Stable Upkeep
A stable is not free to own. It eats bricks, every day, forever. The game calls it maintenance, and there is a section for it on your plot's panel.
What it eats
By the size of the plot under it:
| Plot | Bricks per day |
|---|---|
| 6x6 | 1 |
| 8x8 | 2 |
| 10x10 | 3 |
| 12x12 | 4 |
A brick is 3 horse shit, 2 straw and 1 water, so a 6x6 costs 3 shit a day to keep and a 12x12 costs 12. That is a fraction of what the building itself makes.
The bank and the meter
You do not pay daily. You bank bricks ahead, and the stable spends them one day at a time.
Stand at your plot, press E, and the build panel has a maintenance section: a meter, how many days you have stocked, and a bank bricks button that takes every brick in your bag up to what the bank can still hold. The bricks come out of your bag, not your stash.
The bank holds 14 days of upkeep, and the meter is simply how full it is. Full is 100%.
Banked bricks are destroyed the moment you bank them. They are not stored and they never come back, not on dismantle and not on a sale. This is the repeating brick sink, and it is the reason bricks are worth making after the last stable in the world is built.
A stable you build today starts with 7 days already banked, so nobody is ever born starving.
Below 30%
Let the meter drop under 30% and two things stop:
- The stable stops producing horse shit. Not slower, stopped.
- A level 2 stable stops letting you mount away from home. Standing at your own stable still works, and a tent ride is never affected.
The world tells you: your stable needs bricks, in a notice and on the plot panel.
What never happens
Read this part carefully, because a maintenance meter usually means something worse than this one does.
- The stable is never destroyed. There is no path in the game that takes a building down for unpaid upkeep. Only you can dismantle it.
- Your stash is never touched. Storage does not shrink, leak or lock. A stable at 0% holds exactly as many slots as one at 100%.
- No debt piles up. Days spent with an empty bank are simply gone. Bank a brick and the meter is back at what you banked, with nothing owed for the time you were away.
- Nothing is paid in arrears. The shit the stable did not make while starved is not waiting for you when you return. It was never made.
So the cost of neglect is exactly the production you missed, and nothing more.
The one thing that can actually take a plot away from you is a long absence from the world entirely. See The Stable Auction.