🏙 UrbanPact

Getting Started

UrbanPact is played entirely through Telegram. There's no app to install — just open the bot and start a conversation.

You begin with 1,000 gold and the Settler tier. Before joining city life, every new player spends time alone in the wilderness: gathering resources, upgrading their housing, and learning the ropes at their own pace. When you're ready, you leave the wilderness and join or found a real city.

Once registered, the bot shows a navigation keyboard at the bottom of your screen with quick-tap buttons. In the wilderness your keyboard shows 🏕 Camp as the main action. Once you're in a city it expands to the full set. If you ever dismiss the keyboard, use /menu to bring it back.

Beginner objectives

Use /objectives (or tap 🎯 Goals in the keyboard) to see a twelve-step guided checklist split across two phases:

Wilderness phase (5 steps):

1. Complete your first quest — tap 🏕 Camp and send yourself on an expedition
2. Fill all your quest slots — use the Fill Slots button to pack every available slot at once
3. Upgrade your housing — gather enough resources to move beyond a Tent. Better housing unlocks longer quests and more queue slots
4. Reach Cottage tier — keep upgrading through Shack, Cabin, and Cottage to unlock all four quest locations and the full 10-slot queue
5. Leave the wilderness — use /join or /found when you're ready. Your home carries over and leftover resources convert to gold

City phase (7 steps):

6. Fill your city action queue — tap 📋 Queue and add gather actions until all slots are full
7. Complete your first city gather — wait for the next hourly tick to fire
8. Queue actions 5 ticks in a row — keep your queue topped up every hour for 5 consecutive ticks (a gap resets the queue streak)
9. Buy your first tool — open /vendor and buy a tool; the Shovel (450g) is cheapest. Tools boost gather yield and unlock crafting recipes
10. Complete your first craft — buy a Workbench at /vendor (1,500g), then use /craft to queue a recipe
11. Reach Citizen tier — earn 1,000g and 100 reputation by staying active
12. Help build a city project — gather resources while a project is active to earn reputation on completion

The objectives screen always shows your next hint — you only need to focus on one thing at a time. The 🎯 Goals button disappears from the keyboard once all twelve are complete.

The Wilderness

Every new player starts alone in the wilderness — no city, no teammates. This is where you learn the game at your own pace before joining civilization.

Quests

Quests are timed expeditions that gather resources. You send yourself out, come back with materials, and queue up the next run. There are four locations unlocked as your housing improves:

Each location's button in /camp carries that location's icon, and a quest button never wears the icon of a resource it can't reliably bring home. Grain and Coal are guaranteed only at the Coal Hollow (the 5-minute run) — shorter runs may turn up a little as a lucky bonus drop, but never reliably.

Longer quests guarantee higher-tier resource outputs. But once you've unlocked a location, you can still send yourself to shorter quests — they have a chance to return higher-tier resources as bonus drops, just not guaranteed. Use shorter quests to keep your queue full while still having a shot at rarer materials.

Quest slots

You can queue multiple quests at once — they run back-to-back automatically. The number of slots you have depends on your housing tier:

Tap a quest location button in /camp to add one quest, or use the Fill Slots button to queue as many of that type as your remaining slots allow. The camp panel hides quest buttons once all slots are full — keep it topped up to gather efficiently. Use the 🔄 Refresh button at any time to update the panel and see completed quests.

Housing upgrades

Your wilderness housing tiers up from Tent through Shack, Cabin, and Cottage. Each upgrade costs resources you can already gather at your current tier and unlocks the next quest location plus more queue slots. The /camp panel always shows your exact progress toward the next upgrade.

Notice the pattern: each upgrade only costs resources you can already gather at that tier. Fiber comes from Shack-level quests, so it's needed for the Cabin upgrade (not before). Grain and Coal come from Cabin-level quests, so they're needed for the Cottage upgrade (not before). No circular dependencies.

The Upgrade Housing button appears in /camp whenever you have enough resources for the next tier. Tap it to upgrade immediately — you'll receive a short message describing your new digs.

