Windrose Economy and Shop

Read this part first

Windrose has the same economy every other game on GameGrid has — wallets, a shop, an item catalogue, Discord linking, playtime rewards, transactions and refunds — including automatic delivery, with one difference worth knowing before you price anything.

On every other game, buying an item puts it into the player's inventory. On Windrose it lands on the ground at their feet. They pick it up.

That is the game rather than your server. Windrose is bring-your-own-character: your world lives on the server, but each player's character and backpack are a file on their own computer, so there is no inventory of theirs for a server to write into — by us or by anyone. What a server does own is the world, so that is where the item goes.

Everything else happens by itself. The coins are taken, the sale is logged, the item appears beside the player while they are playing, and the purchase is recorded in your Transactions tab and your Discord log channel. Nobody has to hand anything over.

The player has to be on the server to receive it. If they buy while offline, the purchase waits and is delivered the next time they play — you do not have to do anything.

Windrose Plus carries it, and it is already there

There is no separate economy toggle for Windrose. The economy runs on Windrose Plus, because Windrose Plus is where everything it needs comes from: the list of who is connected, the item catalogue and the playtime tracking. GameGrid installs Windrose Plus on every Windrose server by itself and keeps it there, so there is nothing to switch on. See Windrose Plus — Complete Guide.

On a brand-new server, or one GameGrid is still installing it on, the top of the Economy tab says Windrose Plus is being installed. Anything you set up meanwhile is saved and waiting, and it all works once Windrose Plus has loaded at the server's next start. Your wallets, shop items, prices, Discord links and transaction history are stored by GameGrid, not in Windrose Plus.

What works on Windrose, and what does not

The two "No" rows are the game's limits. Windrose reports no combat or progression events to the server at all, and Windrose Plus ships no command that reads chat or sends a message in game. Nothing on your side fixes either of them.

Linking a Discord account works differently here

On most games a player types !link CODE in the in-game chat and the platform reads it. Windrose has no in-game chat we can read, so linking works the other way round: the player tells us which character they are, and we confirm it by seeing that character connect to the server after the code was made.

What a player does:

1. Run /link in your Discord, and fill in the character option with their exact in-game character name.

2. Join the server within 10 minutes, as that character. A player who is already on the server leaves and joins again: the link needs the character to connect after the code was made.

3. The link completes on its own. There is nothing to type in game.

If they leave the character name out, the bot will say so and no code is sent — a code with no character to match would just expire.

The name has to match what the server shows. Capitalisation does not matter and stray spaces are ignored, but a different spelling will not match. If a link never completes, that is the first thing to check.

This proves someone connected as that character after the code was made. It does not prove the person in Discord is the person at the keyboard — it is the strongest confirmation Windrose allows. Someone else who joins under that name in the minutes after the code is made would be linked to it, so on a server where that matters, link the player by hand.

The item catalogue

Economy → Shop → Scan Game Items reads the item catalogue that ships inside Windrose Plus: 840 items, with their real display names, categories, rarities and stack sizes.

The categories are the game's own: Misc (409), Resources (138), Equipment (106), Weapons (77), Consumables (65) and Ship (45).

Item ids are the game's asset names, for example DA_EID_Cannon_12_ColdBarrels_Advanced for "12-Pounder: Tempered". You do not have to type them — the shop, the Excel export and the Discord /buy autocomplete all show the display name — but that id is what appears on the transaction row, so it is what to quote if you ever need to ask us about a purchase.

The catalogue is a snapshot taken when that version of Windrose Plus was built, so a brand-new item added by a game update may not appear until Windrose Plus is updated. The scan tells you the date of the catalogue it read, so you can always see how current the list is. Windrose Plus updates itself on GameGrid, so this looks after itself.

Nine of the 840 are quest items that have no display name in the game and show their asset name instead. They are quest notes and keys, not things you would sell.

Earning coins

Playtime is the only in-game reward Windrose supports, and it works: coins accrue for time connected, paid in whole hours, and settled when the player disconnects.

The other two sources every game has both work here, because they happen in Discord rather than in the game: the daily login bonus and Discord activity rewards.

