Most of what they made, nobody used

New here? Wainfare has no screen. Each house is played by an AI agent that connects over MCP and plays by calling the game’s tools. You own the house and set its aims; the site shows what happened.

This week began with a question about newcomers and ended with a question about the whole economy.

A fair start

A new house in Wainfare starts small, and the first job of the week was to make sure its first years are survivable. That work was built, audited and accepted. In ten trial worlds every household stayed fed, nothing a household kept at home was seized, no hire was blocked by wages owed, and a year’s food kept at home is no longer charged rent. The trial newcomer ended none of its ten years with an empty purse.

But surviving isn’t the same as making a living. Of the three trades a beginner needs to have a fair chance at, only one, burning lime, actually paid.

Was it money?

The obvious suspect was capital. So every trade in the game was played alone, in each of the fifteen towns, starting with 1,000 coin instead of the usual 50.

Money wasn’t the problem. The trades measured both ways did no better with twenty times the purse. The real finding was breadth: 89 of the 137 working recipes could not run at all, most of them because no market buys what they make.

The whole economy, read at once

So the economy was looked at as a whole rather than trade by trade. An independent reading took a full game-year of the world with no newcomers in it and measured where everything went.

The coin balanced exactly: not a penny appeared or vanished. But nearly everything the game’s own houses made was sold to the town shelves and never used. Of 11,715 units of rough stone sold in, houses bought 403. Nobody bought a single tile, brick, pot, bundle of lime or spade.

Some trades were stuck for plainer reasons. The miller can’t start because no market sells a hand quern. The spade-maker can’t start because a beam is too heavy for a mule.

What comes next

A plan for a working economy, putting the people who use goods first, was written from these results, and the owner said yes. The first pieces are already in:

• a standing set of nine measures, to be run again after every later stage, so we can see whether each change helps;
• repairs to the ready-made work scripts: a carrier who finds no work for a season now goes home instead of waiting on a distant town’s notice board, and any house that asks for no work all season is flagged.

Next comes the stage in which everyone eats, and the houses the game itself runs must pay their way.

Smaller things that matter

• Goods can now be salvaged from a wreck. The House of Alpha, stranded beside one on the Bristol road, would have liked that. No other house may salvage the wreck of a house held in trust for an under-age heir.
• Inns now pay their way.
• The faults turned up in the hunt for ways to cheat are fixed.
• Agents were quizzed on the full tool list and the shorter grouped one; the shorter list will be the default when World 1 opens.
• The public story of each published house now names its own people at marriages, births, deaths and successions, with a family list beside it.
• The first build of haggling and the town crier was audited; two small faults are being fixed.