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The economy

How to set up your sim's money, where coin enters and leaves the game, and how to run the bank, the player markets, the stabiliser and the panic switches.

For staff

Your sim’s economy is the money players carry, earn and spend. This guide covers choosing your money, where it enters and leaves the game, the bank and markets, and the tools that keep it steady or stop it when something breaks. Most of it lives under Game Design › Economy.

Choose your money

The HUD setting coinMode on Server › HUD settings decides which kind your sim uses:

coinMode Money is Vendor prices are paid in
2 A purse of coins in several kinds The base coin, paid as whatever coins fit
1 A single currency item in the inventory The currency item each vendor offer names

For coins, go to Game Design › Economy › Coins:

  1. Press Add a coin for each kind, with a Name, an optional Region where it’s minted, and an Order for the purse.
  2. Press Make base on the smallest coin. Every price and fee counts in it.
  3. Press Add an exchange for each step up: the Larger coin, what it Is worth how many of, and the Smaller coin.

A coin that isn’t on the ladder up from the base coin is worth 0, and the page warns you.

On an item-currency sim, the bank, the auction house and crafting orders use one item, the Currency item in the bank’s settings (bank-currencyItem). Until it’s set, those markets refuse to trade.

profile-coinLockLevel on Server › Settings stops characters below that level paying, giving or transferring coin, and stops their coin being looted. 0 turns it off.

Where money comes from and goes

Coin the game makes is a faucet. Coin it destroys is a sink. Payments, trades and market sales between players only move it.

Faucets Sinks
Recurring stipends NPC vendor purchases
Roleplay currency paid with XP Paid wound treatment
Quest coin rewards Market fees and stall rent
NPC vendors buying from players The bank’s exchange fee, bank-exchangeFee
Coins in the starting kit Community project donations
Paid respecs, profile-respecCost

Stipends: open a group on Staff › Groups › Groups and press Add recurring stipend. Choose what it Pays, the Amount, Every (days), and To every member or one role. Paid from can take it from a group bank account. Members whose character was played within the period are paid, checked hourly. A missed payment is never paid later.

Roleplay currency: rp-currency-per-exp on Server › Settings pays currency with the XP a roleplay session awards, after the XP caps. 0.5 pays 1 for every 2 XP, and 0, the default, pays nothing.

NPC buyback: if you switch on NPC Buyback Cap on your game system, npc_buyback_week limits what vendors pay one account each week, 1500 base coins by default. Past it they stop buying until Monday.

The bank

The bank is off until you switch it on. Staff with Bank - Staff set it up on Main Menu › Bank, on the Settings tab:

  1. Switch on The bank is open (bank-enabled), and set the Bank name and the Card item, a unique item that issuing a card gives out.
  2. Decide where cash moves. bank-hudAnywhere lets players deposit and withdraw from anywhere. Left off, they need an in-world ATM.
  3. Set PIN rules (bank-pinRequired, bank-pinLockAfter) and interest: bank-creditRate (200 basis points is 2% a period on a negative balance), bank-savingsRate and bank-interestDays (7).
  4. Under Banks, switch on the groups whose members are bankers, then press Save settings.
  5. Switch on the bank HUD setting on Server › HUD settings so players see the button.

Bankers work from the Desk tab: they open accounts for characters and groups, Grant or Refuse credit, Freeze accounts and Issue a card. Credit is how far below zero an account may go, charged interest each period. Bank staff can also make a Staff adjustment.

An ATM is an in-world container whose Kind is ATM (the bank’s cash machine) on Staff › Sim › Containers. On a coin sim, players also exchange coins there.

Tip: bank-alertOver posts transfers and card payments at least that big to the bank Discord group. Give that group a webhook on Server › Discord, or the alerts go nowhere.

Player markets

Switch each market on for your game system under Game Design › Combat & effects › Game systems. The server holds the item or payment until the deal closes, and all three refuse while the economy is paused. The auction house and crafting orders take coins, your currency item or bank cards. Stalls take coins only.

