2.0 · Command & Consequence
Command
The resource you cannot buy, the 24-hour hold it is priced against, and what a decision actually costs.
Updated ·patch v2.0.5
What Command means for you in your first week
- Chapter 0 (your first half hour): nothing. There is no meter yet and you can ignore this page.
- Chapter 1: a small Command meter appears. The only thing it buys is Pace (speed up a quest). The game tops everyone up for free once, so press Pace on your longest quest rather than let the points drain.
- Chapter 2: quests start stopping at beats to ask you something. Answer them from the HQ panel or the Active tab. If you miss one, your crew decides by itself after 24 hours and nothing is lost. You get a second free top-up.
- Chapter 3: Intervene unlocks and the free top-ups stop. By now the Founder's Road has usually appeared too, and it is the best long-term place to put spare Command.
A chapter is a step of the main story. You advance by finishing that chapter's story quests (10 in Chapter 0, 5 in Chapter 1, 10 in Chapter 2, then 5 each) with at least one star.
What Command is
Command is the 2.0 resource that pays for the decisions your crew cannot make on their own. Three things make it behave unlike every other currency in the game:
- It is earned only. It is not in any bundle and automation can never spend it, so you always come back to a full bank rather than to something that drained while you were away.
- Time pays it, not activity. Every member accrues on a wall clock according to what they are doing. There is nothing to grind for it.
- It caps hard and drains fast. The bank is small on purpose. Command is meant to be spent on the decision in front of you, not stockpiled for later.
Beats and the hold
A beat is a decision point inside a quest: the party reaches a moment worth an opinion (a fork, a stranger, a bad idea), stops, and waits for you to pick an option. Beats only happen from Chapter 2 onward, and only on quests you dispatched by hand (queued and looped quests skip them).
The clock on that quest freezes while it waits, so a beat costs you nothing in progress until you let it run long. The hold lasts 24 hours, and at the end of it your crew answers for themselves based on who they are. Nothing expires, nothing is lost, and no party is ever stranded at a fork.
That 24-hour figure is the number the whole economy is priced against. When you read the rates below, read them against the hold.
Where waiting decisions show up
Do this: when you come back, check the top of the HQ screen first. Anything waiting on you is listed there and can be answered in place.
- HQ, Command Decisions panel. Sits above First Steps and lists every quest holding for you, soonest to lapse first. It disappears when nothing is waiting.
- Quests, Active tab. Holding quests are sorted to the top under a banner, and each one carries a gold Decide now button.
- The toast. When a party stops at a beat you get a notification; tapping it takes you straight to that quest.
Earning it
Each member accrues separately, and the rate depends entirely on what that member is doing right now.
| Member state | Rate | Per member / day | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Waiting at a beat | 1 per 6h | 4.0 | A party stopped at a decision earns fastest. A full hold banks 4 points per member, which is what the catch-up price is set against. |
| Resting at home | 1 per 12h | 2.0 | The baseline. Members not on a quest and not waiting on you. |
| Deployed on a quest | 1 per 36h | 0.67 | Slowest. Members already out working earn the least, which is why a roster permanently on the road banks slowly. |
| Over the cap | −1 per 2h | −12.0 | Not a rate, a drain. Anything above your cap bleeds off quickly, so a banked surplus is not something you can sit on. |
The shape here is deliberate. A party waiting on you earns at twice the resting rate and six times the deployed rate, so the act of stopping to ask you something is itself the best-paying state a member can be in.
The cap, and the founder's band
Your bank is capped at 2 Command per member. A party of five caps at 10. Go over and the surplus drains at a point every two hours, which is roughly six times faster than a resting member earns.
The founder's band (Chapters 1 and 2). Twice, once while you are in Chapter 1 and once in Chapter 2, the game tops every member's meter up to 5. That is a one-off gift each time, not a higher cap: anything above 2 per member drains at 1 point every 2 hours like any other surplus, so spend it soon. While you are in the band, Pace also cuts 35% instead of 20%. Chapter 0 is not part of the band (there is no meter yet), and the band ends when you reach Chapter 3.
