Stoking the fire
The ritual at the heart of Watchfire. Stoke every 3 days, or go dark and risk losing your village.
Stoking the fire is the one thing you cannot skip. It is the heartbeat of your village.
How stoking works
- You must stoke once every 3 days.
- Each stoke costs 3 wood and a small amount of $FIRE (tuned to roughly one dollar).
- When you stoke, the fire checks your food and your village grows or shrinks accordingly (see Villagers & score).
As long as you stoke inside the 3-day window, the fire stays bright and the village carries on.
When the fire goes dark
Miss the 3-day window and you can no longer stoke — the fire is too old to tend. It isn't lost yet, but the only way forward now is to let it go dark and then relight the embers.
- Let it go dark. Once you're past the 3-day mark the watchfire has to be let go dark before it can be revived — in the app that's the "let it go dark" action. It starts the 4-day revive clock.
- Relight within 4 days. From the moment the fire goes dark you have 4 days to revive the embers. Reviving costs no wood but more $FIRE than a normal stoke.
- Or it's razed. If nobody revives before the 4-day deadline, the village can be razed — see below.
While the fire is dark, everything else is paused: you can't chop, gather, build, or raid. Relighting the embers (or redeeming your rewards) are the only moves available.
Heads up
The revive window is 4 days counted from when the fire goes dark, not from your last stoke. Reviving is also expensive for a large village, so treat the 3-day stoke as a hard commitment.
Reviving the embers
Relighting revives the embers and stokes the fire in one step. It burns no wood, and its $FIRE cost is higher than a normal stoke and grows with the size of your village.
If you would rather not pay to revive, you can instead redeem your rewards, which pays out your accrued RON and resets the village to zero. Redeeming stays available right up until the village is razed. It is a clean exit that keeps what you earned — see The $FIRE token.
When a village is razed
After the 4-day revive window passes, the village can be razed.
Razing is permanent: the village NFT is burned and the village is gone for good. But razing is not a loss of your rewards — any RON your village accrued is sent back to your wallet. The village ends; the earnings come home.
The fire's states
| State | Trigger | What you can do |
|---|---|---|
| Burning | Stoked within the last 3 days | Play normally; stoke any time |
| Low | The 3-day timer is nearly up | Stoke now to reset the timer |
| Overdue | Past 3 days, not yet burned out | Can't stoke — let it go dark to start the revive clock |
| Dark (embers) | Burned out, within 4 days | Relight the embers, or redeem rewards; nothing else works |
| Razed | 4 days after going dark | Gone for good — the NFT is burned, accrued RON returns to your wallet |
Note
The $FIRE cost of a stoke is tuned to roughly a dollar and can change over time. The 3-day stoke window and the 4-day revive window are fixed.