Towns & Claims

You don't need a town to play. You can explore, build, earn and trade without one. A town becomes worth it when you've found a place you want to keep, and specifically when you want other people to stop being able to take it apart.

Everything runs off one main menu: /tan gui.

What it costs to start

Founding a town costs 10,000 Crowns.

The chunk you're standing in becomes the town's first claim. From there, a brand new town gets:

• 35 chunks it's allowed to claim.
• 3 player slots, including you.
• 5 Crowns to claim each chunk.
• 0.5 Crowns per chunk, per day in upkeep.

So 35 chunks fully claimed costs 175 up front and runs at about 17.50 a day. Upkeep is charged at 20:00 server time, when town taxes are collected.

If the treasury can't cover it, the town loses 10% of its claims, and never fewer than 2 chunks, from its borders.

Before you found anything, we suggest you check the live map. It's much easier to pick a good spot.

Claiming

/tan claim takes the chunk you're standing on. /tan autoclaim keeps taking them as you walk, which is the one you probably want. /tan claimarea claims a whole area in one go, capped at 250 chunks so a badly sized selection can't take half the map by accident.

Two rules on where you can claim:

• Chunks have to connect. You can't claim an island three hundred blocks from your town and call it an annexe.
• There's a two-chunk gap between territories. You can't build right up against a neighbour's border, which stops the map turning into a single fused blob and gives everyone a bit of road.

Claiming past your chunk cap is possible, but the town sheds chunks from its borders daily, the same way it does when upkeep goes unpaid, until it's back under the limit. Treat the cap as a "suggestion" as you will.

What a claim actually protects

A claimed chunk stops outsiders breaking blocks, placing blocks, opening containers, using redstone and messing with your things, according to the permissions your ranks are set to.

It does not stop PvP. Members of the same town can still hit each other inside your claims, and so can anyone you're at war or embargo with (see relations). A claim protects your build. It does not protect you.

The border itself is visible: particles mark the edge, and the colour tells you the relationship. Ally, neutral and enemy each look different, so you can tell whether you're walking into a problem before you're in it.

Members and ranks

Invite players and give them a rank. You get up to nine ranks to define: inviting and removing members, claiming land, changing settings, spending from the treasury, managing other ranks, managing buildings.

Give the expensive permissions to people you'd lend money to. Treasury access is treasury access.

Upgrades

Towns level up to 8, and each level opens more of an upgrade tree bought with the treasury.

The interesting part is that the tree makes you choose. Broadly:

• Urbanising upgrades (Small Town, Developing Town, Urbanization, Metropolis, Megalopolis) buy you a lot more player slots and some property slots, and several of them cost you chunk capacity.
• Ruralising upgrades (Ruralization, Deurbanization, Vast Empire, Urban Sprawl) buy you a lot more land, and some of them cost you player slots.

So a town of six people with a huge border and a town of forty crammed into a small footprint are both viable, and they get there by spending in opposite directions. We suggest deciding which one you are before you sink 3,000 Crowns into the wrong half of the tree. Nobody's stopping you from being six people rattling around a border built for forty.. But the upkeep will eventually...

And some other upgrades worth knowing about:

• Establish Private Property and Notary House raise how many properties your town can carve out.
• Extraction Teams raise how many landmarks you can hold.
• Mob Ban unlocks a screen for stopping specific mobs spawning in your claims.
• Portal Technology unlocks /tan spawn, your town's own teleport point. It needs town level 5 and 2,500 Crowns, so a new town doesn't get one.
• Regional Localities and Bureaucratic Reforms cut your upkeep per chunk, which is the upgrade that pays for itself if you're holding a lot of land.

Landmarks

Some chunks are landmarks. You can't modify them, and they cost 500 Crowns, but it generates a resource for your town every day with nobody having to go and collect it.

To take one you have to claim every chunk around it, so a landmark is a commitment rather than a land grab. Your town can only hold a few, and the Extraction Teams upgrades raise that.

They're also one of the things another town can declare war specifically to take off you. A landmark inside your borders is a landmark worth defending. See War & Forts.

Relations with other towns

Every pair of territories sits at one of five relations, and it changes what their players can do to yours:

• Alliance and non-aggression are agreements, and breaking one puts you in a truce period first (72 hours for an alliance, 48 for a non-aggression pact) before you can move to anything hostile. You can't ally with someone in the morning and declare on them in the afternoon.
• Neutral is the default between two territories.
• Embargo and war both cut the other side off: their players can't interact with your properties, and /tp, /tphere, /tpa, /tpahere, /pay, /tan pay and /bank transfer aimed at them stop working.

Alliance, non-aggression and neutral have friendly fire off, so players from those territories can't hurt each other. War and embargo keep PvP on, and so do members of the same town. After a surrender, the two territories end up in non-aggression.

Regions and nations

Towns can group up. A region costs 20,000 Crowns and a nation costs 30,000, and both let several towns coordinate borders, diplomacy and wars as one bloc.

Neither is something to worry about starting out. They matter when you've got a group large enough that the interesting arguments are between towns rather than inside one.

Useful commands

• /tan gui opens everything.
• /tan claim and /tan autoclaim take land.
• /tan map shows nearby claims in chat.
• /tan spawn teleports to your town's spawn, once it's unlocked.
• /map opens the live map in your browser.

Renaming a town, region or nation costs 100 Crowns.

Official documentation

Towns run on Towns & Nations. Their documentation is the full reference, including the parts we haven't switched on. Read this page for what happens here and that one for what the plugin can do.

Related pages

Property & Rent Carving out shops and houses inside your claims.

War & Forts What happens when someone wants your land.

Banking & Trading Where the treasury's money comes from.

Money How to afford any of this.