Economy, Crafting, and Survival¶

Survival Loop¶

Food, water, fatigue, temperature, and injury should determine readiness for action. The player should maintain these needs to stay expedition-capable.

Design Rule¶

Survival should generate demand, not despair. Public rations and basic water must always exist so a player can recover from failure.

Scavenging should only cover emergency needs. Real food supply should come from farms, fisheries, ranches, cooking, storage, and transport.

Economic Consequences of Survival¶

The survival model creates demand for:

farms and fisheries
orchards and ranches
preserved food
water logistics
cooking
medicine
repair kits
climate gear
camp supplies

Town demand should react to shortages in these categories. If a settlement starts running low on grain, clean water, or medicine, its prices, quests, and service quality should change.

Crafting Philosophy¶

Crafting should be regional, tradable, and integrated with logistics. Crafted goods should not default to soulbound.

The system should avoid linear tier obsolescence. Older materials stay relevant because advanced recipes still need structural inputs, binders, fuels, finishes, packaging, repairs, and public-works demand.

The full design should treat crafting as a chain of gathering, refining, assembly, finishing, repair, retrofit, and salvage rather than a single combine step.

Material Relevance Rule¶

Rare materials should modify and specialize items. Common materials should continue to carry most bulk demand.

Examples of permanently relevant material families:

timber and planks
leather and straps
cloth and thread
iron and common fittings
charcoal, coal, peat, oils, salts, waxes, and resins

These materials should be required across advanced gear, maintenance, caravans, storage, and town projects.

Item Loss on Defeat¶

There can be a chance to lose crafted or carried items on defeat, especially in dangerous content. That system needs softeners so the game stays playable:

durability loss
repair economy
cargo prioritization
insurance or recovery services
safer and riskier mission tiers

Market Structure¶

Markets should be regional to preserve travel value. Each market should support:

sell orders
buy orders
auctions
market taxes
historical pricing data

NPC and town demand should influence those prices instead of acting as a separate disconnected system.

Bulk staple materials should remain some of the most liquid goods in the market because they feed nearly every advanced system.

Exploration Economy¶

Surveying should uncover routes, veins, ruins, and gathering sites. Maps and coordinates should be tradeable information goods whose accuracy can decay over time.

See gathering-and-resource-ecology.md, material-relevance-and-recipe-structure.md, crafting-and-itemization.md, agriculture-food-and-water.md, ../world-state/town-simulation-and-supply.md, and ../exploration/exploration-cartography-and-resource-discovery.md for the expanded technical model.