Castle War is a scheduled guild-versus-guild siege. Three fortified castles sit in the
world, each its own map. When a war window opens, guilds fight their way to the crystal at
the heart of a keep — the **Emperium** — and whoever shatters it takes the castle on the
spot. Hold it when the window closes and it is yours until the next war.
You need a **guild**. Not a party, not a friend list — a guild. A character without one
cannot set foot in a castle at any time, and cannot damage an Emperium even standing in
front of it.
## The three keeps
Three castles are contested, and every guild in the realm knows them by name.
An ice-locked keep of frozen stone. Its crypt is a glacier mine haunted by Permafrost Horrors and Frost Revenants.
A blackened fortress over old fire. Magma Crawlers and Cinder Bats hold the tunnels beneath it.
A palace keep of long halls and colonnades. Royal Deathguards and Void Adepts walk its crypt.
Each keep is a 90×90 interior with its own layout of Guardian Stones and Barricades, and
each comes with a private guild crypt for whoever holds it. A castle nobody holds does not
sit empty — it is **overrun**, stocked with every hostile species in the realm and one of
every world boss, so an unclaimed keep is a monster den until a guild takes it.
## The schedule
Castle War runs on **weekly windows**. Two ship with the realm:
| Day | Window |
|---|---|
| **Thursday** | 19:00 – 20:00 (São Paulo) · 22:00 – 23:00 UTC |
| **Sunday** | 18:00 – 19:00 (São Paulo) · 21:00 – 22:00 UTC |
Those are the defaults, not a law: the schedule is **edited by the game's admins**, who can
move a window, add more of them, or force a one-hour war open at any moment for an event.
Never assume — the **Castles** button always shows the real answer, either the time left in
the war running right now or the countdown to the next one.
**While a war is live, a countdown sits at the top of your screen** — everywhere in the
world, not just inside a keep. It is the same clock the server runs on, so when it reads
`0:00` the war is over. You always know how long you have to break that Emperium.
## Getting in
Open the **Castles** button in the sidebar. It lists every castle, who holds it, and either
the time left in the running war or the countdown to the next one. Press **Enter** to be
warped in.
| | No guild | A rival guild | The holding guild |
|---|---|---|---|
| While a war is running | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Between wars | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ |
Between wars a castle belongs to its holder alone — the gates are shut to everyone else.
When the war opens, they open to every guild. If you cannot go in, the Enter button says
why rather than bouncing you.
The Travel Agent will not take you to a castle; the Castles button is the way in. The agent
standing inside each keep is how you leave.
## When the bell rings
The moment a war begins, every castle's defenses are laid — the Emperium, its Guardian
Stones, Barricades and Guardians — and **every held keep is cleared of anyone who does not
hold it**. You cannot camp inside a castle beforehand and be standing next to the Emperium
when the gates open.
You are put down in a temple town — the same one every time, and rarely anywhere near the
castle you were just standing in. You cannot walk back: castles have no roads in or out. Open
the **Castles** button and go in again, which any guild may now do. You just do not get a
head start.
An unclaimed castle has no holder to protect, so nobody is moved out of one.
## Fighting inside
Player-versus-player damage needs **both** a castle map and a running war. Inside that:
- Different guilds may fight. Same guild and allied guilds may not.
- Two guildless players cannot fight — but neither of them should be in here anyway.
- Standing on a temple tile makes you untouchable until you step off.
- All player-to-player damage is **halved**, so nobody deletes anybody instantly.
Dying during a war has no corpse and no resurrection: you respawn immediately in a temple
town — the same one eviction uses, well away from the keep — with **resurrection sickness**,
every combat stat cut in half for two minutes. Going back in through the **Castles** button
under that penalty is the price of dying.
