The Stable Auction
There are 64 plots open in the world and one per soul. A player who leaves and never comes back holds one of them forever, and that is a problem the world solves by itself.
The clock
Fourteen days without being seen and your plot is listed for sale, by the world, on the land sale board at the black market. The listing says it is an auction and it names you as the seller.
Fourteen days is the whole test. It is your last time in the world, not your last login row, not your upkeep meter, and not how much you had banked. A starved stable that its owner visits every week is never listed.
The hammer
A listed plot takes offers like any other listing. After 48 hours the board accepts the best funded offer on it. If the best offer cannot go through, it falls to the next best rather than quietly skipping to a worse price.
If nobody offers, nothing happens and the plot stays listed.
Coming back cancels it
Log in before the hammer and the sale is off. The listing cancels itself, and you keep the plot, the stable, the room, the kiln and everything in the stash. There is nothing to pay and nothing to reclaim.
That is the point of the 48 hour window: it is a last call, not a repossession.
Where the money goes
If the plot does sell, the price splits in half:
- Half waits for the absent owner. It is theirs when they come back. Being gone costs you the land, not the value of it.
- Half goes to the town treasury.
Anything on the plot goes with the deed, with one exception: a mannequin standing on an auctioned plot, and the gear worn on it, is moved back onto the absent owner's own record before the listing is made. Their gear never travels with the sale.
Why it exists
Land is the scarcest thing in the world and it is the one thing that cannot be gathered, crafted or replaced. Ground nobody stands on is worth less than ground somebody lives on, and a world where every lot belongs to a wallet that stopped playing is a world with nothing left to buy. New land is the other half of the same answer.