Spending it
What this means for you: early on, Pace is the only button you will actually press. Spend it on a long quest you want back before you log off, not on one that is nearly done. Pace and Intervene appear on an active quest's card.
Available from Chapter 1, as soon as the Command meter appears. Cuts 35% instead of 20% while you are inside the founder's band (Chapters 1 and 2). You can press it more than once, but each press takes a share of what is LEFT, so repeats shrink. Not offered once a quest has under 10 minutes to go.
Unlocks in Chapter 3, provided you have spent Command at least once or seen 10 beats (almost everyone has by then). Once per quest. It cancels that quest's injury rolls, including an injury a beat choice would have caused, and that is all it does: it does not change the stars, the rewards, the timer or which option was picked, and the region still remembers what your crew chose.
Offered once a beat has been holding for 30 minutes. The price is whichever is bigger: one Command per two hours the quest sat waiting, or 1.25 times the Command that same wait earned the party (rounded up). So it can never cost less than the hold paid you.
Most options at a beat are free. A few stronger ones carry a Command price on the button. You only see these once the meter is visible.
The Road's milestones are paid for in Command, a little at a time, and every point you pledge is kept. See the Founder's Road page.
A worked example
You send a party of three. Partway through they hit a beat and stop, and you are asleep for twelve hours.
- While they wait, the three of them bank at 1 per 6h each. Twelve hours of holding is 6 Command earned across the party.
- The quest clock did not move for those twelve hours. Nothing was lost, it was deferred.
- You wake up and take the catch-up offer. The two candidate prices are 12h at 1 per 2h = 6, and 1.25 x the 6 the hold banked = 7.5, rounded up to 8. You pay the larger: 8 Command.
- Net, you are down about 2 Command and the quest lands on the schedule it originally had.
That is the intended shape: holding a beat overnight is close to free, and the longer you leave it the more the hold has already paid toward undoing itself.
If you would rather not be asked
Do this if beats feel like a chore: open Settings, Gameplay, Automation. From Chapter 2 a Command section there has a switch that hands every decision to your crew. It is off by default. Turning it on is a supported way to play, not a downgrade: the crew answers by who they actually are, quests never hold, and the game runs the way it did before 2.0. You can turn it back off at any time.
After the story ends you also get per-quest Crew Orders: a switch when you send a party (and on the quest card) that says whether you or the crew decide that one quest. The global setting becomes your starting choice. Until you finish the last story chapter, only the global setting exists.
What a decision leaves behind
Every region keeps an opinion of your crew on a scale from −100 to 100, separate from how the region is doing and separate from whose it is. It records only what your people did there, and it keeps up to three receipts explaining why it feels that way.
| Band | Score | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Admired | 60 to 100 | The region's luck tilts your way and work starts arriving unasked. |
| Respected | 25 to 59 | Doors open a little wider. An extra bounty slot unlocks at 50. |
| Neutral | −24 to 24 | Where every region starts, and where they all drift back to. |
| Wary | −25 to −59 | The quiet jobs get harder to pull off here. |
| Unwelcome | −60 to −100 | Doors close. Some people will not talk to your crew at all. |
Regard forgets rather than festers. Stay away from a region for seven days and it starts drifting back toward neutral at a point a day. A place you wronged does not learn to hate you, it just stops thinking about you.
When any of this appears
| When | What you get |
|---|---|
| Chapter 0 | Nothing. No meter, no beats. |
| Chapter 1 | The Command meter, the costs on screen, and Pace. First founder's band top-up to 5 per member. |
| Chapter 2 | Beats start on hand-dispatched quests, with catch-up and costed options. Second band top-up. The hand-it-to-the-crew setting appears. A short teaching line runs across your first five beats. |
| Chapter 2, 3 beats seen | The Founder's Road opens on Quests, Available. |
| Chapter 3 | Intervene. The founder's band ends and the normal cap applies. |
| After the last story chapter | Per-quest Crew Orders. |
If you are early and cannot find a screen this page describes, you have most likely not reached its reveal yet.
Every figure on this page is the shipped default. All of them are server-tunable, so a live build can differ. See also Quests for the boards these parties are dispatched to, Founder's Road for the Command sink that pays your champion, and Alignment for the separate Noble and Underworld meter.