Runes of Magic US / AU

For lack of a better resource, I present the following guide to obtaining and controlling one's guild castle.





The areas I will post about in detail throughout this thread will include the following (for now):

• How to obtain your guild castle
  
• Guild Castle controls - The Treasury
  
• Guild Castle controls - "Visit Guild Castle" Button
  
• Guild Castle controls - Interior controls
  
• Guild Castle controls - Construction
  
• Screenshots of an undecorated guild castle & grounds
  
• Your castle - Getting out alive
  

I hope that this guide will serve to better prepare upcoming (and some established) guilds for this monumental endeavor.

My apologies in advance for the blurry images. At any rate, enjoy the guide!

Many thanks to all of the following characters for their donations and assistance during our big push to obtain the Vortex Castle: (in no particular order, and regardless of how much or how little any single individual contributed)
EdMorgan, LordShadow/Mizbehaven, Raen, Andor, Smonk, Variant, Aleros, Drekar, Daine, Aluseless, Dasaien, Auralis, Slot

The first thing you will need to do to obtain a guild castle, is of course, be a member of a guild. While there are many ways to accomplish this, I will leave it to you, dear reader, to figure them out.

For the purpose of this guide, I will assume that you are a Guildmaster.

Once you have established your guild, you will need to increase it's level to 7. This is accomplished by gathering resources (herbs, ore, and wood) and donating them through your Guild's Resources page. (Press G, click Resources at the top of the window that appears, then click on the 2nd tab of the next window that appears.)

Having achieved 7th level (or higher) with your guild, you are now eligible to apply for a guild castle. This task is performed with the "Guild Castle Manager" NPC located in East and West Varanas (beside the House Fairy) and in the Varanas Guild Hall. The Guild Castle Manager will inform you that you must provide certain resources in order to build your castle. (Currently, the text in-game is incorrect by a very long shot. The correct values you need to "pay" are 360,000 gold, 15,000 herbs, 15,000 ore, and 15,000 wood. These resources are donated to your guild's resources page, and will be taken from there to pay the above castle construction fee.)

Having collected all of the aforementioned resources, you may speak with the Guild Castle Manager again and complete the process of obtaining yout guild castle.

Congratulations! You should now be the proud owner of your own Guild Castle!

Known bugs: Do not attempt to walk through the opening/moving/animated gates of your keep. You may become stuck in mid-air, about 1 foot off the ground, and wasting your Hearth Recall is the only escape.

The treasury inside your guild castle can be found directly ahead, inside the bottom floor of your castle. In fact, when you first obtain your castle, you can see the treasury through the missing inner gate!



Run on inside, you know you can't wait. What you are going to be looking for to access your treasury is a small switch to the right of the large circular treasury chamber portal.



Interact with the switch and you will open your guild castle treasury. Here you can store 100 items on the first page that's available to you.



At the bottom left on the treasury window you will see three small square buttons. These are your treasury controls.



The first button is "Access Log". This will open a window displaying item deposit and withdrawal records. (Question for gamemasters, how many log entries are saved/displayed in this log?)




The middle button is "Permission Setting". This will open a window containing access information for each rank of your guild.

• "Browse Permission" is access to look into the treasury.
  
• "Placement Permission" is access to placing furniture within the guild castle. Note: A person may not pickup, move, or rotate furniture that they have not placed inside the castle themselves. This currently includes the Guildmaster! The Guildmaster does, however, have a special button visible on every furniture item in the furniture window to "Return this item to it's owner's mailbox".
  
• "Grabbing amount per days" is a text field containing the number of item slots in the treasury that a person of that rank may remove from the guild each day. (This number may be 0 to 99.) If an item slot holds 1 item (a recipe, for example) it counts as 1 "grab" for the day when removed. If the slot holds 100 ore, it still counts as 1 "grab" for the day when someone removes the stack of 100 ore. Note: Regardless of the number of "grabs" allowed per day, characters are allowed an apparently unlimited number of deposits per day. Please also note: It is not currently possible to split a stack that is in the treasury, and only take part of it. You will have to remove the entire stack, split it to take what you need, and return the remainder.
  

