territory_exchanges — the territory capture log
primary — Primary source — a record made at the time by the people involved.
Type: datasetArchived: 2026-09-03id: territory-exchanges
Every recorded territory capture from 3 Jan 2018 onward: timestamp, territory, attacker and defender. The backbone of the wiki's map-data analysis, and the only continuous record of Wynncraft warring.
Text as archived (2,078 characters). This is the copy the wiki's citations were checked against; the original may since have changed.
# territory_exchanges — the territory capture log
A row per recorded territory capture: the time, the territory, the guild that took
it and the guild that lost it. Coverage begins **3 January 2018** and continues to
the present. Nothing equivalent exists for the years before that; the pre-2018
record is leaderboard snapshots, forum accounts and imagery.
## What analysis of it looks like
Daily or weekly ownership is reconstructed by taking, for each territory, the most
recent capture before a chosen moment. Aggregating those holders by guild — and,
using the Chronicle's membership stints, by alliance — gives a picture of who held
the map at any time in the covered period.
## The methodological caution that matters most
**Exchange volume is not the same as war.** A set of territories is fought over
constantly by guilds that are not at war — free-for-all territories that change
hands many times a day, historically clusters such as Detlas, the Hive, Lava Lake,
Factory Entrance and Emerald Trail, and in 2020-21 the Silent Expanse. Counting raw
exchanges makes those look like the fiercest wars in history.
The wiki's analyses therefore work with *quiet* territories — those outside the
high-churn set for the window being examined. Real wars are visible as sustained,
near-symmetric fighting across many ordinarily-quiet territories; alliance trading
appears as high-volume, near-symmetric activity concentrated on the hot ones.
## What it cannot tell you
It records that a territory changed hands, not why. It carries no declarations, no
alliances, no motives and no negotiated ends. It can establish that two guilds
fought, when, and how hard — and it can adjudicate between conflicting accounts of
timing, as it did for the Federation's takeover of the map in February 2018 — but
the politics behind any war have to come from written sources or testimony.
## Known gaps
The log has periods where the game's own war tracking was down. Those outages are
classified separately from genuine quiet, so a gap in the data is not mistaken for
a lull in fighting.
