Skip to main content

Documentation Index

Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://mintlify.com/at6132/econ/llms.txt

Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

The design pillars tell you what Realm values. The economic primitives tell you what building blocks players have. The laws of the universe tell you what the simulation engine enforces — unconditionally, at the data layer, with no exceptions for convenience or clever workarounds. These laws are what keep the economy from hyperinflating, stagnating, or collapsing. They are not configurable, and they are not negotiable in feature design.
These laws are enforced at the data layer, not the application layer. They cannot be bypassed by bugs or clever player behavior.

​
The ten laws

Matter is conserved. Money is conserved.For every unit of material that exists in the simulation, there is a complete record of where it came from: extracted from a specific plot, or purchased from another player. No material spawns from nothing. When material is consumed in production, it converts to other material according to a recipe that enforces mass balance — outputs are always less than or equal to inputs, with any difference accounted for as waste.Money follows the same rule. Every dollar in your account came from somewhere: your initial starting grant, a scheduled NPC seed transaction, or a payment from another player’s account. There is no mechanism — by design or by accident — that creates money outside these defined channels.Engine enforcement: All transfers of matter and money flow through a single transaction layer that double-entry-bookkeeps every change. There is no code path that mutates balances directly. Audit logs exist for every state change.Designed exceptions (each one is intentional, bounded, and recorded):
  • Initial player grant: a fixed starting capital, recorded as “system genesis”
  • Scheduled NPC injections in solo mode: NPC consumers buy goods, injecting money into the player economy from NPC accounts, which are topped up on a fixed schedule
  • Decay and loss: matter and goods can be destroyed; money cannot
Any code path that creates or destroys money outside designed channels will be rejected at the transaction level.
The simulation has a tick rate. Real-world time and game-world time are related by a fixed ratio.v1 ratio: 1 in-game day equals 1 real-world hour in public mode. Solo mode is configurable — you can run at 1:1, pause entirely, or accelerate to 4x.Why this ratio: Slow enough that you can dip in and out over the course of a day without missing critical events. Fast enough that meaningful economic change happens within a single play session. A week of in-game time equals roughly 7 real hours — about one workday of intermittent attention. A month of game-time passes in a weekend.Engine enforcement: All movement durations, production cycle times, contract trigger schedules, and decay rates are expressed in game-time units. The mobile companion app exists partly to alert you when game-time-sensitive events require your attention.Pause behavior:
  • Solo mode: fully pausable
  • Public mode: never pauses — the simulation runs continuously whether or not you are logged in
  • Competitive seasons: never pause within an active season; the season ends and the world resets on a fixed schedule
Moving anything between two locations takes time and may cost energy or money.Distance in Realm is not cosmetic. Every shipment, every labor transfer, every capital movement has a physical path with real costs attached.Movement cost function:
cost = base_rate × distance × (1 + load_factor) × terrain_modifier
time = distance / speed × terrain_modifier
Speed depends on the transport asset. A coastal vessel is fast over water but useless on land. A truck is slow but flexible. Building transport infrastructure is a capital investment that reduces your terrain modifiers on specific routes.Engine enforcement: Goods in transit are tracked in a dedicated transit state with a computed arrival time. You can see your in-transit inventory, but you cannot use or sell it until it arrives. There is no instant delivery mechanic.This law is what makes geography matter economically, and what makes logistics a viable business vertical rather than a background process.
Production consumes energy. Energy is a tradeable good.Every production recipe specifies an energy input. If energy is not available at the production location, production stalls. You cannot produce without power, any more than a real factory can.Energy is generated from tradeable materials — fuel refineries, power plants — and is subject to the same primitives as everything else. It has location, quantity, and cost.Regional energy networks: Energy does not transmit globally for free. Local grids exist. A region without an energy provider is economically inactive until someone builds one. This creates one of the most reliable first-mover opportunities in a new world: building energy infrastructure earns reliable revenue because every producer in the region depends on you.Engine enforcement: Every production recipe has an energy field. The engine checks energy availability before allowing a production tick to execute. No energy, no output.
Buildings, vehicles, equipment, and stockpiles deteriorate over time without upkeep.Decay rates vary by asset type:
  • Stored perishables (food, organics): rapid decay without refrigeration or preservation infrastructure
  • Equipment and vehicles: moderate decay rate, accelerated by heavy use
  • Buildings: slow decay — require periodic maintenance labor or scheduled maintenance contracts
  • Code services: do not decay (logic does not rust), but require periodic CPU payment to remain hosted and active
Engine enforcement: Decay runs on every tick as a scheduled process. Assets that cross a durability threshold begin losing function — reduced throughput, higher failure rates — until they are repaired or replaced.Why decay must not be softened: Decay is one of the mechanics players will most want to escape. Offering “permanent buildings” or maintenance subscriptions priced at zero would eliminate the entire maintenance-services vertical and allow passive strategies that never require active reinvestment. Decay is what keeps capital circulating and the economy active.
Not everything is automatically known. Some information costs effort or money to obtain.What is free and public:
  • World geography (terrain, coastlines, plot boundaries)
  • Plot ownership (who owns or leases what)
  • Public order books (current prices, recent trade history)
  • Reputation summaries (contracts honored and breached, with a short delay)
  • A player’s declared business profile (if they choose to publish one)
What costs effort or money:
  • Subsurface composition of a plot (requires surveying, or purchasing survey data from someone who surveyed it)
  • Other players’ private inventory levels
  • Other players’ private contract terms
  • Historical price data beyond the recent window (sold as analytics products by data businesses)
  • Forecasts, price indices, and synthesized market data (sold by analytics firms)
What is hidden by design:
  • Other players’ private accounts and balances (unless a contract explicitly reveals them)
  • The internal source code of another player’s code service (the behavior is observable; the implementation is private unless the author chooses to publish it)
  • AI agent strategies in solo mode
Engine enforcement: Visibility is a first-class attribute. Every piece of state carries a visibility flag — public, owner-only, or contract-revealed. The engine checks this flag on every read operation. There is no back-channel to retrieve state you are not authorized to see.This law is what gives analytics businesses, surveying firms, and market-data services their reason to exist.
Every player and business has a public reputation profile that can only grow, never shrink back to neutral.What the engine tracks on every account:
  • Total contracts entered (count)
  • Contracts honored (count)
  • Contracts breached (count plus severity of each breach)
  • Average payment punctuality
  • Average delivery punctuality
  • Notable disputes and how they were resolved
  • An optional self-published narrative — a company description the account holder can write
Engine enforcement: Reputation is a public, append-only object on every account. It cannot be deleted, revised, or hidden. Players can create new identities (see Law 8 for the cost), but they cannot launder their history on an existing account.This is what makes long-term counterparty relationships economically meaningful. A supplier with a ten-month record of on-time delivery commands a real price premium. A player who defaults on a loan carries that mark publicly. Reputation is the trust infrastructure that allows complex contracts and multi-party arrangements to function without a central authority arbitrating every dispute.
Creating a new player identity in the same world has a meaningful, non-trivial cost.Without this law, reputation laundering is trivial: breach a contract, create a new account, repeat. Law 8 makes that strategy expensive enough to be unprofitable for most players.v1 design:
  • One free account per verified real-world person
  • Additional accounts are allowed but are flagged, and may have reduced access to certain features (premium contract types, order book access above certain thresholds)
Public mode: Stricter verification requirements than solo mode.Closed-cohort competitive play: Identities are hand-curated at registration. No account farming is possible. Participants are known entities.Engine enforcement: Account creation requires passing a verification gate. The engine tracks cross-account signals to detect farming and flag suspicious patterns. This is not meant to be a perfect anti-cheat system — it is meant to make reputation laundering expensive enough that honest play is the dominant strategy.
Given the same starting state and the same player and agent inputs, the simulation always produces the same outputs.This is not optional. It is foundational to the entire architecture.Why determinism is required:
  • Reproducibility for debugging: any bug in the simulation can be replayed exactly from a saved state
  • Replays: players and spectators can watch historical events as they actually unfolded
  • Offline simulation: the engine can simulate ahead, or run in solo mode without a persistent server
  • Solo-mode save and load: a saved game is just a snapshot — resuming it produces the same results regardless of when you resume
  • Cheating prevention: if client-side state ever diverges from simulation state, the simulation wins — and that divergence is detectable
Engine enforcement: All randomness in the simulation derives from a tick-stamped seed. Player-written code services must be deterministic — they receive the seed for their execution context, and any randomness they use must derive from it. Side effects from player code go through the engine’s transaction layer, never directly.
The state of the world is what the simulation says it is. Everything else — clients, code services, third-party tools — can only propose actions. The engine validates and either commits or rejects.This is the architectural expression of the entire system’s trust model. The web client does not store authoritative state. The mobile app does not store authoritative state. Player code running in the Lua sandbox does not store authoritative state. All of these are dumb terminals that propose actions and receive confirmed state back.Engine enforcement: No client-side trust. Every action — place order, propose contract, hire labor, move goods — is submitted to the engine as a proposal. The engine validates it against the current authoritative world state and either commits it as a transaction or rejects it with a reason. A client that shows you a stale or incorrect state is simply wrong; the engine’s state is the truth.Why this matters for players: Cheating through client manipulation is structurally impossible. An exploit that works by tricking the client has no effect on the economy, because the engine will reject any action that violates the laws of the universe.