As mentioned previously, all 3 of these settings are set on a per rank basis, so don't miss out on anything when you're setting them. Note: All three of the above settings are set on a per page basis, also, so you must remember to set these again when you purchase additional storage pages for your treasury. (See below for purchasing additional pages.)

The final button is "Purchase new page". This button will open a new window displaying the resources required (in your guild resources page, as when obtaining the guild castle) in order to add new pages to your guild treasury. (At the time of this posting, the first additional page of storage was set to cost you 535,800 gold, 0 guild rubies, 1950 ore, 1950 wood, 1950 herbs, 4800 guild runes/magical essence, and 0 champion's core.)

Known Bugs: When you have the treasury open, closing the window by the X button on the top right does not reset the treasury "switch". (Remember the switch? To the right of the treasury door?) So you will need to interact with the treasury switch twice to open the treasury if the switch is in the "open" position.

A FINAL WORD OF CAUTION: It is incredibly common for guild members in online games to rob the guild blind if given unrestricted access to a guild's treasury. Exercise extreme caution and prejudice when assigning access to your treasury to your guild ranks. And never give unrestricted access to new recruit ranks. Historically, they are the most likely to rob your guild and disappear into the night. Though they may have wrongly taken any number of items, and your "access log" can prove who took what, and how long ago, the Guildmaster did give them permission with those settings to take things, so you can not expect the GMs to reimburse you for any lost items. Beware!

While speaking with the Guild Castle Manager, you may have noticed the option to "Look up all information of guild.".



This option displays similar information to that you may see while interacting with the Guild Bulletin Board (two large golden panels) inside the Varanas Guild Hall, with one additional item of interest. That additional bit is a button that will allow anyone to visit your guild castle.






In order to turn this "Visit Guild Castle" button off, begin by pressing G, then follow these steps:

1. Click on the "Leader functions" button at the bottom of the guild window.
   
2. Click on the "Guild Bulletin ..." button on the bottom left of the Leader functions window.
   
3. Checkmark the "Close visit" box to prevent strangers from entering your castle.
   
4. Click on the "Confirm" button on the Guild Bulletin window.
   
5. Click on the "Confirm" button on the Leader functions window.
   
6. Click on the X at the top right of your guild window to close it.
   

Your "Visit Guild Castle" button should now be disabled and greyed out in the Guild Castle Manager's display of your guild information.




Known Bugs: At the time of this posting, the Vortex guild "Visit Guild Castle" button is repeatedly resetting itself to the "on" position. This appears to either be graphics related, or an actual bug. Vortex has appeared visitable after I've clicked on other guilds, and went from a guild that is allowing visitors, to Vortex (which was not). Clicking on Vortex a second time in a row returned the button to a disabled state. However, there have been 3 ocassions so far where I have disabled visits, and returned to the window some time later to find them re-enabled.

Please note: Non-guildmembers have no access to your treasury that I was able to recreate.

We begin our examination of interior controls with a window very similar to the one inside every character's own house.



This window contains the following information:

• "Guild name" This is your guild's name.
  
• "Guild level" This is your current guild level.
  
• "Castle Type" This begins with a display of "Normal". (GMs, what is this?)
  
• "Open Visiting" This is the visitation state of your guild castle. (See "Visit Guild Castle" posted previously in this thread.)
  
• "Guild Gold" This is how much gold you currently have in your guild resources. (Press G, click the "Resources" button at the top. The gold displayed there and here should be the same.)
  
• "Daily Expense" This is (I suspect) the cost of maintaining your guild castle. It begins with a value of "0". I am currently unaware of what would increase this value. (GMs, anything?)
  

There are also two buttons found on the bottom of this window (see image above):

• "Guild con ..." This button displays the "Guild Construction" window. It is within this window that you will manage the construction of different things around your castle. (See "Guild Construction" posted later in this thread.)
  
