What the Cost Tables Actually Say

The Buildings List shows one upgrade step per row. That is the right shape for looking a number up, and the wrong shape for seeing where your resources actually go — you cannot add up a column by scrolling it.

So this is the same table, summed. Every figure below is computed from the table on this site, and you can check any of them against it.

What is in the 440 rows

The table is not 440 buildings. It is 440 upgrade steps, and only about a quarter of them are buildings:

The 13 buildings that cost resources

Of the 24 building entries, 13 cost resources. The rest — every Sacred level, every Sacred Tier — cost azurite and nothing else.

Total: 19.70B resources and 2.0M azurite to take all thirteen through their listed range.

Three things the flat table hides

1. Wood is the bottleneck, not food

Add up all four resources across those 118 building steps and the split is not even close to even:

Wood is 46% of everything the buildings ask for, and iron is 7%. If your farms and your sawmills get the same attention, you are over-producing iron by a wide margin and you will still be waiting on wood.

2. The Castle is 38% of the whole bill

7.58B of the 19.70B total is the Castle alone, and its level 40 step is 1.04B by itself — bigger than the entire cost of the Blacksmith, Embassy, College and Depot combined.

That is worth knowing before you start it, because it is not a step you finish on impulse. Everything else on the list is small next to it.

3. Almost all research costs no resources at all

Of the 322 research steps in the table — High College and Mystic College — 303 cost zero food, wood, stone and iron. They cost azurite and only azurite.

And the azurite adds up to more than the buildings do: 2.2M azurite across research versus 2.0M across all buildings.

This is the part that changes how you plan. Resources and azurite are not two versions of the same constraint — they are two separate budgets that fund two separate halves of your progression. Farming harder does not move your research at all.

What to do with this

• Use the Planner to queue several steps and see the combined total, rather than pricing them one at a time.
• Use the Azurite Calculator for the research half, since that is where the azurite goes.
• Sort the Buildings List by the Wood column to see the steps that will actually hold you up.
• The High College simulator covers the 187 steps of that tree, and the Mystic College one the other 135.

A note on the category names

An earlier version of this guide listed three research categories — High Technology, Mystic College and High College — because that is what the type column said. It was wrong, and the table has been corrected.

The evidence: the 27 buildings filed under "High Technology" are all keyed hc*, all 27 of their names match the High College research list exactly, and none of them appear in the Mystic College dataset. The 10 filed under "High College" are all keyed mc*, and all 10 appear in the Mystic College dataset. The labels were shifted by one.

There are two research trees, not three. The totals are unchanged: 322 research steps, 440 rows.

How these numbers were produced

Every figure on this page is a sum, count or ratio over buildingList, the same array that renders the Buildings List table. Nothing here is an estimate and nothing is from another site. Costs are base costs — construction buffs, alliance help and event discounts apply on top and vary per account, so they are deliberately not folded in.

If a figure in the table gets corrected, the sums on this page need recomputing with it. See where the data comes from.