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Getting Started

What Kingdoms of Iron is, and how to spend your first hour.

What is this?

Kingdoms of Iron is a browser idle RPG. One character per account. You fight monsters, gather materials, craft gear, level up skills, and gradually push into harder regions: all through simple button clicks, with production continuing at a reduced rate while you're away.

The core loop

  • Fight monsters in your current region for gold, Combat XP, and a chance at item drops.
  • Gather raw materials (wood, ore, fish, herbs...) from resource nodes to level gathering skills and feed crafting.
  • Craft gear, tools, and consumables from those materials.
  • Level up: every skill has its own XP track; your overall character level is the average of all 14 skill levels, so a broad spread of training moves it up (new characters also get a temporary XP boost: see below).
  • Unlock the next region by defeating the current region's boss. Each region is meaningfully harder, and its loot is scaled up to match (see Regions & Loot).

HP, food, and why combat doesn't full-heal you

Combat carries your HP forward from fight to fight: winning or losing doesn't reset you back to full. You recover HP by eating food (cooked fish and similar items restore a fixed amount instantly) or, slowly, through passive regeneration over real time.

Below Combat level 10, you don't yet have an auto-eat safety net: check your Inventory and eat manually when you're getting low. Every new character starts with 5 Cooked Fish already in their bag for exactly this reason. If you ever end up at 0 HP with genuinely no food on hand, a once-per-day emergency heal kicks in automatically so you're never truly stuck.

Tip: keep a stack of food on hand at all times, especially before Combat level 10.

Passive production while you're away

Hire workers in the Village panel to gather or craft on your behalf, even while you're offline - slower than playing actively, but it adds up. See Crafting & Village for the numbers.

Your first hour

  1. Fight Blightlings and Ravaged Prowlers in Green Plains: cheap XP, and your first equipment drops.
  2. Equip anything better than what you're wearing (Inventory panel: tap an item to see its stats and compare).
  3. Gather Wood and Stone alongside fighting. Smithing recipes need both early on.
  4. Accept the three Green Plains quests for a gold/XP head start.
  5. Keep an eye on HP: eat food from your Inventory before it hits 0.
  6. Clear the other monsters in Green Plains Outskirts before challenging Thicket Matriarch, the area's boss: it hits noticeably harder than anything before it and lands an extra unavoidable burst of damage partway through the fight, so go in geared up, topped off on HP, and with food in your bag.
  7. Further out, defeating Thornback the Corrupted (deeper into Green Plains) unlocks the next region, Shadowfen Marsh.