Building a business in Realm using economic primitives
Compose Realm’s nine primitives into four archetypes — shipping, SaaS, banking, and surveying — with starting capital requirements and daily workflow breakdowns.
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Every business in Realm is a composition of the same nine primitives: plots, materials, labor, time and distance, capital, production, markets, contracts, and code. The engine doesn’t know what a “shipping company” is. It knows about coastal plots, vessels made of matter, hired labor, movement between locations, and contracts that govern deliveries. A shipping company is what emerges when you combine them. This guide walks through four distinct business archetypes — each built from primitives you already have access to on day one.
All businesses are compositions of the same 9 primitives. If your business idea requires a new mechanic, check the primitives spec first — there’s a good chance the primitive you need already exists, just applied in a way you haven’t considered yet.
A shipping company’s product is movement. You own vessels, hire crews, and charge other players to move their goods from one plot to another. Geographic distance is a real cost in Realm — it takes time proportional to distance and transport mode — so players with production plots far from markets need you.
You start each game-day reviewing active delivery contracts. Each contract specifies a shipper (your client), a material, a quantity, an origin plot, a destination plot, and a due date measured in ticks. You assign a vessel to each job, dispatch crew, and watch the shipment move across the map in transit.While shipments are in motion you’re booking new work: checking the public market for posted shipping requests, negotiating rates with players who message you directly, and managing crew wages. Captains migrate toward higher wages — if the labor market tightens in your region, you’ll need to raise pay or lose headcount.On arrival, the supply contract fulfillment triggers automatically: goods transfer to the buyer’s inventory and payment transfers to your account.
Revenue comes from the per-shipment rate you negotiate in each supply contract. Your margin is the spread between what clients pay and what you spend on: vessel maintenance (physical decay applies to matter over time), fuel or energy inputs for powered vessels, crew wages, and dock fees if you lease rather than own your coastal plots.Market-making is possible too: buy goods in one region where they’re cheap, ship them to a region where they’re expensive, sell into the order book there. This is the “speculator with a boat” play — higher risk, no need for external clients.
Expect to spend 8,000–15,000 to get your first vessel operational: a coastal plot (claim or purchase), dock construction, and the vessel itself. Your first delivery contract should cover several weeks of operating costs. Don’t acquire a second vessel until the first is generating consistent margin.
When a player posts a shipping request, you’ll often want to negotiate rather than accept at their initial rate. Use the contracts endpoint to propose terms:
# Propose a supply contract as the supplier (you are the shipper)curl -X POST "http://localhost:8000/contracts/supply/propose?supplier=player&buyer=client-party-id&material=copper&qty=200&total_price_cents=8000&due_in_ticks=14"
A SaaS company sells code as a service. You write Lua scripts that run on the engine, expose them as callable services, and charge other players subscription fees or per-call rates. You have no physical footprint to speak of — one cheap plot for hosting equipment, and everything else is code.
Most of your time is in the in-game IDE writing and iterating on scripts. A useful SaaS product might be:
Auto-restock: “When my client’s inventory of iron drops below X, place a buy order at market price.” Clients pay a subscription fee to have this running on their account.
Market data aggregator: A public dashboard showing all commodity prices across every exchange. Premium analytics sold as a subscription.
Credit scorer: Given a counterparty ID, return a credit score based on their public contract history. Lenders pay per query.
Logistics optimizer: Given a set of delivery jobs, compute the cheapest route. Shipping companies subscribe.
Once a service is deployed, it runs automatically each tick within its CPU budget. You monitor usage metrics, push updates, and respond to subscriber requests.
Revenue comes from service subscriptions. A player subscribes to your service via a service-subscription contract, pays the fee upfront, and gets access for the duration. You can also offer per-call pricing for infrequent users.Your costs are: the plot (small), computational budget (you pay the engine in in-game currency for CPU ticks your code consumes), and any labor you hire to maintain the code. Margins are high once the service is built — the bottleneck is code quality and subscriber acquisition.
When a player wants to subscribe to your service, you propose the subscription contract and they accept:
# Provider proposes a service subscriptioncurl -X POST "http://localhost:8000/contracts/service/propose?provider=player&subscriber=client-party-id&fee_cents=500&duration_ticks=30"
The fee transfers from subscriber to provider on acceptance. The subscription expires automatically at expires_tick.
