The economy

There is one order book per world, a continuous double auction. You place a bid or an offer, it rests there, and it executes when somebody comes the other way.

Prices do not come out of a table. They come out of what other players are willing to pay that week, on your world, with what they produced. Two worlds do not have the same prices.

Every bound is printed next to the decision it shapes

This is a rule for the whole game and it shows here more than anywhere. You do not find a limit by hitting it.

• The price floor for a resource, below which an order is not accepted.
• The civic price, at one and a half times the floor: what the treasury pays as
• buyer of last resort, which makes it the effective floor for materials.
• The council's bounds on selling a Hex, from 0.9 to 1.25 times the smoothed
• price, shown to the buyer and the seller alike.
• The market fee, 4 percent, taken on every transaction.

The planet's upkeep is taken, not requested

Part of what you produce goes to the planet automatically, to whichever gauge is furthest behind, unless you pin another one.

• a tenth of harvested materials;
• a twentieth of food, because food is also the subsistence good;
• a fiftieth of the value of every sale, in money, to the treasury;
• nothing on tools.

This levy is small, global and diffuse. Do not expect one of your decisions to move a planetary gauge visibly: that is not the scale it works at.

Money is created and destroyed, and we say where

There are sources. Money enters this economy through the weekly stipend, the subsistence income floor, and a newcomer's endowment, which is one hundred.

There are deliberate sinks: the market fee, gate maintenance once a gate is open, conversions and expansions paid to the common domain, the civic fees. Those are the deliberate sinks, and that is exactly what this list is - not everything that takes money out.

Your Hexes are always bought back

A Hex is bought back at the smoothed price, always. That is a guarantee rather than an offer.

The honest ceiling on the delay is within the month in the ordinary case. The council pays in order when the land account is short, and you are never blocked from acquiring Hexes while it does.

Project contracts are real income, never the main loop

A player can put work out to contract and pay you to do it. It is a genuine second income, it matters, and it is not designed to replace what your Hexes produce.

This was simulated before it was built

This economy was run to equilibrium in simulation before a line of server code existed: twelve calibration reports and around a hundred numbered experiments, on whole worlds populated with agents, before it was offered to anybody.

We do not publish those figures here, and that is deliberate. A measurement taken on a simulated world describes a population; on this page it would read as a promise made to you.