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Raids and Loot

How PvP raids work in Pixel Kingdom Wars: finding a target, energy and ante, the 90-second battle, stars, the loot formula, trophies, shields, and replays.

A raid is a 90-second attack on another player's base. You pick a target, drop your army around their plot, and the server resolves every hit. Any star you earn is a win, and wins take a share of the defender's SHARDS. There is no travel time: the moment you confirm a target, you are on their field.

Everything on this page is the devnet playtest. SOL and KEEP here are test-net tokens with no real value, and SHARDS are an in-game currency.

Quick facts

• Raids are instant — no march, no waiting. The only clocks are a 30-second deploy countdown and the 90-second battle.
• Each PvP raid costs 1 raid energy (6 free per UTC day) plus a SHARDS ante of 100 × your Keep level.
• Stars: 1 for destroying 50% of the base, 1 for destroying the Keep, 1 for 100%. Walls and traps never count. Any star is a victory.
• Loot: up to 50% of the defender's liquid SHARDS (plus open Gold Forge SHARDS) is at stake. Stars pay 25% / 50% / 100% of that pool. Destroyed Mines also hand over their uncollected shards.
• KEEP is never lootable. Raids move SHARDS only.
• Losing a raid (giving up at least one star) shields you for 2 days (48 h). Attacking anyone drops your own shield.
• Every battle on a deed is kept forever with a playable replay.

Finding a target

Open the globe and tap a parcel to see its owner's base. You can attack a base you picked yourself, or let the game auto-match you.

Who you can see and hit

• Landowners only meet landowners. Players who have not bought land have no parcel on the globe and are matched only against other landless players.
• Named target (globe pick or revenge): the defender's trophies must be within the larger of 50 or 20% of your own trophies.
• Auto-match: ±15% of your trophies (never narrower than 50), choosing from the 50 nearest-rated bases; if nobody qualifies the game retries once with a window three times as wide. The final pick among eligible bases is random.
• A target must have a finished Keep, must not be shielded, and must not have been raided by you already today (UTC). You also cannot raid a player who is in the middle of their own attack, and you cannot raid yourself.

Scouting. Before you commit, the parcel view gives you a 30-second scout preview of the base. Only completed buildings appear; traps that were sprung in an earlier raid and not yet repaired are simply absent.

Tip: the globe also shows a loot preview as a 1★ / 2★ / 3★ range. The numbers are rounded into buckets (never finer than 100 SHARDS) so a preview cannot reveal a player's exact balance. The low end assumes their defenses hold; the high end assumes everything falls, Mines included.

Revenge

Anyone who raided you in the last 4 hours is flagged on your map. The flag is a badge and a sort key, nothing more: the trophy window, shield, land tier, and once-per-day rules still apply.

What a raid costs

There is no daily cap on raids as long as you have energy. Campaign stages cost no energy and no ante — see Campaign and PvE.

Why the ante: there is no daily raid cap, so the ante is the only throttle on how often you attack, and it scales with your Keep level. The exact numbers are marked as playtest placeholders in the code and may be tuned.

Deploying and fighting

When you confirm, the server freezes a snapshot of the defender's base and drops you straight onto the field.

• Deploy window: you have 30 seconds to start. The battle clock begins at your first accepted unit or hero drop; if the countdown runs out the client commits for you.
• Battle length: 90 seconds, resolved at 10 ticks per second. You may keep deploying reserves for the whole fight.
• Deploy zone: the defender's 30×30 plot plus a 4-tile ring around it. You cannot drop inside the defender's actual claim (14×14 at the start, growing to 26×26 as they upgrade).
• Hold a troop button to deploy repeatedly.

Commands available during the battle

• RALLY (Keep level 3 and up): once per raid, free. Troops in a 2.5-tile radius get +25% speed and damage for 5 seconds.
• Buffs (paid in devnet KEEP, at most one of each per raid): War Horn 40 KEEP, troop damage ×1.15; Swift Boots 30 KEEP, troop speed ×1.2; Powder Charge 35 KEEP, Keg Runner wall damage ×1.6.
• Heroes: a recruited hero who is not recovering can be dropped like a troop. See Troops and Heroes.

The battle ends early when the base is 100% destroyed, or when you have no living troop left and nothing left to deploy. The only randomness in combat is a ±6% damage jitter on defense shots, seeded per raid, so a replay always matches what happened.

Stars and victory

Destruction counts every building except walls and traps. One star is a win; zero stars is a loss for you and a clean defense for them.

Loot

Loot is worked out per defending deed. It never touches wallet-wide balances and it never touches KEEP.

