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Act 7 - Reclamation

Act 7 is the late-game reclamation act. The player is no longer only defending surviving ground. They are pushing into demon-held territory, restoring broken systems, and reaching beyond the home Shielded Zone.

Role​

  • Make reclamation the main strategic loop.
  • Turn crown-scale power into world-restoring or world-shaping projects.
  • Treat major gates, corrupted regions, and other-Zone reach as end-state play, not midgame scenery.
  • Preserve the early promise that reclamation begins with frontier pressure but finishes only at the end of the campaign.
  • Force-led Operations (ReclaimArea, SealGateScar, CleanseSite, ContainThreat) are the canonical delivery mechanism for large-scale reclamation work; Fronts group multi-Province reclamation campaigns under named Campaign Goals (see ../systems/gd-fronts.md and ../systems/gd-operations.md).

What Changes From Act 6​

  • Holding territory is no longer the top question; taking it back is.
  • Realm projects matter alongside armies and settlement output.
  • Major gate assaults, ward restoration, and strategic cleansing become central.
  • Other Shielded Zones and surviving external powers can now enter the realm's practical horizon. (See lore exposure: lh-game1-world-hooks.md — Surviving nations row, false-king row, Afterwar period state row)

Required Outcomes​

  • The player can sustain long reclamation campaigns.
  • Realm projects, armies, and settlement output are all tied into the same late-game agenda.
  • Corruption and gate systems are being reversed or contained at large scale.
  • The campaign has reached its final strategic identity.

Cross-Act Quest Thread Lanes​

The following cross-act Quest Thread lanes have appearance views in Act 7. Per-act mission entry points for each lane are provided by this act's content; lane canonical owners live under ../quest-threads/.

  • Core/Truth — Act 7 is the resolution act for this saga-spanning lane; the cosmological truth behind the Nexus / Wardheart, the MC's identity, and the false-king arc conclude here through the authored story gates that the final reclamation campaign unlocks.
  • Pressure/Corruption — pushing into demon-held territory, sealing gate scars, and sustaining Crown- scale cleansing Operations make this lane's late-arc content the most mechanically intensive of the campaign; the threat-response arc pivots from holding to reclaiming.
  • Faction/Polity — other Shielded Zones and surviving external powers enter the realm's practical horizon in Act 7, creating the late-arc faction and diplomatic stakes that the Crown built toward; polity-rank consequences of major reclamation decisions surface here.
  • Rune/Crafting/True Harm — major gate assaults and ward-restoration Operations at reclamation scale produce the rarest True Harm materials and the final recipe-unlock gates; this is the lane's culminating acquisition surface.
  • Reclamation/Crown — Act 7 is the resolution act for this saga-spanning lane alongside Core/Truth; Realm projects, Crown-scale Fronts, and sustained reclamation campaigns carry the lane to its Afterwar-consequence conclusion.