Surviving the Long Night

Quick answers

Is Iron Realms free to play?

Yes. Iron Realms is free to play in any browser with no download and no account required. Every building, troop tier and Seat of Power is reachable without spending money — purchases buy speed and cosmetics, never a higher ceiling.

Does spending money make you stronger in Iron Realms?

No. Nothing purchasable raises your power ceiling. A charter audit runs on every build and fails it if any offer would sell power. During the pre-alpha nothing is for sale at all — better than that, the store gives its goods away: everything in it is free to take, once a day per item, while the realm is being built. When payments do open, spending will compress time only: it clears timers, it never raises the summit.

How long does it take to max a keep in Iron Realms?

Keeps cap at level 45 and troops at tier 13 — the same summit for everyone, and it is a campaign: about seven months of steady play at half an hour a day, counting keep 45 and the nineteen plots that gate it. The Fair Play ledger inside the game reads that figure straight out of the shipped constants, so it is never a month behind the build.

Seasons in Iron Realms run seven real days, and winter — the Long Night — is not decoration. It reshapes the map and the war. Prepare for it and it becomes an opportunity.

Read the season clock

Seasons turn on a seven-day cycle and the in-game sky mirrors real weather, so the clock is genuinely external — you cannot rush it, reroll it, or buy past it. The White Ravens of the Citadel herald each turn.

The Long Night also runs its own gauntlet: fifty waves, with a Night's Watch rank at each milestone that grants a permanent winter-defense bonus:

Wave	Rank	Winter defense
3	Recruit of the Watch	+3%
8	Ranger	+5%
15	First Ranger	+8%
25	Lord Commander	+11%
40	The Watcher on the Walls	+15%

The gauntlet opens at Keep 18 — it used to open at 12, which put fifty waves of the dead in front of a host that did not exist yet.

Note the shape, because it is the opposite of what the rank table suggests. The ranks come thick and fast early and then stretch — wave 3 to wave 8 is five waves for +2%, while wave 25 to wave 40 is fifteen for +4%. The waves do the reverse, and far more violently: wave w fields 600 × 1.17^w−1 wights, which compounds to roughly 5,400 at wave 15, 26,000 at wave 25 and 270,000 at wave 40. Every rung costs multiples of the one below it.

That escalation was eased on 17 September, and the reason is the host rather than the wights. The march-size cap now binds here as it does everywhere else: the Long Night used to send your entire garrison — up to 162,000 troops at a maxed keep — and now sends what your Training Yard allows, around 40,000. Roughly a quarter of the army, against the same wall of the dead. The growth came down from 1.22 to 1.17 to give back the reach that cost, and wave one is deliberately unchanged at 600: an early lord's army was always smaller than their own cap, so the cap never bound them and their first night is exactly the fight it was.

So the honest advice is: push until the wave in front of you costs more host than the next rank is worth, and stop there. For most lords in their first month that is somewhere in the single digits to low teens, not wave 15 as a default and certainly not wave 25. First Ranger is a real goal; The Watcher on the Walls is a prestige objective and an expensive one.

The season banner counts down and the White Ravens herald each turn. Watch it: pushes you start in autumn should conclude before the Long Night changes the terrain and tempo underneath them.

Stockpile before the freeze

Winter is a poor time to be caught short. Bank resources and speedups in the warmer seasons so you can act decisively when the map hardens and rivals hesitate.

Turn winter to advantage

The Long Night rewards the prepared. Live weather and season effects change movement and combat — a lord who planned for the freeze presses while others hunker down, and the season-turn raven's gift is a free boost for the attentive.