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 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.
The hold
A party on a quest reaches a moment worth an opinion, stops, and waits. 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.
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.
Chapters 1 and 2 are different. New players get an allowance of 5 per member that sits above the cap, and Pace cuts 35% instead of 20%. The band ends when you reach Chapter 3 and the designed economy takes over. If you are reading a guide that quotes tighter numbers than you are seeing, this is usually why.
Spending it
35% instead of 20% while you are inside the founder's band. Will not fire below 10 minutes remaining, so it cannot be used to shave the last sliver of a quest.
The expensive verb. This is the one that buys an outcome rather than time.
Offered once a beat has been holding for 30 minutes. Priced at a 1.25x markup on what that hold actually banked, and floored so it can never cost less than the hold paid you.
A worked example
You send a party of three. Twelve hours later they hit a beat and stop, and you are asleep.
- 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. Twelve hours of held time at 1 per 2h is 6 points, plus the 1.25x markup, so it costs roughly 8.
- 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
There is one setting, crew handles beats, that hands every decision to your people permanently. It is off by default, so the game asks you unless you tell it not to. Turning it on is a supported way to play, not a downgrade: the crew answers by who they actually are, and the game runs the way it did before 2.0. You can turn it back off at any time.
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
The systems reveal in stages rather than all at once. The Command meter itself shows up in Chapter 1, the full explanation follows in Chapter 2, and the later verbs unlock from Chapter 3. A short teaching line runs across your first five beats. 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, and Alignment for the separate Noble and Underworld meter.