Essos
A second continent stands east of the Narrow Sea: twenty-one seats, four deep workings and a hundred and twenty camps. This page says what a lord may do with it today, and — at the same length — what they may not.
Essos is not a reskin of Westeros. It is a frontier: richer, further and deliberately incomplete. It arrived in pieces and is still arriving, so the honest way to read this page is as two lists.
What is there
Nine Free Cities stand along the western coast and the Rhoyne, each with its own banner, its own grant and its own blurb. Braavos and Volantis are the only seats outside King's Landing rated at five stars: those three top the world, and that is a decision rather than an accident of the ladder.
Twelve more eastern seats stand beyond them: three walled Volantene river towns, five Rhoynar ruins along the Rhoyne, three Sarnori holds in the northern grass, and one marker where the Forest of Qohor gives out and the Dothraki sea begins.
Slaver's Bay, Qarth, Valyria and Asshai are absent, deliberately. They do not fit on this map at this scale, and a marker in the wrong place is worse than no marker.
Four eastern deep workings join the four western ones. An eastern vein holds twelve million where a western one holds six.
Six eastern creatures stand on a board of 120 camps, taking the world from 400 camps to 520.
The Titan of Braavos stands over the harbour mouth — scenery with a story rather than a seat.
What you can do today
Sail a gathering party east
The crossing needs a harbour and hulls; the arithmetic is in The Navy and the Crossing. Once you have both, a gathering party sails to the eastern veins and works them exactly as it works a western one, for twice the seam.
The party is sized to your Training Yard's march cap rather than to your whole army: the rest of your host stays home, and gathers share one march-slot pool with field marches rather than running on two ceilings that disagree.
Read any eastern seat
Tapping a Free City opens its own panel — not the western seat panel pointed east, and the distinction matters. The western panel offers attack, rally, reinforce, repair and the bestowing of a lesser title, and every one of those is a thing you cannot do to a Free City. A row of greyed-out buttons reads as a broken screen, not as a frontier.
The eastern card answers the two questions a lord standing off that coast actually has: what does this city grant whoever holds it, and could my harbour and my hulls carry a host there at all. The second is read from the same check the gathering screen and the launch itself use, so the three surfaces cannot disagree.
Strike an eastern camp
Six eastern creatures stand on a board of a hundred and twenty camps, and a strike on one now needs the same crossing a gathering party needs: a harbour, hulls, and berths enough for the host you send. Until this release it did not. The camps were on the board from the day the east was seeded and the strike never asked where the camp stood, so a lord with no harbour at all could hit them — marches in this game are straight lines and know nothing of water.
The refusal comes before anything is spent. A barred strike costs no stamina, no troops and no ships, and it names the missing thing rather than saying no: no harbour, then no ships, then host too great, in the order you would build them.
The host that sails is the host the decks hold. A crossing does not refuse a great army — it carries what fits and leaves the rest at home, sized by the smaller of your harbour's berths and your hulls'. The rest of your garrison stays where it is.
The east pays more, and it pays in a coin the west does not have. An eastern camp yields three times the haul of a western one at the same level, double the gems, half again the commander experience — and Valyrian steel, one ingot per twelve levels of the host you break. No hunt in Westeros drops a single ingot at any level. It is deliberately a trickle rather than a tap: gathering iron and taking great seats remain the bulk sources.
And the sea takes its cut. Every crossing costs hulls, more of them on a beaten retreat than on a won one, scaled by how full the decks were — but never your last hull. That is what stops the east being simply a better western board: stamina refills for free, ships do not, so the fleet is the thing you are really spending.
The feral skim — the raid a neglected keep suffers — stays western on purpose, and the reason survives this change: its take scales with the count of neglected camps, and a lord who has not yet built a harbour still cannot reach a single eastern one.
What you cannot do yet
This section matters as much as the one above it, and it is written to be read rather than buried.
- You cannot take an eastern seat. The east is on the map, lit, named, tapped and gathered from, and it is uncontestable. That is why the realm's contestable count is 170 and not 191 — and a check fails the build the hour that stops being true, so this site cannot quietly understate the game by twenty-one holds.
- Eastern seats are worth no throne points. The Iron Throne is a Westerosi title; a hold on the Rhoyne does not vote in it.
- Trade pacts do not yet pay out on the beat. Each city has an exchange rate and a pact ledger; the payment machinery is unfinished.
- The relics minted on the far shore are not in a player's hands. They exist, they are granted by the server and nowhere else, and no client sums them into a battle yet.
- You cannot sack a city, and no navy has ever fought another lord's navy.
No date is promised for any of it. Every page on this site is checked against the shipped constants precisely so the line between what is built and what is planned stays visible from outside the studio.
Why the east is meant to be harder
The design brief for Essos is that it should be competitive and hard with extreme rewards — that an eastern seat should out-grant any seat in Westeros, and that reaching one should need a navy rather than a longer march. Two of those three are in place: the veins pay double and the camps pay triple, and the crossing is real and gated at every door that reaches east. The third arrives when the east becomes contestable.
Until then the honest summary is this: the east is a place to work, not yet a place to hold.
Getting there, shortest path
- Raise your Keep to 10.
- Build the harbour. One level is 800 berths.
- Lay down hulls until their berths match the harbour — longships are the efficient middle.
- Open Gathering, choose an eastern vein, and send the party.
- Tap a Free City on the way past and read what it would grant, for the day it can be taken.