Economy

Status: draft v0.1, 2026-11-09. Hangs off GAME-DESIGN.md §8 and is tightly coupled to SECURITY-AND-SOVEREIGNTY.md. Numbers are shapes, not balance.

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1. Rules this economy must obey

1. Legible. A player must be able to hold the whole material tree in their head after one week.
2. Distance is the price signal. Every price difference on the map is a statement about how far and how dangerous.
3. No global market. Goods move physically, through space, at risk. Hauling is a profession.
4. Self-regulating. No developer intervention to fix inflation. Ever.
5. Nothing has a fixed value except through the Empire's price band (§5).

2. Materials

Four raw materials, each refining to exactly one intermediate. That is the entire tree.

Raw	Where	Refines to	Used for
Ore	Everywhere, common	Alloy	Hulls, structures, ammunition
Ice	Common, cold bodies	Volatiles	Coolant, propellant stores, life support — consumed by building things, never per trip
Crystal	Uncommon, specific bodies	Circuitry	Modules, sensors, drones, electronics
Exotics	Rare, and only far out	Antimatter	Jump drives, gates, high-end weapons

Exotics are the hook that drags players toward danger. They cannot be obtained safely at any price; the only question is how much risk you take and how good your logistics are. Every endgame object — gates above all — needs them, so frontier expansion is permanently gated on someone being willing to go out there.

Deliberately absent: fifty ores, tiered rarities, random stat rolls. If something needs more depth later it will be added as a process, not as a new rock.

2.1 Rare materials are earned, never accrued

Two rules, and either one qualifies a deposit as rare:

1. It sits in unsafe space. Far from the roads, where nobody is paying for security, and the trip itself is the cost.
2. It requires active farming. No passive extraction, no drones left running overnight, no structure quietly filling a hopper. The player has to be present and doing it.

The second rule is what stops wealth from being a function of how long ago you started. A veteran with a hundred structures accrues scale; they do not accrue the rare things. Those are taken by someone who went and got them, which keeps a motivated newcomer competitive in the only market that matters.

2.2 Deposits move

Rare deposits deplete, and they do not come back. When a system is worked out, it is worked out.

And they do not come back there specifically if the system has become safe. Depleted richness re-emerges elsewhere, in unsafe space.

This produces the most important consequence in the economy:

Securing a system kills its rare yield. Safety and wealth cannot occupy the same place.

Nobody can ever finish the game by building a fortified bubble around the good rocks — fortifying them is precisely what ends their yield. The rich frontier is permanently somewhere you have not secured yet, which means the frontier never stops moving and expansion never stops being necessary. It also means a system's history is visible in its state: worked-out space is the archaeology of where everyone used to be.

Mechanics are open (§10): what triggers migration, how fast, whether players can observe or predict where richness will surface next — and whether that prediction is itself a profession.

3. The chain

• Raw enters the world only through a player. Every unit of Ore, Ice, Crystal and Exotics is taken by someone who flew out and mined it. Nothing accumulates at a base while you are away (§2.1); colonies refine, fabricate, trade and defend, and that is all.
• Mining — your ship, or drones you dispatch (Act II). Rate depends on hardware; yield depends on the body, which is a pure function of the galaxy seed.
• Salvage — wrecks, ruins, derelicts. Returns intermediates directly, skipping refining. This is what makes war debris and lapsed empires valuable, and it is the solo raider's bread and butter.
• Refining — station modules. Loss percentage improves with skill and hardware.
• Fabrication — needs a blueprint. Blueprints are the real progression (§6).

Everything is a timed queue. Queues are the check-in loop; they must be readable and re-queueable in under thirty seconds on a phone.

4. Credits

One currency, imperial, fungible, non-tradeable for real money by design (there is no monetization).

Faucets — credits only enter the world through NPC activity, which is bounded by what players actually do:

• Bounties on NPC pirates — and pirate density is highest where nobody is paying for a system's security, so the faucet is largest exactly where risk is highest.
• Imperial contracts (hauling, patrol, survey).
• Selling into the imperial price floor (§5).

