage is the only thing research costs in treasury. Individual pieces of research are paid for in Research Pages and nothing else, so the hourly bill doesn't rise because the city picked something ambitious.
If the treasury can't cover the wage that hour, the researchers simply don't work that hour. Nothing is lost and nothing is taken back — the Research Pages already banked and every part-funded piece of research sit exactly where they were, and the researchers pick up again the hour the treasury can pay them. Volunteers are unaffected: a citizen who spends an hour in the Library is never paid a wage, so contributions keep arriving even in an hour the city couldn't pay. Once a city has finished everything there is to study, the wage bill stops along with the work.
Two research lines can appear in your hourly report:
The payroll also shows up as an ordinary hourly treasury cost anywhere your city accounts for what it burns, so it's never a mystery drain.
✅ A city is only ever at risk if it deliberately asks to be. Disasters reach exactly one kind of city: one that has chosen to fund the Great Works research, which buys no ability of any kind — it lets your city build past the proven pattern, and unproven works fail in unproven ways. A city that never takes it is never struck. Not rarely — never. And a city can never be struck harder than it signed up for: each level of Great Works it takes is one more building a single disaster is allowed to touch, up to three.
For a city that has opted in, the game checks once an hour, and the odds are long — on the order of one event a month. When one lands it is a fire, a flood, an earthquake or a tornado, and you hear about it in a message of its own, written for the occasion, rather than buried in your hourly report.
Nothing is destroyed and no level is ever lost. A struck building is damaged: it keeps everything it is and runs at half output until somebody does something about it. Half applies to whatever that building does for you — a struck Market halves its wage bonus, a struck Bank its dividend, a struck Library its research and reputation, a struck Lodge its standing hunts, a struck Craftworks its crews. The Trading Post is the odd one out: it shuts its doors rather than halving them. Your premium buildings are never touched at all — landmarks, monuments and Wonders alike, every generation of them — and neither are your Chamber of Commerce, your Customs House or your specialty luxury buildings.
Nothing repairs itself, and there are two steps.
Coming back earns real standing. A finished rebuild pays your city prestige — the same prestige that lifts every citizen's wages — scaled to how much you actually had to put back, so the bigger the building the bigger the lift. Your city group gets the announcement, wage bonus and all. Like all prestige it's a rolling two-week score, so it fades on its own; the story is worth something while it's fresh.
You are also never hit while you're down. A city carrying any unrepaired damage cannot be struck again, and after the last rebuild finishes there's a two-week grace period before it's eligible at all.
And you can switch it off while you're away. The 🌂 Vacation shield sits on the 🏛 City panel for cities that hold the research. The Mayor or the Minister of Urban Development can raise it for anything from a day to a year, and it costs nothing — no gold, no materials. While it's up the city simply cannot be struck. Two small rules: the clock starts the moment you set it, and it can only be set once a day, so standing it down early doesn't buy you a fresh one straight away.
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