Medals

Five one-time achievements are unlockable during the wilderness phase — each earns reputation and is announced by the bot when you hit it:

• 🌲 First Expedition — Complete your first quest. (+5 ⭐ Reputation)
• 🎒 Packed and Ready — Fill every quest slot at once. (+5 ⭐ Reputation)
• 🏚 Roughing It — Upgrade beyond a Tent. (+5 ⭐ Reputation)
• 🏡 Off the Grid — Reach Cottage tier. (+10 ⭐ Reputation)
• 🏙 Civilized — Leave the wilderness and join a real city. (+10 ⭐ Reputation)

Quiet mode

By default the wilderness is already quiet — your Camp panel updates silently as quests complete, and the bot only pings you when your quest queue runs down to its last quest or empties (your cue to send your camp out again). Prefer total silence? Turn on Quiet Wilderness in /settings — it suppresses even that drain notification, so no wilderness DM ever fires; the panel still shows your latest progress whenever you open it.

Leaving the wilderness

When you're ready to join civilization, use /join to join an existing city or /found to start one. Two things happen automatically:

1. Resource conversion — any resources left in your wilderness stockpile are sold for gold (1g per unit) and added to your wallet.
2. Home transfer — whatever wilderness home you earned carries over as your starting tier on the Estate track, your personal home in the city.

There's no bus ticket fee when leaving the wilderness — that only applies when switching between real cities.

Camping mode — /gocamping

Already in a city but never finished your wilderness medals? Use /gocamping to head back out for a solo camping trip. It costs 300 gold and lets you work through any of the five wilderness medals you missed, without leaving your city.

The bot shows a confirmation prompt before charging you. Your starting camp tier is carried over from your Estate track — if you've already upgraded to Cabin with gold, you'll start camping at Cabin, not Tent.

While camping:

• Your full city keyboard stays active — you can still gather, queue, build, and craft as normal.
• A 🏕 Camp button appears at the top of your keyboard. Tap it to reach the camp panel, send quests, and upgrade your wilderness housing.
• All five wilderness medals are earnable: First Expedition, Packed and Ready, Roughing It, Off the Grid, and Civilized.

When you're done, tap 🏙 Return to City in the camp panel. Any resources you gathered convert to gold and your camp is packed up. The "Civilized" medal is awarded at this point if you hadn't already earned it. Your camp housing tier is saved — if you come back for another trip, you pick up where you left off.

Hunting mode — Hunter's Lodge

Once your city builds a Hunter's Lodge (requires Town Hall 2) and you own a Bow, a 🏹 Hunt button appears in your navigation menu. Tap it to start a free hunting trip alongside your city work — wages and your queue keep running. A Bow is required to hunt — pick one up at /vendor for 800g once the Lodge is built.

Choose your hunting ground. The panel lists hunting grounds from the gentle Outskirts to the untamed Wild Country. You can hunt any ground up to your Lodge level — farther grounds take longer to reach but hold bigger, more valuable game (each quick hunt bags one animal; a heavier one pays more pelts). Locked grounds show the Lodge level you need.

A 🎯 Crossbow's Big Game trips run much longer than the Bow times above (roughly half an hour and up), for heavier trophy prey — see Resources & Crafting for the Crossbow.

Tap a ground to send out a party, or 📋 Fill to load every open slot with that ground. Queued too many, or picked the wrong ground? Each queued hunt gets its own 🚫 delete button below the grounds — tap it to remove that hunt and free the slot, just like the workbench crafting queue. The hunts behind it slide up to fill the gap. When a hunt completes, the bot DMs you what you caught and its weight. The game is delivered to the Lodge and processed into Pelts at the next hourly tick — you won't see the pelts in your city stockpile until after the hour.

Pelts are a steady wage. Every ground earns pelts at the same rate per hour — a farther ground takes longer per trip but brings back proportionally more, so no ground out-farms another. What farther grounds give you is bigger trophies (your biggest-catch record), the rarest-animal medal, and fewer taps for the same pelts. (A single big catch still pays more pelts than a single small one — it's only flat per hour.)

Bow still earns XP and levels up with every hunt (and unlocks heavier-hitting crafts), though which animals you catch is decided by the ground you pick rather than your Bow level.