Sinks — in rough order of magnitude:

• System tax — the master sink: a subscription every colony pays, charged as a rate on the revenue it actually receives rather than a flat fee. The Empire charges what patrolling the region costs and splits that between the colonies in it that subscribe, so each subscriber's share falls as neighbours join and climbs as they leave. The colony controlling the system collects the subscribers' shares and remits the whole bill in full, keeping nothing. No revenue, no tax: a colony earning nothing owes nothing, at any distance. Not subscribing is legal and costs nothing in tax — it costs the whole system its full protection instead (COLONIES.md §5.2). It stays the master sink because every credit in the game is earned somewhere, so the burn rises with the economy itself instead of with anyone's estimate of it.
• Gate construction, and upkeep on every private or toll road — the continuous price of controlling who moves through your space.
• Ship and structure loss (the materials are gone, and replacing them costs).
• Insurance premiums, clone costs, refit costs. Market sales tax is deliberately not here: it moves credits between players, not out of the economy (§7.1).

The design claim: credits in are proportional to player activity, credits out are proportional to what players produce. Wealth therefore converges instead of exploding. This is the part that most needs a simulation before launch.

5. The imperial price band

The Empire posts standing buy and sell orders at every Core station, for raw and intermediate materials only:

• Buy floor — it will always buy, at a deliberately poor price. Nothing is ever worthless, markets cannot crash to zero, and a new player can always sell something.
• Sell ceiling — it will always sell, at a deliberately expensive price. Nothing can be cornered, no cartel can hold the galaxy hostage.

The player market operates inside that band and is where all the actual value is. The band is a guard rail, not a market. It exists in Core space only — out on the frontier there is no floor and no ceiling, which is precisely why frontier prices are interesting.

This replaces a central bank with two numbers.

6. Blueprints and progression

Progression is horizontal (GAME-DESIGN.md §5), and blueprints are where it lives.

• Found through exploration — ancient caches, derelicts, scan sites. The galaxy is procedurally generated, so there is always another one out there, somewhere nobody has looked.
• Earned through reputation with imperial branches and NPC factions.
• Produced by research, which consumes time and intermediates.

A blueprint is access, not power. Veterans have more options, better specialisation and better logistics — not bigger numbers. Combat power curves flatten hard (COMBAT.md).

7. Markets

• Orders are posted at a station, and apply to that station only.
• Buying something somewhere else means going to get it, or paying someone to.
• Hauling contracts — put up cargo, a destination, a reward and a collateral; anyone can take it. This single feature creates a courier profession, an insurance market, a scam economy and a reason for pirates to watch routes.
• Price differences between regions are a map of risk. Nobody has to author that content; it is generated by the security system.

7.1 The market is a colony's tax base

Every market is somebody's. A market belongs to a colony, and that colony sets a per-item sales tax on everything sold through it, taken out of the seller's proceeds. The tax is the host colony's revenue, never the Empire's: it is a transfer, not a sink. Those credits stay in the world until the colony spends them, and what it spends them on is its own system tax (§4).

So the rate is a price, and it is discovered like every other price here. Set it greedily and the next colony over takes your volume; set it cheap and you draw trade you barely tax. We never need to cap it. An overpriced market empties itself, which is the only cap a market needs.

It is a political decision at the same time: the market tax you collect is revenue, revenue is what you are taxed on, and the tax you pay is your influence — which is how a colony comes to control its system (COLONIES.md §5.1). The cheapest rate in the region is how a small colony buys a big system; a rate that funds a fortress is how it loses one. Pricing a market is simultaneously an economic and a political act, and we got that for free by giving the rate to whoever owns the till.

One ceiling exists, and it is imperial. Core stations still run markets, at a flat and unexciting rate, and no player-run market within reach of the Core can charge meaningfully more. Cheap is always available there. Beyond the Core there is no imperial market and therefore no ceiling, which is exactly why frontier rates are the interesting ones.

8. Logistics

• Cargo is volume-limited; the big haulers are slow, fat and delicious.
• Distance costs time, not fuel (TRAVEL.md §2). There is no consumable to top up before a journey, because a chore levied on every trip would tax the check-in loop forever.
• Which means the hauler's scarce resource is their own hours and their exposure, not a tank. Long routes pay more because they take longer and pass through places where nobody is obliged to help you.
• There is no such thing as house-supplied material. Every unit a refinery or fabricator eats was mined by a player or bought on a market and hauled there (§3); nothing appears at a base. A forge is a permanent customer for miners and haulers, which is what keeps trade routes worth running.