The pool. When the raid is created, 50% of the defender's liquid SHARDS plus their open (uncollected) Gold Forge SHARDS is set aside as the lootable pool. Every Mine's uncollected buffer is frozen separately.

Stars pay from the pool. 1★ takes 25% of the pool, 2★ takes 50%, 3★ takes 100%.

The Vault decides how much of the pool is exposed (formula v2). The highest Vault still standing at the end of the battle shields up to 30 of the 50 points, scaled by its level. A level-1 Vault shields 1.5 points (48.5% of the balance lootable); a level-20 Vault shields all 30 (20% lootable). A Vault you destroy protects nothing — breaking it is how raiders reach the rest. A deed with no Vault exposes the whole pool. Raids created before this rule shipped settle under the older rule they were created with (75% of the pool always reachable, the last 25% opening as Vaults fell).

A few examples:

Why: the owner's rule is "during a raid 50% of your shards can be taken, so the Vault should reduce that by up to 30% based on its level." The Vault's storage capacity plays no part in raid loot — only its level and whether it survived.

Mines. On any victory, each destroyed Mine's frozen buffer is paid to you in full. Buffers of Mines that survived go back to the defender. Collecting often is the defender's best protection here — see Mining and Daily Cache.

Settlement. The attacker's deed receives exactly the total; whatever the attacker did not take is returned to the defender. No league tithe and no clan cut are taken on this path. Gold Forge stakes are lootable in proportion to their share of the balance, so an open Forge is not a safe place to park SHARDS — see Gold Forge.

Trophies and leagues

Those are the base values; both are damped by the rating gap. The factor is 100% minus 0.1% per trophy of gap (your trophies minus theirs), clamped between 50% and 150%. Beating someone far below you pays less; beating someone above you pays more. On a 0★ loss the damping inverts, so a favored attacker who whiffs loses more. Nobody drops below 0. These curves are marked as playtest placeholders in the code and will be tuned.

Trophies belong to the base (deed), not the wallet, so they transfer with the land. Campaign stages award no trophies.

Leagues: Bronze from 0, Silver from 400, Gold from 800, Sol from 1,200 trophies. Tiers are recomputed every Monday at 00:15 UTC. A league prize pool exists in code (60% to Sol, 40% to Gold) but currently has no funding source, so league prizes are effectively 0 for now; badges and tiers are live.

Shields and cooldowns

• Loss shield: if a defender concedes at least one star, their base is shielded for 2 days (48 h). A 0★ raid grants nothing. An existing longer shield is never shortened.
• Attacking breaks your shield — at your first accepted deploy in a live raid. Campaign stages never break it.
• Extend: +12 hours for 0.05 devnet SOL, only when 1 d 12 h (36 h) or less remain, and never past 2 days (48 h) total.
• Shielded bases cannot be targeted, and cannot be shown as auto-match candidates.
• Same target: once per UTC day per attacker.
• Warzone (admin-opened windows where loss shields do not protect) exists in code but is switched off; it is not live.

Replays and raid log

Every battle a deed takes part in — attacking or defending — is written to its permanent battle history, 20 entries per page. Open any entry for a replay. Replays play back the server's own event timeline rather than re-simulating, so what you watch is exactly what was settled. Exact loot figures are shown only to the wallet that owned the deed when the battle settled; other viewers see the outcome, not the money.

What the defender experiences

• Your base is frozen as a snapshot the instant the raid is created: only finished buildings fight, buildings still under construction sit the raid out, and sprung traps that you have not repaired are absent.
• You cannot be raided while you are attacking someone.
• You can watch a raid on your base live as it happens.
• Your towers shoot automatically; a recruited hero who is not recovering stands guard at its altar. See Defenses, Traps and Walls for how towers target.
• After the raid, triggered traps stay on the map but are inert until you pay their repair cost and a builder re-arms them.
• Losing at least one star shields you for 2 days (48 h); a 0★ defense gives no shield, but costs you nothing either.
• Your trophy change mirrors the attacker's, and the SHARDS you lose come only from the lootable pool and destroyed Mine buffers. KEEP is untouched.

Tip: keep your Vault standing and inside your walls, collect Mines before logging off, and do not leave SHARDS sitting open in the Gold Forge. Each of those shrinks what an attacker can take.

See also

• Troops and Heroes
• Defenses, Traps and Walls
• Campaign and PvE
• Land Deeds and the Globe
• Mining and Daily Cache
• Gold Forge
• Economy: Shards and KEEP
• Glossary and FAQ