Hunting Expeditions — in /queue

Once your city's Hunter's Lodge reaches Level 3, a new 🎒 Mount Expedition button appears in your /queue menu. Where a quick hunt is a few minutes, an expedition is a full day-long hunt that brings back a much bigger pelt haul. To send one out you provide supplies: a fixed bundle of raw materials (mostly timber and stone, plus a few other staples) drawn from the city's shared stores — what a hunting party needs to stay out in the field.

A full party gets through a lot of supplies, so an expedition costs far more raw material than a quick hunt — but it comes home with a big haul of pelts, which your Tanning Rack turns into the leather your builds need. Pick a ground (up to your Lodge level): nearer grounds bag many small animals, farther grounds fewer but bigger, rarer game — and a farther ground also brings home more pelts (about 25 / 30 / 35 / 40 for grounds 1–4, give or take a little), so distance is a genuine spend-more-get-more choice. The picker shows an estimated pelt range and exactly which supplies each ground will draw before you commit. The catch goes to the Lodge and is dressed into pelts on the next tick, same as any hunt.

An expedition costs one main-queue slot and resolves on the next tick. Short on supplies? It still goes out as a smaller trip — but an under-supplied trip earns no trophies or rare-animal medal credit (those need a full expedition). Casual hunting via 🏹 Hunt is unchanged — expeditions are an extra, bulk path.

Because supplies come out of the shared city stores, any citizen's expedition appears on the mayor's hour report — naming who went and exactly which supplies it drew — so the mayor can always see the stockpile drawing down.

🐾 No animals were harmed in the development, testing, or execution of this game. Every creature here is a friendly bundle of pixels that trots home for dinner after the hunt.

The Game Loop

Once you're in a city, every hour the game runs a tick that processes everything in order:

1. Building production — each city's buildings add resources to the shared stockpile
2. Wages — every player with a city earns 100 gold automatically. A city's Market boosts this wage by a percentage; the Bank pays an additional flat dividend to home-working citizens.
3. Trade routes — active trade routes between cities move resources
4. Your queued action fires — the oldest action in your queue executes and is removed
5. Build project draw — if your city has an active project, required materials are pulled from the stockpile
6. City Score — every unit your members produce that hour (gathers, crafts, building output) is added to your city's running score; visiting other cities' premium buildings adds points too. Score only ever goes up — spending never reduces it
7. Premium visits — queued visits fire: the visitor pays an admission ticket that goes to the host city's citizens, and out-of-stock buildings are stocked by a Tycoon importer (or close their doors, free of charge)
8. Tier promotions — players who hit their thresholds are promoted automatically
9. Tick reports — each player receives a summary of what happened that hour

Hourly tick report

After each tick completes, the bot sends you a summary of everything that happened that hour:

• What your queued action produced — or your background gather contribution if your queue was empty (3–5 units of your last-gathered resource)
• If your action had a 💤 Rested bonus — earned from idle ticks, gives +50% yield to that action
• Wages earned, any Bank dividend, any Estate-track treasury contribution, and reputation gained
• Your city's total building production for the hour
• If your city had premium building visitors: a ✨ Visitors to your city block naming each visitor and which building they came to see
• If your city has an active build project: a progress snapshot showing the name, percent complete, and which resources still have a shortfall
• A 💡 personalized advice line — if your queue fired, an AI-generated one-sentence tip based on your current state. If idle, a nudge to queue actions plus your current rested charge count.

You'll receive this message whether you were online or not — check in at any time to see what changed while you were away.

💡 AI Tips — full strategic review

Beyond the one-line tick tip, you can request a full strategic review anytime: open /help (or tap 📜 Help) and hit the 💡 Get AI Tips button. The AI advisor looks at your complete current state — queue, tools and levels, city stockpile, active project shortfalls, buildings, consumables, rested charges — and returns 3–5 numbered tips tailored to your numbers.

Tips are cached for 1 hour; the button shows ✓ cached when your last review is still fresh and refreshes automatically once the hour is up.

Your Action Queue

Your queue is a list of actions that fire one per tick, in order. Higher tiers unlock more queue slots, letting you plan further ahead.

Queue depth by tier

Queue options by tier

Which actions you can queue depends on your personal tier:

Opening /queue shows a two-level inline keyboard. Tap 🌾 Gather Resources to pick a resource, or 🔨 Craft Resources (if unlocked) to pick a recipe. A ◀ Back button returns you to the top level. The keyboard stays open in the same sub-menu as you fill your queue — all buttons remain visible even when the queue is full, and tapping one shows you a toast confirming or explaining why it can't be added. A 🗑 Clear Queue button is always present at the bottom.

