Immortal Realm Convoys: Group Escorts, Routes, and Cargo Rewards

Convoys are Immortal Realm's scheduled group-content surface — NPC caravans that walk a defined route between two cities, on a timer, with cargo, chatter, and a real chance of getting jumped along the way. They're how the shard creates organic group content without requiring you to be in a party, on a Discord, or even friends with the people you're traveling with.

This page covers how convoys spawn, how the escort zone works, how rewards pay out, and what to expect on the road.

What a Convoy Is

A convoy is a small NPC group walking a fixed route on a recurring schedule:

• A caravan master at the front who walks the recorded route and often carries cargo.
• A handful of escorts behind the master, following the lead's position rather than the route.
• A route with a start label, an end label, and waypoints — typically a city-to-city path crossing real road geometry.
• A schedule measured in minutes; the system fires that convoy on a recurring interval with some random variance so you can't perfectly predict the exact second.
• An optional encounter pool — a list of ambush definitions that can fire mid-route.
• A cargo item the master carries that can drop on the ground if they die and become recoverable.

The whole thing runs as ambient world content. You don't queue for it. You don't sign up. You're walking past the road; the convoy walks by; you can choose to escort it or not.

How They Spawn

Convoys are scheduler-driven, not on-demand. Each convoy definition has a recurring interval (current shipping routes use 60, 85, 100, 110, 120, or 130-minute cycles) plus randomized variance. When the timer fires:

1. The system spawns the caravan group at the route's first waypoint.
2. The convoy enters a brief gather window at the start point — a short pause before departure where the NPCs collect themselves and chatter.
3. A town-scope broadcast announces the convoy's departure to anyone within roughly 40 tiles of the start.
4. The caravan begins walking the route.

The gather window matters: it's the on-ramp. If you happen to be in the start city when the broadcast fires, you have a brief grace period to walk over and join up before the convoy moves.

After completing the trip — whether successfully or by failure — that convoy is despawned. The next run will be a fresh spawn at the next scheduled tick.

Joining a Convoy in Progress

You don't formally "join." The system continuously checks who's within 12 tiles of any living convoy NPC during travel; that's your zone. If you're inside the zone when a tick fires, you accumulate participation credit for that tick and your Time Token tick rate is multiplied by 3. Walk away and both stop. Walk back and they pick up again.

The zone is defined by proximity to any living member, not just the lead. So during an ambush, when defenders peel off to fight, players helping those defenders still earn credit even though the lead has walked further down the road. This is deliberate — escort credit goes to anyone meaningfully traveling with the caravan, not just the players standing next to the master.

When you first cross into the zone you see "You have joined the <name> escort. Stay close to the caravan to earn Time Tokens at triple rate." When you leave, "You have left the escort zone. Your in-zone time is still counted toward the arrival reward." Accumulated time isn't wiped on exit — it just pauses.

Rewards by Time-in-Zone

Payout is the part of the system that matters most, and it's deliberately not lockout-based.

• Every tick during travel, the system records who's currently in the zone and grants those players a 3× Time Token tick (ConvoyRewards.GetTickMultiplier). This is the headline reward — it accrues continuously while you're in the zone, not at arrival.
• Each player also builds a per-convoy credit ledger measured in seconds-of-presence.
• On arrival, the system computes each player's participation fraction: their reckoned in-zone seconds divided by the total reckoned travel seconds.
• Players whose fraction is at or above 70 percent qualify for the gold payout. Below that they get nothing. The payout is binary (route's full goldPayout, ranging 250-900g across current routes), not scaled.
• Gold ≥ 1000 is delivered as a BankCheck; smaller amounts arrive as raw gold. If you're offline at arrival, the payout is auto-deposited to your bank box.

The fraction is computed against a denominator built from the same per-tick clamps the credit uses, so a laggy server doesn't punish honest escorts — being present for every tick produces a 1.0 fraction whether the ticks fired on cadence or slipped.

If you finish a convoy and got paid, the system also bumps your Daily Ledger progress for any active escort task — so consistent escort work plugs directly into the day's civic-duty rotation.

Mission-typed convoys can layer additional rewards on top of the base gold — guild-contract convoys credit guild contribution; civic-supplier convoys produce supply records for the originating institution. The base gold-by-presence model is the same in all cases.

Cargo and What It Represents

Many convoys carry cargo — a named, often-hued item that spawns inside the caravan master's pack at convoy start. Cargo is more than flavor; it's a real item that can:

• Be looted from the master's corpse if the master dies on the route. The cargo lands on the corpse (or on the ground if no corpse) at the death site.
• Drift outside the escort zone if no one picks it up and the surviving NPCs walk on. The cargo watcher polls every 2 seconds; if the cargo leaves the zone for longer than a 3-second grace period, the watcher fires OnCargoLost on the convoy's mission handler.
• Be recovered by players who pick it up and stay in the zone. The cargo counts as "present" anywhere inside the convoy zone — on a corpse, on the ground, in a member's pack, or in a player's pack mid-carry.

