Questing in Bestia is primarily player-driven. Players post rewards for tasks they need done — gathering resources, transporting goods from A to B, hunting a troublesome Bestia — and other players pick those tasks up. Alongside those, NPCs hand out work of their own, and very rarely the world itself intervenes when the simulation produces a genuine emergency such as a mana rift tearing open next to a settlement.

Whether a quest is written by a player, offered by an NPC or born from the world, it is always the same underlying thing: a contract. There are no magical quest markers or interfaces that teleport you to your objective — a quest is an agreement in the world, and you complete it by acting in the world. This keeps questing aligned with the consistent fantasy simulation principle.

Player Commissions link

The vast majority of quests are commissions written by players. The loop is:

graph LR
    A[Draft] --> B[Funded]
    B --> C[Open]
    C -->|"signed by one accepter"| D[Assigned]
    C -->|"signed by anyone"| E[In Progress]
    D --> E
    E --> F[Completed]
    E --> G[Failed / Expired]
    F --> H[Settled]
    G --> H

Funding and Escrow link

Before a commission is ever visible to other players, the issuer must fund it up front. The reward — gold and/or items — is handed to a broker NPC (this can also be a blackboard in a town). No funded contract means no quest.

This single rule is the backbone of trust in the system: every commission a player sees on a board is already paid for. Two charges are taken at the moment the contract is funded:

Both are always paid in gold, even when the reward itself is items, and both follow the rounding rule from the economy page: rounded up to the next whole gold, minimum 1. The broker cut is the fee for the service, consistent with the reward calculation. The posting tax is a sink in the same spirit as auction listing fees — small enough to ignore for a serious contract, large enough that papering the boards with dozens of trivial ones has a running cost.

Rewards are bounded by the server-wide reward formula (which factors in available money and the issuer’s wealth) so that commissions cannot be used to distort the economy. A commission may offer more than the formula’s baseline, but never a trivial amount for a hard task. The same World Treasury Director that keeps NPC payouts backed by NPC earnings supervises these bounds.

Objective Types link

Every objective is verifiable from physical world state — never from self-reporting. The world simulation already emits the events needed to confirm completion (an item delivered, a Bestia deactivated, a location reached). Gather commissions ask for natural resources or crafted items, and transport commissions are bounded by the carrier’s weight limit.

Difficulty and Level Range link

The difficulty of a commission is derived by the server from the objective, never declared by the issuer. This keeps rewards honest and stops issuers from luring under-levelled players into lethal tasks. Difficulty is measured along two separate axes, because “dangerous” and “long” are not the same problem:

• Danger is expressed as a Contract Danger Level (CDL), on the same scale as player levels. It decides who is allowed to sign the contract.
• Effort measures how much work the task is. It decides how large the reward and the experience may be, and has no influence on who may accept.

Danger comes from the world, not from the wording of the contract. Every region carries a threat level — the average level of the hostile Bestia the simulation currently sustains there, which rises with the region’s mana concentration because that is what Bestia spawn from:

  CDL(bounty)    = target_level + 5 (if boss) + 2 per elemental level of the target
CDL(gather)    = threat_level of the region holding the nearest viable deposit
CDL(transport) = highest threat_level along the shortest viable route
CDL(escort)    = highest threat_level along the route, +5 if the escortee is more
                 than 10 levels below that threat level
  

The +5 / +2 terms on a bounty mirror the boss and elemental modifiers used in the experience calculation, so a contract’s danger and the experience the fight actually yields cannot drift apart.

Effort reuses formulas the game already has, so a commission’s baseline reward stays anchored to what the same work costs through other systems:

  effort(gather)    = N * resource_level
effort(transport) = distance_km * weight_kg   (the same term as the postal freight fee)
effort(escort)    = distance_km
effort(bounty)    = 4 * target_level + 5      (the base experience of the kill)
  

Every commission shows its derived CDL as a level band of CDL - 5 to CDL + 10. The lower bound is enforced: a master below CDL - 5 cannot sign the contract at all, on any board, no matter how the reward tempts them. A five-level reach upward is deliberately allowed — a well-prepared team punching slightly above its weight is good play, walking a Lv. 12 master into a Lv. 60 rift valley for someone else’s ore is not.

Open vs. Assigned link

Before your work counts, you sign the commission at the board or with the broker. Signing is what enforces the level floor, and it is what lets escrow know who is owed what. The fulfilment model then depends on the objective type:

• Open commissions (used for Gather): any number of players may sign, and the reward is paid out pro rata per unit delivered until N units are reached, at which point the contract closes. Five players who each haul a fifth of the order each earn a fifth of the pot. This is what makes “many hands help” true rather than a slogan — nobody who did real work goes home with nothing because somebody else arrived first.
• Assigned commissions (used for Transport and Escort): the contract locks to a single accepter on signing, with a deadline, and the accepter posts collateral. Sealed cargo and a named escortee cannot be split across several couriers, and time-critical deliveries must not be blocked by someone who signs and then stalls.