## The defences, and healing them
A castle is not just its crystal. When the bell rings the server lays the whole set out:
| Defence | Toughness | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| **Emperium** | 30,000 HP | The prize at the heart of the keep. Break it and the castle changes hands |
| **Guardian Stone** | 15,000 HP, +5,000 per castle upgrade | Stationary bulwarks flanking the approach |
| **Barricade** | 10,000 HP | Rows of them seal the gatehouse and the inner ward |
| **Guardian** | 8,000 HP | A hostile defender that never turns on the guild it serves — where a keep's layout posts them |
None of it can be touched by the guild that owns it — your own stones are allies, and your
support spells treat them as such. **The defending guild can heal and buff its Emperium,
stones, barricades and Guardians**, which is a real part of holding a keep: a healer parked
behind the crystal buys the defence minutes it would not otherwise have.
There is a hard limit on it, though. **Every heal that lands on a siege object during a war
is cut to 30% of its normal value** — direct heals, area heals and lifesteal alike. You can
shore a crystal up between hits. You cannot out-heal a committed assault.
While the war runs, **the Emperium's health is pushed to everyone on the castle map about
once a second**, so the whole keep watches the same bar fall. There is no hiding how close
the crystal is to going.
## Breaking the Emperium
Shatter it and the castle is yours immediately — there is no capture timer and no second
round:
- Ownership transfers to the breaker's guild on the spot, and the conquest is announced to
the entire realm.
- Every member of the winning guild **standing on the castle map at the moment it breaks**
is credited with the attendance. Presence at the break is the whole rule; there is no
damage ledger.
- Everyone not in the new owning guild is thrown out of the keep.
- **About two seconds later the full set of defences rebuilds at full health** — Emperium,
stones, barricades and all. Taking a castle early in a window means holding it for the
rest of that window against everyone who now wants it back.
A guildless character who somehow breaks an Emperium takes nothing: the crystal simply
re-arms.
## When the war ends
The Emperium, Guardian Stones, Barricades and Guardians all vanish. The keep stops being a
PvP zone — **you cannot attack anyone any more** — and with no Emperium there is nothing
left to conquer until the next war.
**Nobody is thrown out.** Wherever you were standing when the bell rang, you stay. Walk out
in your own time, or talk to the Travel Agent by the gate.
## What holding a castle is worth
### The daily vault
Every castle you hold has a treasure room, and it **refills once a day**. Each chest holds
one rolled item and a pile of gold, and both go **straight into the guild bank** — never
into the opener's own bag. Only a **leader or an officer** can open one.
| Castle upgrade level | Chests per day | Gold per chest | Gold per day |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0 (unupgraded) | 3 | ~1,000 | ~3,000 |
| 1 | 4 | ~2,000 | ~8,000 |
| 2 | 5 | ~3,000 | ~15,000 |
| 3 (maxed) | 6 | ~4,000 | ~24,000 |
Investing in a castle improves the vault on three axes at once: more chests, more gold in
each, and better odds on what is inside — a top-tier item comes out **five times as often**
at maximum investment as it does at level 0. A maxed vault pays back its whole 60,000-gold
investment in about a week of daily openings, before counting the items.
One warning: a refill **replaces** whatever chests are still sitting unopened. Ignore your
vault for a week and you find one fresh batch, not seven. Open them daily.
### And the rest
- **A private guild crypt**, reached through a warp inside the castle: your own farming map,
with its own monsters and ore veins. **Only the holding guild may go down, and nobody at
all may while a Castle War is running** — no waiting out the siege underground.
- **A weekly cut of the market tax** from the castle's region.
- **A daily gold stipend.** Every castle you hold pays 5,000 gold straight to the guild bank
each day — 25% more once your guild reaches level 12.
- **Upgrades.** Spend guild-bank gold — 20,000 per level, up to level 3 — to harden the
keep: tougher Guardian Stones, more chests in the vault, and better odds on what is inside
them.
## Where to next
- **[Combat](/wiki/guides/combat)** — how damage, spells and stats work.
- **[Factions & Holy Relics](/wiki/guides/factions)** — the realm's other war, fought
between the Aesir and the Jotun. Faction lines are ignored inside a castle: cross-faction
guildmates besiege Winterhall, Harrenfell and Astrun side by side.
- **[Guild Directory](/wiki/guilds)** — the realm's top guilds, ranked by level.
- Browse the **Compendium** for every class, monster, item and place.
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Source: https://arcanoronline.com/wiki/guides/castle-war
