A home should be more than scenery. It should have an owner, a place in the world and a relationship with the people who live around it.
We have now finalized the canonical design for Housing & Property V1. The design is complete and canonical; the full gameplay/runtime system is not yet implemented or live.
Housing connects personal ambition to the larger life of The City of Gold. Citizenship determines where private urban property can begin. Rent creates relationships between owners and tenants. Commoner Housing connects homes to the labor market. Maintenance, taxation and regional currency turn every property into an ongoing economic decision. Future Justice may have to settle disputes that no invisible rule should decide automatically.
Build Where You Belong
A Character may acquire a House Blueprint or deed regardless of political status. The political restriction appears when that Character chooses where to build.
Inside an established Settlement's city limits, only a recognized Citizen of that Settlement may place their own House or another eligible private Building. Citizenship comes through the Settlement Charter and its established civic process; it does not arise from owning a key or sleeping within the walls.
A Free Man cannot place private property inside established city limits. Outside those limits, however, Free Men may build wherever ordinary placement rules permit: in claimed County territory beyond a city, in unclaimed territory, or where no Settlement has yet been established. Building there does not automatically make the owner a Citizen.
Residence Is Not Citizenship
A Free Man may legitimately live inside a city when a House owner or active tenant grants residential access. That makes the Character a resident of that home, not a political member of the Settlement.
Residence is not Citizenship.
The distinction gives both ideas weight. Citizenship carries civic membership and urban property rights. Residence answers the more immediate question of who may live behind a particular door.
Frontier Property Matters
The Town Hall defines two protected boundaries: the Settlement's current, smaller city boundary and a larger outer boundary reserving its maximum future growth toward Metropolis scale.
A Mayor cannot place a Town Hall and silently absorb independent Free Men and their pre-existing Buildings anywhere inside that protected future area. Political expansion must account for the people who were already there.
Those occupants may eventually join the Charter, reach a voluntary property agreement, or be affected by separately designed lawful or conflict systems. Housing V1 does not invent forced removal, warfare or judicial eviction to resolve them.
Own What You Can Support
There is no arbitrary one-House ownership limit. A Character may own multiple Houses, workshops, businesses and other eligible Buildings.
The limit is economic. Every property carries construction cost, weekly maintenance, taxation and other responsibilities. Owning ten Houses is possible; sustaining a property empire still has to make sense.
House models may differ in architecture, footprint, room layout, interior space and furniture-placement possibilities without becoming artificial upgrade tiers. Whatever their shape, all Houses remain part of the same Universal Building architecture.
Player Housing or Commoner Housing
A Residential House has one simple choice: Player Housing or Commoner Housing. It can never serve both modes at the same time.
Player Housing supports Character residence and rental. There is no arbitrary numerical cap on the Characters who may receive legitimate residential access. Physical space provides a natural practical limit, and planned placeable Beds determine who can use the House for sleeping. The wider Sleep and Rest system remains deferred.
Commoner Housing instead contributes places to the County's abstract Commoner economy. Choosing one mode means the House supplies none of the benefits of the other.
Putting a House Up for Rent
An owner may list a Player House For Rent and set a weekly price. Rent follows the common Monday-to-Sunday cycle and is prepaid for the current rental week.
A tenancy beginning on Tuesday, Wednesday or any other day still pays the complete current week through Sunday. The starting week is not prorated, and a new full obligation begins on Monday. A tenant may prepay from one week up to four weekly cycles—approximately one month—but not indefinitely.
All Prices Begin in Copper
Housing also brings a broader economic rule into focus: all gameplay prices are quoted in Copper. Copper is the universal unit of account.
A House might therefore be advertised at 1,000 Copper per week. The tenant need not necessarily carry one thousand Copper Coins. Copper, Silver, Gold or a valid combination can satisfy that Copper-denominated price when their value matches it under the authoritative County exchange rate.
Housing does not create its own exchange mechanism. It uses the same one-rate-per-County monetary foundation as wages, fares, taxes, trading and other obligations.
Rent Goes to the Property
Paid rent enters the House's existing Universal Building Treasury. There is no Rental Wallet or separate Landlord Treasury.
The landlord manages those funds through the Universal Building System and remains responsible for the House's maintenance, repairs and applicable property taxation. Renting a home transfers possession for the tenancy; it does not transfer structural ownership responsibilities.
When You Rent It, It Is Their Home
While a tenancy is active and paid, the tenant has ordinary residential possession of the House. The landlord remains the legal Building owner but does not retain ordinary residential entry and cannot simply walk into the rented home at will.
Housing V1 also gives no Evict Now action against a compliant paid tenant. A genuine tenancy is more than temporary door access: it creates a protected home for as long as its terms remain active.