Editing the queue: once you have actions queued, tap ✏️ Edit Queue to manage them individually. Each action gets ▲/▼ buttons to change its firing order, a ⏫ button to send it straight to the top, and a ✖ to remove just that one — so you can drop a single action, top-deck an urgent one, or reshuffle priorities without clearing the whole queue.

Gather actions

The core action type. When a gather fires, a random amount of the chosen resource (10–25 units) lands in your city's shared stockpile.

The seven gatherable resources and their commands: /queue_timber, /queue_stone, /queue_iron_ore, /queue_grain, /queue_coal, /queue_fiber, /queue_clay. (Treasury isn't gathered — it comes from your city's Town Hall.)

If your city has an active build project, resources it needs are highlighted with a ⭐ star in the gather sub-menu — they stay in their normal positions so the layout doesn't shift.

Queue crafting (Developer + Workbench 5)

Once you reach Developer tier and level your Workbench to level 5, crafting joins your queue options. Each queued craft slot fires once per tick — the same hourly cycle as gathering. It uses ingredients from the city stockpile and sends the output straight back in.

Your hour report shows both sides of the trade: the Crafted line for what you made, and a 🔧 Used line naming every ingredient it drew from the stockpile — the same way your districts and hunting parties report their draw. That matters when your city produces a material in the very same hour your craft consumes it: without the 🔧 line, the material can look like it arrived and then vanished.

If you hold the Master's Charter and your city has a Masterwork, your queued craft runs on a leased crew — and that crew eats 🌾 Grain, one per unit crafted, on top of the recipe. The report keeps that separate on its own 👷 Fed the leased Masterworks crew line, so the grain never looks like a secret ingredient of the recipe.

Output scales with your tool level. The recipe determines which tool applies: Axe for Planks, Shovel for Bricks, Scythe for Rope, Pickaxe for Mortar, Crucible for Iron Ingots/Steel/Charcoal. A higher tool level means more output per tick.

All seven queue-craft commands: /queue_planks, /queue_bricks, /queue_iron, /queue_mortar, /queue_steel, /queue_rope, /queue_charcoal. Or tap 🔨 Craft Resources in /queue.

If the city stockpile doesn't have enough ingredients when the tick fires, the slot silently skips — your queue streak is preserved and the slot is freed for next time. No penalty, no interruption.

Queued crafts count toward the Daily Top Crafter leaderboard alongside workbench crafts. There's also a weekly recognition: when the weekly scoring window closes, a pinned 🏆 Weekly Champions post in the community group crowns a top-3 🥇🥈🥉 podium in up to eleven categories — top cities, most prestigious cities, prestige climbers, gatherers, biggest earners, rising stars, top hunters, top travelers, crafters, crate hunters, and the week's luckiest scratches (categories with no qualifying players are skipped).

Odd jobs

Sometimes you need gold more than your city needs resources. Queue an odd jobs action to spend the tick earning personal gold instead of gathering for the stockpile. It's available at every tier — reach for it whenever you'd rather bank cash than add to the stockpile.

Odd jobs keep your queue streak going — you're counted as active, not idle.

Idle players

Even with an empty queue, you're still contributing — just less. Three things happen automatically each tick when you're idle (your queue streak resets if the tick fires with nothing queued):

• Background gather — the game automatically chips in 3–5 units of the last resource you queued, added to the city stockpile with no action from you.
• Rested charges — each idle tick builds up a "rested" charge (up to 24). When you come back, each charge gives your next gather or craft action a +50% yield bonus, one charge consumed per eligible action. (Other actions — odd jobs, visits, work-away — don't use or benefit from charges.) A 💤 icon appears next to each boosted slot in /queue so you can see at a glance which upcoming gathers/crafts will get the bonus.
• Estate contribution — if you own a home on the Estate track, it contributes treasury to your city every hour regardless of whether you're active or idle (see The Estate track below).

You still miss out on rep and the larger active gather amounts — active players will always pull ahead faster — but being offline never means being useless to your city.