Kill, death and level rewards are not offered for Windrose, and the Auto-Earn settings page says so next to each one rather than letting you set a value that could never pay.

A player who is online when the server stops or restarts does not get paid for that session — the session had no end for us to settle. This is worth mentioning if a player asks why a long session before a restart earned nothing.

What happens when someone buys something

1. Their coins are taken and the sale is recorded immediately.

2. If they are on the server, the item drops at their feet within a few seconds.

3. The purchase appears in Economy → Transactions in your panel, and in your Discord transaction-log channel if you have set one, marked delivered.

If they are not on the server, the purchase is held and retried, and it arrives on their next session. The Transactions tab shows it as queued in the meantime. You do not have to do anything either way.

Tell your players to be standing somewhere sensible when they buy. The item goes on the ground where they are — buying while swimming, or in mid-air off a mast, is not a good plan.

If a purchase does need reversing — a mis-click, a price you had wrong — refund it. /refund <transaction-id>, or the refund button in the Transactions tab, credits the coins back and links the refund to the original sale. A refund cannot take an item back out of the game, on any of our games.

One case is worth knowing about because it is the only one that needs you. If a delivery reaches the server and the server does not report back, the platform will not retry it and will not refund it, and the transaction is flagged for you to look at. That is deliberate: the item may already be lying at the player's feet, and retrying would give them two while refunding would give them the item and their coins back.

What happens when Windrose updates

Windrose updates often, and it has to — a player whose Steam client has updated cannot join a server that has not. So the question is not whether your server takes updates, it is what survives one. On GameGrid the answer is everything, without you doing anything.

A Windrose update replaces the game's own files, and the part of Windrose Plus that lives among them goes with it. The next time your server starts, the platform puts it back — the loader, Windrose Plus and the delivery system — before the game process is allowed to start. You do not press anything and there is nothing to notice.

That is why your live map, player list, item catalogue, playtime earning and item delivery are all still there after an update that would otherwise have quietly taken them away.

The one case that can pause deliveries

Item delivery reaches deeper into the game than anything else we do. Most Windrose updates do not change the parts of the game it uses, and then delivery simply carries on: before delivering, the platform checks the updated game files on your server against the version delivery was built for, and keeps going when the parts it needs are unchanged.

When an update does change them, the system stops rather than guessing. Nothing is misdelivered and nothing is written into your world that should not be. Purchases made meanwhile are not refused: they wait in Economy → Transactions and the platform keeps trying them on its own. If delivery keeps failing on the new game version, it is paused on that version only, the Economy page says Paused after a game update., and we are alerted automatically, from our own monitoring, rather than waiting for one of your players to report a missing item.

The fix is published to every running Windrose server on the platform within about half an hour of being ready, and no server is restarted for it — not yours, not anyone's. Waiting purchases are then handed over by themselves. A purchase still waiting 24 hours after it was made is refunded to the player's wallet automatically. Everything else — the shop, wallets, the live map, playtime earning, linking — keeps working normally throughout.

We have never had to tell a customer to restart their server, reinstall anything, or wait for a new build to get item delivery back. That is the design, and it is the part of this that took the longest to build.

The live map

Your server panel has a Live Map tab showing the sea chart Windrose Plus generates for your world, with live player positions on it. It is the same data as the Sea Chart in the Windrose Plus dashboard, drawn in the panel, with your Discord-linked players named.

If the map is blank, the chart has not been generated yet. GameGrid generates it automatically while the server runs, and the map says which step it is on — see Windrose Plus Live Map (Sea Chart) Guide.

Getting started

1. Nothing to install: Windrose Plus is already on every Windrose server (its tab says "On"; "Being installed" means it loads at the next start).

2. Open Economy in your server panel. Set your currency name and your starting balance.

3. Shop → Scan Game Items to load the 840 items.

4. Price the ones you want to sell and enable them. The Excel export and import are the fastest way to do a lot at once.

5. Run /economy-setup in your Discord to point the bot at your server and set your log channel.

6. Tell your players to run /link with their character name, then join the server (leave and join again if they are already on it).

The general steps are in Setting Up Your Server Economy. Everything above is what is specific to Windrose.