9. Abuse

No monetization means real-money trading has little to buy, but it will still exist. Approach: keep it simple and observable rather than building an anti-fraud platform.

• One account, one character (GAME-DESIGN.md §10) removes most self-dealing. Players acting at scale do it through contracts and protection agreements, which are visible and carry reputation.
• Market and contract flows are logged server-side; collusion is a pattern-matching problem we solve if and when it is real.
• No action is taken on suspicion alone. We are not building a surveillance system in a game whose pillar is no tracking.

10. Open questions

• [ ] Does refining happen only at structures, or can a ship module do it badly? Ship-based refining weakens station economies but helps the solo frontier player a lot.
• [ ] Should the imperial price band drift with aggregate supply, or be fixed constants? Drifting is more alive and much harder to reason about.
• [ ] Is there an interest/decay mechanic on idle credits? Probably not — it punishes absence, which violates an anti-pillar.
• [ ] Insurance: imperial only, or a player-run underwriting market? The second is wonderful and dangerous.
• [ ] Should the market sales tax apply to buy orders as well as sell orders? One charge on every completed sale is the easiest rule to explain and the hardest to dodge; charging both sides raises more from a hub, and makes owning a market richer and more worth fighting over.
• [ ] Do we need a sink for materials as well as credits, beyond loss? Structure decay may be enough.
• [ ] Deposit migration (§2.2): what triggers it — depletion alone, or a security threshold crossing? How fast? Instant or over weeks?
• [ ] Can players predict where richness surfaces next, or only find it once it has? Finding it is already covered by scanning (SECURITY-AND-SOVEREIGNTY.md §7.2), which makes prospecting a profession on its own. Prediction on top would be a second, deeper skill — attractive, and a whole system.
• [x] Does securing a system deplete its existing rare deposits faster, or only prevent new ones from appearing there? Settled: neither faster nor by removal. Existing deposits deplete as they are worked, and new rare richness never surfaces in secured space, so a secured system runs dry permanently and is never replenished (GATHERING.md §9).
• [ ] What exactly counts as "active farming" (§2.1) mechanically, without becoming a tapping minigame that fails the no-twitch anti-pillar?

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Changelog

• 2026-11-09 — v0.1. Four-material tree, imperial price band as inflation guard rail, tax as master sink, regional markets with physical hauling, blueprints as horizontal progression, isotopes as the pull toward danger.
• 2026-11-09 — v0.2. Isotopes renamed Exotics → Antimatter. One-character rule settled and reflected in §9.
• 2026-11-09 — v0.3. §2.1 rare materials are gated on danger or active presence, never passive accrual. §2.2 deposits deplete permanently and re-emerge in unsafe space, so securing a system kills its rare yield — safety and wealth cannot share a location.
• 2026-11-09 — v0.4. Fuel removed. Ice now refines to Volatiles, consumed by construction and manufacturing rather than per trip. Gate construction replaces fuel and gate upkeep in the sink list; §8 logistics reframed around time and exposure instead of a tank.
• 2026-11-09 — v0.5. Private and toll road upkeep added to the sink list alongside gate construction.
• 2026-11-09 — v0.6. Markets are colony-owned and set a per-item sales tax, so market tax is colony income discovered by competition rather than an imperial sink, and trade volume is how a colony buys influence. System tax is now a rate on output — no production, no tax — paid to the Empire by the colony that controls the system and collected from the other colonies in it. Colonies extract nothing: raw material enters the economy only through a player mining it.
• 2026-11-09 — v0.7. Tax base corrected to revenue — the credits a colony actually receives, market sales tax included — and the controller now only collects and remits the Empire's bill in full. §2.1 and §4 no longer describe security as a gradient. Deposit security question closed: securing a system removes no rock and works nothing faster; new rare richness simply never surfaces in secured space, so a secured system runs dry for good.
• 2026-11-10 — v0.8. §4's system tax is restated as the shared insurance subscription: every colony pays it, as a rate on its own revenue, and the Empire splits the regional patrol bill between the subscribers so each share falls with more of them and climbs with fewer. Still the master sink, still no revenue, no tax — and a non-subscriber pays nothing while costing its system full protection (COLONIES.md §5.2).