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Economy, Crafting, and Survival

Currency

The game uses one unified currency: coin. There are no denominations or tiers.

Coin enters the economy through two sources:

  • NPC mission and contract payouts
  • Selling goods to NPC vendors

Human-type enemies (bandits, brigands, deserters) carry coin and drop it on defeat. All other creature families drop materials only. Non-human creature materials are collected through wilderness activities selected before departure — harvesting beast carcasses, gathering plants, mining ore, fishing, and similar field work. Each selected activity adds time to the expedition duration.

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
  • mount feed and fodder (grain, hay, dried provisions — required whenever a mounted expedition departs)

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.

Crafting Categories

  • weapons and armor
  • tools
  • food and drink
  • medicine
  • camp gear
  • trade goods
  • repair materials
  • utility consumables

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 — construction, furniture, tool handles, wagon parts, fuel (charcoal), barrel staves; every building project, vehicle, and kiln run consumes timber
  • leather and cordage — armor linings, straps, bindings, boots, saddlery, bowstrings; leather is a structural input on every equipment slot, not a transitional tier
  • cloth and fiber — clothing, armor padding, bandages, sacks, alchemy filters, trade parcels; produced by weavers from flax, wool, and silk; demand sustained by clothing wear and medical supply
  • salt and oil — food preservation, weapon tempering, alchemy bases, hide curing, lamp fuel; produced regionally; price spikes during supply shortages affect food preservation chains directly
  • iron fittings and hardware — buckles, rivets, axe heads, hinges, nails, tools; the structural layer behind all weapon, armor, and construction work; never replaced by rare metals because it is cheaper and covers all attachment roles
  • charcoal and fuel — required by every smelting and kilning operation; Coedwair produces the bulk supply; forge capacity in Trevalkaan depends on consistent charcoal delivery
  • stone and aggregate — road repair, building construction, kiln lining, foundation work; civic projects always consume stone; supply from Rocky Hills and Mountain zones
  • clay and ceramic — alchemy vials, storage vessels, kiln bricks, cookware; small per-unit value but consumed in high volume by alchemy, cooking, and construction
  • wax and resin — wood finish, armor waterproofing, seal material, candle stock, wagon wheel grease; produced by beekeeping and tree tapping; steady low-volume demand across most crafting disciplines
  • bone and sinew — bowstrings, surgical sutures, glue stock, weapon hafts, small tool blanks; recovered from any creature harvest; never replaced because no synthetic substitute exists in-world

These categories remain economically relevant at every tier of play because recipes at every tier require at least one structural input from each group. Rare materials enter through the augmentation and modification slots only — they do not eliminate the base material requirement.

Coin Sink Design

Coin exits the economy through:

  • expedition supply costs (rations, medicine, tools)
  • crafting workshop fees (Established and Master rank workshops charge per commission)
  • exchange listing fees (3% sell order; 5% auction settlement)
  • repair costs (durability loss on all active equipment)
  • warehouse storage fees (1 coin per 5 slots per day)
  • guild upkeep (guild buildings require periodic material or coin contributions)
  • mount care (feed, stabling, veterinary)
  • town access fees during emergency band states (temporary toll increases on contested roads)

The supply cost is the largest regular coin sink for active players. A character running 3 expeditions per week with a moderate supply load spends 15–40 coin per week on perishable expedition inputs — food, water containers, medicine, torches. This is intentional: it keeps farmers, fishers, alchemists, and cooks relevant even when the player base is focused on combat and crafting.

Crafting Chain Depth

The full crafting chain for most items involves at least four stages:

  1. Gather — collect raw materials from the world (mining, logging, harvesting, hunting, fishing)
  2. Refine — convert raw materials to usable form (smelting ore to ingots, tanning hide to leather, milling grain to flour, curing meat to provision)
  3. Assemble — combine refined materials at a workshop to produce the item (smithing a weapon head, sewing a garment, brewing a salve)
  4. Finish — apply a final treatment that affects quality, durability, or functional properties (oil rub, tempering, lacquering, charging with a rare material augment)

Some disciplines add a fifth stage — Package — for items that must be stored or shipped in a specific container (alchemy vials, preserved food portions, tool kits). The container itself is a crafted item.

Each stage has its own skill gate, workshop requirement, and time cost. This means a complex item like a well-made hunting bow involves Woodcraft (stave selection), Leatherworking (grip binding and quiver), Smithing (arrowheads and nock fittings), and Alchemy (bowstring wax treatment) — plus the knowledge of how to combine them correctly at assembly. A single character rarely masters all four; this is the economic foundation of crafting specialization and player-to-player trade.

Settlement Demand as Price Driver

All survival needs that are not met by the market create pressure on the settlement tick. The tick checks reserves, advances scarcity multipliers, and publishes demand as:

  • rising NPC buy prices (market index rises)
  • emergency board orders (urgent and above-index)
  • NPC service suspensions (healer slows or closes; blacksmith raises repair cost)
  • player notifications (town-wide alerts when reserve hits Critical)

Survival creates demand. Demand creates price pressure. Price pressure makes gathering, farming, fishing, and crafting profitable. Profitability sustains the player supply chain. This is the core economic loop the survival system is designed to drive.

  • agriculture-food-and-water.md — full farming, water, and food supply chain
  • crafting-and-itemization.md — quality model, recipe structure, profession set bonuses
  • material-relevance-and-recipe-structure.md — material categories and recipe slot roles
  • gathering-and-resource-ecology.md — field extraction, depletion, and material tiers
  • market-contracts-and-logistics.md — pricing model, logistics, and the coin fee structure
  • town-simulation-and-supply.md — settlement tick, reserve bands, and NPC demand formulas
  • 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.