Questing in Bestia is primarily player-driven. Players write out rewards for tasks they need done — gathering resources, transporting goods from A to B, hunting a troublesome Bestia and other players pick them up. The world itself only rarely steps in, 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 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 --> D[In Progress]
    D --> E[Completed]
    D --> F[Failed / Expired]
    E --> G[Settled]
    F --> G

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. The broker keeps a 5% cut of the reward for managing the contract, consistent with the reward calculation.

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.

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).

Open vs. Assigned link

The fulfilment model depends on the objective type:

• Open commissions (used for Gather): anyone may work the task, and the first valid delivery wins the pot. This suits stockpiling goals where many hands help and racing is harmless.
• Assigned commissions (used for Transport and Escort): the contract locks to a single accepter on acceptance, with a deadline. To make this trustworthy, the accepter posts collateral — a small stake that is forfeited to the issuer if they fail or abandon the task. This protects time-critical deliveries from being blocked by someone who accepts and then stalls.

Bounty commissions may be posted either way depending on the issuer’s preference.

Level Range link

The suitable level range for a commission is derived automatically from the objective’s difficulty, rather than set by the issuer. This keeps rewards honest and prevents luring under-levelled players into lethal tasks.

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 posted by a failed accepter is paid to the issuer as compensation.

Experience deserves special care. Player commissions do not let issuers mint experience. Instead, any XP reward is drawn from a capped NPC/world pool scaled to the automatically-derived difficulty of the task.

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
• The offline mobile companion, to browse commissions and pre-stage your Bestia team before logging in

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 the maps to see distant boards.

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.

Faction-Contested by Design link

World events are not purely cooperative — they hook directly into the factions:

• The 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 profits from sealing it.
• The Harmony seeks to stabilise the region without fully suppressing the mana flow. Rather putting it into a stasis.

So the same rift is a defend-quest for one faction and a sabotage opportunity for another. 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

Both player commissions and world events 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 event bus and evaluates its predicates.
3. 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.