Purpose of Estates?

I feel like I must be missing something here, but after reading through the 2017 updates (which are the most recent I can find) I'm really confused on what purpose estates serve. I see buildings to convert certain tags to resources, but those buildings don't actually generate rags/bones/etc. to convert, do they? Worker Housing upgrades don't appear to have any effect rules as written? The tavern can potentially generate income, but that's about it. far as I can tell, having an estate is purely for status and a money/resource sink. Am I missing something that makes estates actually worthwhile? Is it just something that needs to be discovered in-game to understand their value?

[Zydana]

Mostly you understand correctly.

Perhaps what you don't know is that by way of loot, you'll receive things like Rags, Animal Bones, Scrap Metal, etc. Those tags are not usable to create anything in-game. You'll need to convert them to resources (Cloth, Supplies, Steel), if you want to craft anything. Resources, in turn, can be used to create commodities.. which are needed for highest tier crafting. Most NPCs won't take the lesser items for barter either since they are fairly useless. You'll need to make these "useless" tags useful. One way to do that is to convert them with a building on land.

You do need a skill to have a holding, but you don't need any skills to have an estate... so there's a bit of a trade off. Also keep in mind that this portion of the game doesn't appeal to everyone... and for some it's been their favorite.

The economy system has gone through many revisions over the years - this version is a very simplified version and available to everyone. This version also has limitless property available too (previous versions there was a set amount of property and quickly you'd have to try to steal the land from other players).

We are very open to listening to new ideas on how the economic system in the game can get better. We know this isn't perfect.

I hope this in some way helps.

Thanks, that helps a lot! On a somewhat related question, do multiple instances of Income stack? For example, would the Essence Boon Income, Bureaucrat lvl 1 Income, and Merchant lvl 1 income stack for +15 silver at check-in? Is there any limit to how many times Income can stack?

[Zydana]

If you had all of the above, yes. These things would stack. As for the perk, that, I believe, has a limit to the stack-ability.

Edit: the money-giving Perk is Rich and Filthy Rich. You can only get each of them once.