Player Owned Towns Explained: From Holdfast to Teralopolis

Scroll the map of New Britannia and most of the settlements you see weren't placed by the developers. They were bought, named, themed, and governed by players. Part three of our housing series explains the Player Owned Town — the system that turns Shroud of the Avatar's housing from a hobby into a society.

What a POT is

A Player Owned Town is a town a player purchases from the official SotA store and places in the world. The buyer becomes its Governor: they pick the town's map template, lay out the property markers that define its lots, recruit residents, and decorate everything outside the individual lots. A POT comes with a complimentary starter kit that is frankly enormous — over 1,300 property markers of every size, a full roster of NPC merchants and buildings from banks to taverns, devotionals for all the virtues, and a jukebox's worth of wax cylinder music.

Living in one

You don't need to own a town to benefit from one — most residents never will. You need:

1. A POT-compatible deed — either a "POT" deed (including the free ones from the Episode 1 story quests) or a "PA" deed, which works anywhere.

2. An unclaimed lot — many towns post a daily message or billboard saying "claim anything open"; otherwise, ask the governor. If the spot you want has no marker, the governor can place one.

The one rule of POT life: the governor can evict you at any time. The game warns you when you claim. In practice, towns want residents — an active, decorated town is the whole point — but it's a relationship, not a land registry. If eviction happens, your deed goes to your bank and your decorations into the Property Manager; nothing is destroyed.

Governors shape daily life in subtler ways too: they choose the town's water type (fresh, fetid, or salt — lava is off the table, though decorative lava pools are not), and fill the common spaces with as much or as little as the town's decoration budget allows.

Town sizes: Holdfast to Teralopolis

Towns are bought at Holdfast size and upgraded from there — with COTOs or through the web store. Upgrading doesn't physically enlarge the map; it raises the town's limits: how many NPC buildings and NPCs the governor can place, the shared decoration budget, and the total square footage of lots the town can hold.

Some biomes also include fixed Castle- and Keep-sized water lots that don't count against the square footage budget — claimable with the right deed, if you can find one open.

Picking a look

Every POT uses a biome template — coastal forest, walled tropical island, underground cavern, snowy mountain and a few dozen more. You can preview them in-game: visit the town of Hometown and check the docks, where a hatch, a pair of balloons, and several blue-sailed boats each lead into a walkable template.

The town on the map

A POT's overland marker isn't static. It fills in with buildings as lots get claimed, shows smoke and window lights when residents are online, and sprouts indicators for devotionals. An empty town and a thriving one look different from across the map — which is exactly the kind of touch that makes player towns feel lived in.

If you're hunting for a home, our advice: visit a few towns, hold P near anything promising, and talk to the governors. Somewhere in New Britannia there's a town that fits.

This wraps the housing series — part 1 covered deeds, claiming and taxes; part 2 covered houses, basements, dungeons and deco limits. Housing facts courtesy of the ever-excellent SotAwiki; market prices from our own receipt archive.