Bounty commissions may be posted either way. An assigned bounty pays its single accepter. An open bounty splits the pot in proportion to damage dealt to the target, exactly as kill experience is already distributed among damage dealers, and the kill itself is credited to whoever dealt the most damage. Because both the experience and the gold follow the same proportional rule, there is nothing for a last-hit thief to steal: sniping the killing blow off a Bestia somebody else ground down earns a proportional sliver and nothing more.

Collateral link

An assigned contract is a promise to be somewhere with something. To make that promise cost something, the accepter posts collateral in gold when they sign:

  collateral = max(20 * subject_level, 25% of the reward's value)
  

where subject_level is the item level of the cargo for a Transport, the level of the escortee for an Escort, and the resource level for an assigned Gather. Hauling a Legendary crate is therefore a serious financial commitment, and the stake is meant to be felt: walking away from the job must be the expensive option, not the convenient one.

This does mean a fresh player cannot immediately take the high-value hauls, and that is intended. Those contracts are trusted work, and the trust is bought with gold you already have.

On settlement:

• Completed on time — collateral is returned in full, on top of the reward.
• Failed after a genuine attempt (the courier was killed en route, the escortee died to something that outmatched the team) — half the collateral goes to the issuer as compensation, half returns to the accepter. This mirrors the postal insurance logic, which already accepts “the courier died” as a real outcome of the world rather than as cheating.
• Abandoned — the accepter drops the contract, lets it expire without a serious attempt, or dumps the cargo — the full collateral goes to the issuer, and the accepter loses honor. Brokers keep a ledger and they talk: an abandoned contract costs -5 global honor and -20 local honor with the broker who held it, on the same scale as the other breaches of trust in the honor system. Repeat offenders find the boards of a whole town closed to them long before their gold runs out.

Withdrawing a Commission link

A Draft can be discarded freely and a Funded contract can be withdrawn before it goes on a board, refunding the escrow minus the charges already taken. Once a commission is Open, escrow-as-trust would be worthless if the issuer could pull it out from under people mid-haul, so withdrawal follows a notice rule:

• Withdrawal takes effect only after a notice window of 3 Bestia hours (1 real-time hour).
• During the window the commission is flagged as closing on every board, but deliveries still settle normally. The issuer must leave the escrow fully funded until the window closes, so work already in flight is always paid for.
• Whatever escrow is unspent when the window closes returns to the issuer. The broker cut and posting tax are not refunded — the broker did the work of advertising the contract.

For an Assigned contract, the issuer may only cancel with the accepter’s agreement, or by paying out the reward in full. Somebody is already on the road.

Rewards, Experience and Settlement link

Rewards are delivered through the postal system — you do not report back to a magical quest-giver. On failure or expiry, escrow returns to the issuer minus fees, and any collateral forfeited by a failed accepter is paid to the issuer as compensation.

Experience deserves special care. Player commissions do not let issuers mint experience. The server decides the whole experience reward from the derived difficulty of the task, and it is drawn from a capped NPC/world pool:

• The accepter earns experience scaled to the contract’s CDL and effort, in the same order of magnitude as doing the equivalent work uncommissioned — a haul is worth roughly what gathering that resource is worth, a bounty roughly what the kill is worth.
• The issuer earns a flat 5 experience for posting a funded commission, plus 10% of the experience paid to the accepter once the contract settles successfully. Writing good work into the world is worth rewarding — but a flat posting bonus is insignificant to anyone past the first few levels, and the completion share only ever arrives if a real player really did the job.

Why Big Contracts Beat Many Small Ones link

Gold and items only ever move between players, so trading favours back and forth costs both sides the broker cut and the posting tax and gains nobody anything. Experience is the part worth protecting, because it comes from the world pool rather than from a player’s pocket. Three rules make a wall of tiny contracts strictly worse than one real one:

1. Experience follows the objective, not the paperwork. Splitting a 500-unit order into ten 50-unit orders yields the same total effort and therefore the same total experience, minus ten posting taxes instead of one.
2. Diminishing returns per role, per day. For the n-th contract a player settles within a Bestia day, counted separately as issuer and as accepter, the world-pool experience is multiplied by 1 / (1 + 0.5 * n). The first contract of the day pays full, the third about half, the tenth barely registers. Gold and items are untouched — a dedicated hauler can run all day for pay, they simply cannot grind levels off the contract board.
3. The same two names, again and again, stop paying. Contracts between the same issuer–accepter pair decay much harder: 1 / (1 + n_pair) over a rolling 7 Bestia days. A guild’s regular courier is mildly affected. Two accounts cycling ten-metre escort contracts at each other are earning nothing within minutes.