What happens on cargo loss depends on the cargo def's OnLoss policy: FailConvoy flips the run to Failed; None is silent — the loss fires no narrative effect and the convoy keeps going. The page-level "wiped escort can still be salvaged" framing applies to every cargo type, but only FailConvoy cargos make the loss itself a run-ender.

Hostile Encounters Along the Route

Convoys aren't safe travel. Each convoy definition can carry an encounter pool — a list of ambush definitions, each with NPC types, count ranges, and a chance to fire.

How it plays out:

• The primary encounter is rolled once and fires when the lead crosses a waypoint in the 40-70 percent route band.
• Long-route convoys can opt into a second encounter in the 75-90 percent band via a separate probability gate.
• When an ambush fires, the system spawns the configured raiders ahead of the caravan, set to start hostile to the master.
• The convoy enters a danger state: half the followers (rounded up, excluding the lead) peel off to fight as defenders, while the lead keeps walking forward at walking pace.
• Players in the zone can engage freely. A good ambush is messy — defenders are AI-controlled, the lead is moving away, the cargo is exposed.
• On a clean win — every spawned raider dead before the encounter's 5-minute deadline lapses, and the convoy not in Failed state — a tribute chest drops at the ambush site with gold inside. The chest is public, decays after 5 minutes, and is lootable by anyone in range.

Players who attack the caravan instead of defending it get reported once per attacker through the Civic Justice system as an AssaultNpc crime. Civic-supplier convoys bump that severity by an extra +2, treating attacks on civic shipments as more serious than attacks on private caravans. The convoy isn't a soft target; it's part of the realm's protected travel infrastructure.

When the Caravan Fails

A convoy fails when every member of the caravan is dead, a FailConvoy-typed cargo drifts outside the zone, or the run hits its 60-minute lifetime cap (MaxLifetimeMinutes) without arriving. On failure:

• Pending ambush rewards do not drop. Tribute chests are tied to encounter resolution while the controller is alive — Failed-state convoys explicitly suppress the chest.
• An emergency payout still runs: any player whose accumulated time-in-zone is at or above the 70 percent threshold receives the gold payout. Mission-handler bonuses (civic-supplier supply records, guild-contract contribution credits) are suppressed in emergency mode, but the base gold pays.
• The caravan despawns in place. The next scheduled run begins fresh at the next tick.

So a long, mostly-successful run that wipes near the destination still pays the gold for qualified escorts — only the mission extras and any unresolved tribute are forfeit. A wipe in the early route is a wasted trip; the 70 percent threshold is what determines whether emergency payout finds you.

Why the System Exists

The shard's design instinct: group content shouldn't require pre-formed groups. The two failure modes the convoy system is built against:

• Solo grinding pretending to be group content. Lockout-based escort quests where one party tags the NPC and the rest of the server is locked out.
• Party-required group content. Quests that demand you've already organized a group before you can engage.

Convoys split the difference. The caravan exists whether anyone shows up or not. Strangers can escort the same convoy and each be paid out individually. The route is real — long enough for things to go wrong, short enough that strangers can build a routine around catching the same convoys week to week.

The rhythm works as ambient social play: the broadcast fires, people in the city look up, a few walk over, the caravan leaves. Some of those people will recognize each other from last week's run.

How to Engage

Practical approach:

• Pay attention to broadcasts. If you're in a major city and a convoy departure fires nearby, walking over takes a minute and the trip is paid work.
• Stay close to the lead, not the route line. Followers move based on the master's position; the zone is centered on living members. The road is just where they happen to be walking.
• Engage ambushes aggressively. Defenders alone usually can't clear a serious encounter fast enough to keep the cargo safe. A real player swing makes a clean tribute chest drop possible.
• Don't grief. Attacking the caravan or its NPCs registers as a Civic Justice crime. Scaling that into a writ on you is not worth a few seconds of trolling.
• Run cargo on foot if you have to. If the master dies but the cargo is intact and you're in the zone, picking it up and continuing toward the destination can salvage the run.

For solo players especially, convoys are some of the highest-quality "group content while alone" available — strangers, real stakes, real payouts, no pre-coordination required.

Where to Read Next

• For the broader system map convoys sit inside, Immortal Realm Custom Systems.
• For the daily task layer that tracks convoy completions, Daily Ledger.
• For the civic-justice flow that polices attacks on caravans, Immortal Realm Civic Justice.
• For the broader economy convoys plug into, Immortal Realm Economy.
• The download page is the on-ramp when you're ready.