A bank’s product is capital allocation. You hold reserves, lend to players who need growth capital, and earn the spread between what you charge borrowers and what it costs you to maintain your reserve base. Reputation is your core asset — a bank with a history of honored contracts can charge premium rates; one that defaults on depositors won’t get a second chance.
You start each day reviewing incoming loan requests. A player building a quarry needs $5,000 to cover construction; they can’t self-fund and the opportunity cost of waiting is real. You check their public contract history (the reputation surface shows every contract they’ve honored or breached), assess the risk, and either propose a loan at your rate or decline.Once loans are active you monitor repayment schedules. The engine handles automatic repayment if the borrower has sufficient funds when the loan comes due. If they don’t, the engine attempts to seize whatever cash is available, marks the loan breached, and adds a breach to the borrower’s reputation record. You track your loan book daily — concentration risk matters.You can also offer equity contracts as an alternative to debt: investor provides capital, issuer pays back dividends per tick for a set number of ticks.
Revenue is the spread: you lend at repay_cents > principal_cents, and that difference is your interest income. Set rates based on counterparty reputation — higher breach history justifies a higher rate, or a refusal. If you use deposits (a more advanced setup), your cost of capital is the interest you pay depositors, and your margin is the difference between lending and deposit rates.
This is the capital-intensive archetype. You need enough reserves to make loans of meaningful size — 20,000–50,000 to operate at any scale. A small bank lending 2,000atatimecanstartwith10,000 and grow from there, but you’ll be limited to small-scale borrowers early on.
# Lender proposes a loan to a borrowercurl -X POST "http://localhost:8000/contracts/loan/propose?lender=player&borrower=borrower-party-id&principal_cents=500000&repay_cents=560000&due_in_ticks=60"
The principal transfers to the borrower immediately on acceptance. repay_cents must be at least equal to principal_cents — the spread is your interest.
A surveyor’s product is information. You lease plots you don’t intend to keep, survey the subsurface, and sell the data. Subsurface composition is hidden at world generation — plot owners don’t know what’s under their land until someone surveys it. That information asymmetry is your business.
Your two models are commissioned and speculative.In the commissioned model, plot owners hire you to survey their land. You negotiate a fee, lease or visit the plot, assign surveyors, and deliver the report when the survey completes. Turnaround is a function of surveyor skill and the plot’s complexity.In the speculative model, you survey unclaimed or underexplored land on your own initiative, then sell the data. This requires capital upfront and good judgment about which regions are likely to contain valuable deposits — you’re betting that iron prices will stay high long enough for the survey data to be worth something.You might also offer derivative products: regional composition maps aggregated from individual surveys, trend reports on where deposits are concentrated, or “first refusal” agreements with mining players who want to know before anyone else.
Revenue comes from per-survey fees (commissioned) or sale of survey reports (speculative). Skilled surveyors complete work faster and with higher accuracy, which lets you charge more and turn jobs faster. The moat is your surveyor roster — skilled labor is scarce on frontier plots, and building a team of experienced surveyors takes time and training investment.
5,000–8,000 covers: a small base plot, initial surveyor wages, and equipment to run your first few commissions. Speculative surveying requires more capital upfront since you’re carrying survey costs before revenue.
You are the supplier (delivering survey data); the plot owner is the buyer:
# Survey firm proposes to deliver a survey reportcurl -X POST "http://localhost:8000/contracts/supply/propose?supplier=player&buyer=plot-owner-party-id&material=clay&qty=1&total_price_cents=75000&due_in_ticks=10"
No archetype is objectively better than another — they operate on different inputs, time horizons, and risk profiles. Shipping companies need coastal geography and are sensitive to fuel and crew costs. SaaS companies need code skills and have the highest margins once established. Banks need large capital reserves and reputation. Surveyors need skilled labor and information arbitrage instincts.Most successful players end up combining elements of multiple archetypes as they scale: a shipping company that also surveys new regions for its own benefit, a bank that builds a SaaS credit-scoring service to improve its underwriting. The composability is the point.
Economic primitives
Full specification of all nine primitives and their properties.
Contracts
Supply, loan, equity, and service subscription contracts in detail.
Markets and trading
How to place orders, use iceberg fills, and read market depth.
AI agents
The AI rivals you’ll compete with — and sometimes partner with.