• "Guild fur ..." This button displays the "Guild Furniture" window, which is very similar in appearance and functionality to a character's home furniture window. Reminder: You may only pickup, move, or rotate furniture that you have placed inside the castle yourself. This includes the Guildmaster! The Guildmaster does, however, have a special button to return placed items to their owner's mailbox.
  

And finally, this window contains (in the top right corner) an arrow pointing up. Clicking on this arrow will not minimize the castle control window to a bar, as in a character's house, but to an area the size of that arrow alone (see below), which also animates and moves itself to the top left corner of the user interface.




Note: This castle control window is locked to the top left corner of your user interface by default. This could cause problems for some people in pvp situations on the castle grounds if it is left open.

This is probably one of the more undeveloped aspects of the guild castles expansion, as there are relatively few things you can do in this regard so far, so this section will be relatively brief.

There are three options that you can currently access and manipulate in this area.

First, as you may have noticed when you initially entered your guild castle, the inner keep does not have a gate on it, allowing anyone that breaches your walls or bashes down your gate to just walk right in and see who's home. To correct this situation, we are going to add a gate.

On your Guild Castle control window (mentioned in the previous post), click on "Guild con ..." to display the dropdown window of additional features.



From there, you want to double left-click on "3 Main city(1) Guild Castle Main Building(1/4)" (step 2, highlighted above) to reach the inner keep's sub-menu, and additional options.



Left click on "2 Inner gate(1) Main Fortress Gate" to highlight it in blue (as shown above, and click on the center button at the bottom of the window to complete the construction. (Currently, the inner gate appears to have no cost. Vortex had next to nothing left after getting the castle.)

In a similar manner, you may add another teleport disk to the ground outside of your castle, inside the outer gate, across from the original teleport disk. (Why there are two there, I have no idea. GMs?) The additional teleport disk also appeared to be a no-cost item, at the time of this posting.

You will see where construction may be completed by having the "Guild con ..." window open, and looking around your castle for hookpoints like this on the ground:



The last item we're able to add to our castles is one that I have heard is directly related to guild castle wars, and that is the castle's throne. (This construction is currently set to cost your guild 100,000 gold, 0 guild rubies, 10,000 ore, and 10,000 wood, 10,000 herbs, 5,000 guild runes/magic essence, and 0 champion's core.)



There has been a great deal of hearsay, rumor, and conjecture about how castle wars will function, but GM Icarii has assured me that steps will be taken to prevent high-powered guilds from attacking lower level or non-pvp guilds and/or guilds on the PvE server in general. We shall see...

For now, however, everyone is safe; this upcoming feature is not yet implemented.

Known bugs: When I initially placed the gate mentioned above, I was able to remove it and add it over and over. Since leaving the castle and returning at a much later time, I am unable to remove this gate. (Didn't try picking up the 2nd teleport disk at any time, but that would also be of interest to me.)

Also, as mentioned elsewhere in this guide, do not walk through the moving/opening/closing gates, as you may become stuck about a foot off the ground. Using your Hearth Recall will be your only option for escape; the Book of Recall does not function inside the castle instances.

To give you an idea of how incredibly vast your castle lands are, it took me a full 26 seconds to run from here:



to here



For those who might be interested- It takes a full 1 minute, 55 seconds to run from the center of one wall's corner tower, completely around the keep on the wall, touching the same center point on each tower.

Around the castle are scattered various (currently inert, non-interactive) siege machines:



And here we have several views around the castle, facing inwards and out, and of various interesting aspects of the castles:









If you are interested in seeing more screenshots, or screenshots at a higher resolution, please feel free to visit the Vortex Photobucket album devoted to castle screenshots.

Thank you.

On the off chance that someone did not notice, here is where you go to get out of your guild castle:



The exit teleporter is located right beside the main outer gate, actually behind your character when you teleport into the castle from the Varanas Guild Castle Manager or "Visit Guild Castle" buttons.

Reserved for

• Future content
  

Reserved for

• Future content