The tenant may add or remove Characters who receive residential access. Those tenant-granted permissions end automatically with the tenancy, while unrelated owner-granted Building permissions remain separate.
Tenancy does not grant the tenant access to the landlord's Universal Building Inventory or Treasury. Tenants instead use their own placeable furniture, Chests, containers and possessions. There is no hidden Tenant Building Inventory.
Rent Can Change—With Notice
A landlord may change the quoted weekly rent, but a new price does not immediately apply to an existing tenant. It becomes effective only after four complete weekly rental cycles following the current rental week.
That deterministic advance period prevents a sudden increase from becoming a disguised eviction while allowing owners to respond to changing economic conditions.
When Rent Is Not Paid
Rent must be paid before the current paid week expires. If the next obligation remains unpaid, lockout is immediate. The tenant and everyone whose access derives from that tenant lose ordinary entry.
The tenancy does not vanish immediately. It enters a two-week delinquency and recovery period. During that time the tenant remains registered, access remains locked, and rent continues accumulating.
Restoring access requires payment of all outstanding rent. Partial payment does not unlock the House. If the full balance is paid within the recovery period, normal tenancy and tenant-derived access resume. If it remains unpaid at the end of two weeks, the tenancy terminates automatically, the House returns fully to the landlord's possession, and tenant-derived access ends.
Possessions, Mechanics and Law
Lockout does not make furniture, Chests or possessions disappear, teleport to safety or produce automatic reimbursement. They remain physically where gameplay left them unless someone moves or interacts with them.
Once a landlord regains possession, ordinary mechanics may make property left inside reachable. That mechanical possibility does not automatically decide whether taking or retaining a disputed item is legally justified.
Housing establishes facts—access, possession, rent status, lockout and what remains inside. A future Justice System may adjudicate the legal dispute. A Judge may decide an individual case, and the parties will be expected to comply with that decision under future Justice rules. Housing V1 does not invent court procedures or automatic punishments, because not every human dispute should be settled by an invisible system.
A Commoner Housing Market
Any House owner may configure an eligible House as Commoner Housing. The owner does not need to employ the Commoners who use it: property owners supply housing, employers supply jobs, and those may be entirely different players.
Every Commoner House provides exactly 10 Commoner Housing places, regardless of model or physical size in V1. Those places join the established deterministic County Commoner market; the game does not create ten individually simulated permanent tenants for each House.
This opens another economic role. A player may invest in residential property and support the population without personally operating the workshops that employ it.
If a Commoner House collapses, its ten places disappear from the County allocation. The simulation remains abstract: the ten currently filled lowest-paying Commoner jobs in that County market lose their workers. Those jobs stay vacant until the next weekly Commoner allocation recalculates housing, population, work and wages.
Property Transfer and Citizenship
Eligible Buildings use a Universal Building Transfer Ownership action. The owner enters the new owner's Character handle and confirms a strong warning that ownership and control will be lost.
An actively rented House cannot be transferred. The tenancy must end first; V1 does not silently hand an active landlord contract to a buyer.
Urban ownership also remains connected to citizenship. If a Citizen leaves or loses the citizenship that allowed private ownership inside that city, the urban property is forfeited to the appropriate municipal authority or Mayor under the established Settlement model. The Building persists rather than being automatically destroyed.
That is different from independent Free Man property that existed before a Settlement claim. Frontier property cannot be absorbed merely by drawing a new city around it.
Where Property Tax Belongs
Housing V1 establishes jurisdiction without inventing rates or enforcement. A property inside city limits falls under municipal or Mayoral property taxation. A property in claimed County territory outside city limits falls under County or Count taxation.
The same property does not receive simultaneous direct Mayor and Count property taxes. Arrears, liens, seizure and other enforcement questions belong to future Taxation, Governance and Justice design.
A Home Must Still Be Maintained
Landlords remain responsible for the Maintenance and Building HP rules described in Built to Last. A House needs its weekly original-material obligations, can be repaired, and collapses permanently if it reaches 0% HP.
If a rented House collapses, protected Week 1 recovery keeps owner-attributable Building Inventory and Treasury contents separate from tenant-attributable furniture, containers and possessions. Week 2 then follows the ordinary free-for-all collapse rule.
A Place in the World
Housing creates more than interiors to decorate. It creates homes, rental businesses, Commoner landlords, frontier holdings, material obligations, political consequences and disputes that may one day become legal cases.
A House can anchor a family inside a city or establish a Free Man beyond its walls. It can provide ten places to the Commoner economy or become somebody else's protected rented home. It can produce income, require maintenance and carry consequences when citizenship, rent or ownership changes.
In The City of Gold, property is a real part of the world's social and economic structure. A place to call home is also a place for opportunity, responsibility and history to begin.