​
How the laws hold together

The ten laws are not independent. They form an interlocking system:
  • Laws 1, 4, and 5 prevent infinite-money and infinite-production exploits — nothing comes from nothing, production requires power, and assets require ongoing investment.
  • Law 2 makes everything time-bounded. Events are not instantaneous; strategies play out over real (game) time.
  • Law 3 makes geography a real economic variable. Distance is cost; location is strategy.
  • Laws 6, 7, and 8 create the trust and information layer. Markets work because information costs something and reputation is permanent and public.
  • Laws 9 and 10 make the engine reliable, auditable, and structurally resistant to cheating.

​
Common temptations and the correct response

When a feature proposal requires violating one of these laws, the law is not the problem.
TemptationCorrect response
”This feature would be simpler if money could be created here.”Find the real source of money in the design. It is likely an NPC payment or a contract trigger that was overlooked.
”This feature would be simpler if buildings didn’t decay.”Either accept decay, or expose decay-cost as a service that players can purchase from each other.
”This feature would be simpler if all information were public.”Check whether making it public removes an entire market. If it does, keep it private.
”This feature would be simpler if travel were instant.”No. Geography is a pillar. Instant travel removes one of the core sources of strategic depth.
”This feature would be simpler if the simulation could pause in public mode.”Solo only. Public mode never pauses. If a feature requires public mode to pause, the feature is wrong.
The constraints are not obstacles. They are what make the game worth playing.

Design pillars

The 7 non-negotiable principles behind every design decision.

Economic primitives

The 9 atoms from which all in-game businesses are composed.

Build docs developers (and LLMs) love

Get started for freeTalk to us