Market Switch Settings (default) Staff page
Auction house Auction House auction_list_fee_percent (2), auction_sale_fee_percent (5), auction_max_listings (20) Game Design › Economy › Auction house
Crafting orders Crafting-order Board craft_order_post_fee (5), craft_order_fee_percent (2), craft_order_hold_hours (48) Game Design › Economy › Crafting orders
Player stalls Player Stalls stall_rent_week (200), stall_sale_fee_percent (2), stall_max_listings (30) Game Design › Economy › Player stalls

On the auction and order pages, Take it down removes a listing with a reason.

To set up a stall:

  1. Add and place the vendor on Game Design › Economy › Vendors.
  2. On Player stalls, under Make a vendor a stall, pick the Vendor, choose Character or Faction and the owner, then press Make it a stall.
  3. The stall opens when its owner pays the first week. It renews itself while they can pay and closes when they can’t. A faction pays from its bank account.

Pickpocketing

If you switch on Pickpocketing, players on a coin sim can try a purse within pickpocket_range_m (2 m) outside a fight, after an emote. They roll 3d6 plus Agility against pickpocket_dc_base (10) plus the target’s Spirit, and a success takes up to pickpocket_coin_max (30). Each account tries each character once a day, and a failure warns the target. With Pickpocketing: Take From the Target off, the target loses nothing and the game makes the coins, which turns it into a faucet.

Community projects

If you switch on Community Projects, run them from Storytellers › Community projects. Press New project, then set a Name, What it’s for (shown to players), a Region (empty is everywhere) and Days. Add up to six coin or item goals with a target Per active account, a perk for each of the Milestones at 25, 60 and 100%, and a Contributor reward. Then Save draft or Start.

Targets scale with the accounts active in the last 14 days, one project runs per region, and everything given is used up.

The economy stabiliser

The stabiliser on Game Design › Economy › Economy is a weekly job for your whole grid. It measures coin per active account (purses and bank balances of characters active in the last 14 days) against economy-target, a price index from a basket of items, and the last 7 days of coin in and out by source.

Above the target’s band, it raises the sink multiplier and lowers the faucet multiplier by economy-step percent. Below it, the opposite. Inside it, both drift back towards 1, within their limits. The sink multiplier scales NPC prices, wound treatment, market fees and stall rent. The faucet multiplier scales quest coin, NPC buyback and roleplay currency.

Set Stabiliser to off, alerts or on. alerts works the multipliers out and changes nothing. Turning it on starts from what alerts suggested, at the next weekly run. Measure now previews this moment. The economy Discord group is alerted when a multiplier sits at its limit two weeks running, or the price index moves 20% from 100.

Tip: Run alerts for a few weeks before on, and read each week’s coin flows to find the source that’s out of line.

The same page holds two more tools:

  • Faction trade tax: Trade tax (faction-tax) and Cap (%) (faction-tax-cap, 5). Under Territories, give a Region (as in-world) to a Faction. Its leaders set a Rate (%) on Faction Leaders › Faction tax. The faction then takes that share of NPC vendor and stall sales in the region, and of auctions listed there, into its bank account. Without an open account it collects nothing.
  • Weekly export (economy-export): each Monday, a gzipped SQL file of the last week of economy logs and current balances, with passwords, IPs and emails left out. Download it, or Make this week’s now.

When something goes wrong

Server › Panic buttons holds two switches, each with its own permission:

  • Pause the economy stops trading, paying, vendors, crafting, bank and container deposits and withdrawals, gathering and loot, and the economy crons. Staff tools on the website keep working.
  • Turn the server off shows every player’s HUD an offline screen. In-world objects and the website keep working.

Each asks for a Reason (players see it), posts to the admin Discord group and is kept in History.

If you find a dupe bug: Pause the economy and find the damage in the logs. Fix purses with Give and Take under Coin purse on the character’s Inventory tab, and items with Staff › Premade operations. Then press Reopen the economy.

What to watch in the logs

Under Logs › Economy:

  • Coins: every purse change, with its source, the other character and any staff member behind it. Filter by Failed to see refused payments.
  • Bank: every balance change, including interest and staff adjustments.
  • Trades, Vendor sales, Vendor restocks and Inventory: who moved what.

Logs › Master log records staff changes to coins, vendors, the bank and economy settings. Watch for one source that suddenly pays far more than usual, a purse that jumps, and buyback near the weekly cap.