On top of that, a contract whose CDL and effort both fall below the trivial floor pays no world experience at all — only the gold its issuer chose to attach. Work has to be work.

Discovery link

Finding commissions stays physical and range-limited, matching the postal system’s locality rules:

• Bulletin boards at settlements
• Town-crier NPCs and tavern chatter announcing local needs
• Classical NPC interaction

There is deliberately no global, world-spanning “quest finder.” If you want to know what is needed far away, you travel, send word, or own a map that reveals the distant postboxes you can reach — the same locality rules that govern parcels govern how far your reach extends.

NPC Commissions link

NPCs also generate work of their own: a farmer who cannot bring in a harvest before it spoils, a merchant who needs an escort, a village that wants a guardian Bestia dealt with. These use the same contract machinery as player commissions, funded from the NPC side rather than from a player’s purse, and they are the reason a quiet corner of the world still has something to do in it.

World Events link

Occasionally the world itself generates a quest. These are rare and emergent — never on a fixed timer. A lightweight regional Director watches aggregate simulation state (mana density, threat level, unattended rift activity), and when a threshold is crossed it instantiates a public contract open to everyone and scored by contribution.

Contribution Scoring link

A world event is scored along several independent axes, not one summed number, and each axis pays from its own share of the pot:

• Damage dealt to the event’s Bestia and bosses
• Objective work — seals placed, wards raised, rituals performed, cargo brought to the front
• Time held — presence and survival inside the contested area while it mattered

Scoring each axis separately is what keeps a world event from being a high-level damage party. A Scholar who located the rift with Observation, an Eternity player placing seals and a fighter tanking the wave bosses all earn from the axis they actually contributed to, and none of them has to out-damage anyone to be paid.

Funding and Repeat Events link

World-event rewards come from a treasury pool — a settlement’s, a faction’s or the world’s — never from a single issuer. That pool is real gold that NPCs earned, tracked by the World Treasury Director, so a world event recirculates money rather than minting it.

Which also means a treasury can be farmed, if opening rifts and then being paid to close them is profitable enough to industrialise. So payouts in a region decay with repetition:

  payout_share = 1 / (1 + events_in_region_within_last_7_bestia_days)
  

A first rift in a quiet region pays in full. The fourth rift in the same valley inside a week pays a quarter. The intended rhythm — mana builds slowly, the response is a genuine event — survives contact with organised players, and a region that has just been through a crisis needs time before another one is worth the same effort.

Faction-Contested by Design link

World events are not purely cooperative — they hook directly into the factions and their spheres of influence:

• The Order of Chaos wants rifts open and may have caused the mana build-up in the first place; they can defend or even widen a rift.
• The Order of Eternity profits from sealing it.
• The Order of the Circle seeks to stabilize the region without suppressing the mana flow entirely, holding the rift in a controlled stasis instead of closing or feeding it.

So the same rift is a defend-quest for one Order and a sabotage opportunity for another, and how it ends shifts the region’s influence scores. This turns world events into emergent PvPvE flashpoints instead of scripted set-pieces.

Crucially, the frequency of these events is itself player-driven: because Chaos players opening rifts is what raises the regional mana that trips the Director’s threshold, world events stay rare by design — gated behind accumulated player behaviour rather than a hardcoded cooldown.

How Completion Is Verified link

Player commissions, NPC commissions and world events all run on the same top-level machinery, which fits the event-based server architecture:

1. A contract is a small state machine: Draft → Funded → Open/Assigned → In Progress → Completed | Failed | Expired → Settled.
2. Objectives are expressed as composable predicates over events the simulation already emits — for example ItemDelivered(to, type, qty), EntityDeactivated(id), or EntityReached(region). The contract subscribes to the server’s event messages and evaluates its predicates.
3. Signatures and partial progress are part of the contract’s state, so an open Gather knows how many of its N units each signer has delivered, and an open Bounty knows how much damage each signer dealt. Pro-rata settlement is bookkeeping over events, not a separate system.
4. World events reuse the identical predicate/state-machine system; only the funding source (a treasury pool) and the many-contributor scoring differ from a single-accepter commission.

This shared foundation also connects naturally to the server’s automatic quest generation and Petri-net / graph-based objective modelling.