Does Exploration Use Time?

What is genuinely free

• Walking and riding anywhere in the valley.
• Looking, reading, and sweeping an area with Focus to see what is in it.
• Gathering — one reviewer notes you could circle a meadow picking flowers indefinitely without spending a segment.
• Fast-travel points and lookout towers, named as the two standing exceptions on the map. A broken fast-travel point has to be restored first, and restoring it costs time.

What charges you

• Enemy camps, and other marked points of interest.
• Open-world events — including helping someone in danger.
• Cashing in a treasure map.
• The working rule one reviewer arrived at: if it is a marker on your map, clearing it costs you.

The practical rule

The world is still genuinely worth exploring rather than something to be rushed, and the developers have emphasised hand-crafted exploration throughout. Curiosity is not punished. Completion is priced.

The wandering-combat exception

One case is still unsettled. Publisher material has said consistently that combat does not advance time, and killing loose enemies in the woods is described as free — but clearing an enemy camp is also combat, and is reported as costing. No source states where the line between an encounter and an objective falls, so this site does not claim to know.