SECOND ORDER - a bit size economy by WizWorks

A randomized policy stance, reshuffled every 50,000 ticks like a new administration — but the SAME head also reviews policy every 5,000 ticks, nudging hawkish/pro-people/mint-bias/gold-aligned in response to real conditions rather than staying frozen all term. Hawkish sets a higher base interest rate. Pro-people scales the landlord rent tax up to 2× or down to 0.5×. Mint bias (0.70-1.30×) leans the money supply independently. The money supply target itself is held PER CAPITA — the head's declared growth rate is growth in coins per head, and the headline target is that times a smoothed population index, so the supply tracks the size of the economy instead of a fixed absolute level. Gold-aligned (0=pro-money, 1=pro-gold) controls BOTH how much welfare gets skimmed into the reserve each cycle (5-30%) and how hard the Fed defends gold's price during a decline — a pro-gold head builds a bigger reserve and spends it more freely defending gold; a pro-money head keeps welfare generous and barely intervenes.

Dynasties have no separate treasury — a house's value is just the live sum of its current members' net worth. Buying injects real coins into the family (split evenly among members) and issues new shares at the current fair price; selling extracts real coins from members' actual liquid balances, capped at what's there — a land-rich, cash-poor family may not fully pay out. Only you can hold shares; agents never trade them.

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Agents with a high enough retail gene (≥0.55) buy their assigned category — food, gold, iron, oil, glass, or stone/sand — whenever it's trading under its own 5,000-tick moving average, and resell above that same average once holding stock. Both the buy-in discount required and the resale margin scale with prudence (bigger safety cushion) and speculate (holding out for a bigger dip / better spread) — a maxed-out retailer waits for a real ~12% dip before buying and charges up to ~25% on the way back out; a bold, low-prudence one trades on almost any softness at all. Retailers can also build storage on land they own, raising their carry capacity for trade goods from any tile they hold it on. (Target margin above is the intended spread built into each retailer's genes, not realized profit — inventory isn't cost-basis tracked, so actual $ earned per sale isn't measured yet.)

A landlord is anyone who currently owns a house tile in the rental pool — every first-floor house build enters that pool automatically, whether the owner lives there or leases it out. Rent price per tenant is 4×the owner's own rentTake gene, paid per tick, billed upfront for a full lease block. The same rentTake-scaled cut also applies to crop land — a landowner takes a share of whatever a tenant farmer harvests on their claimed tile, tracked in the same rent-vs-labor split above. Rent extraction as a share of GDP feeds directly into the rent tax rate, which rises automatically the more rent-dominant the economy becomes.

Smelting is a clean 1:1 conversion — 1 sand becomes 1 glass, over a 4-tick smelting process costing 9 energy total, gated by the industry gene. No efficiency loss, no byproduct — the only cost is the sand itself and the time/energy spent smelting it. "Glassmaker" isn't a fixed gene threshold — an agent is classified into whichever of the 9 sectors they're most active in RELATIVE to that sector's own population-wide average, so it accounts for glass-smelting naturally happening less often than, say, mining. Demand pressure is just open order counts on the glass order book — above 1 means more agents currently want to buy glass than are currently offering to sell it.

Stone crushes into iron by hand (slow, brutal energy cost) or at a Crusher structure (same yield, much faster/cheaper). Enough iron alone builds a Tractor. It moves faster, vacuums stone across a wide radius while roaming, and crushes at machine speed while parked, as long as the tank isn't empty. Once low, it refuels from the market — liquidating spare stone/iron for gold first if it can't afford fuel outright.

A drill is a permanent structure on land you own — produces gold and sand indefinitely instead of depleting a fixed deposit, the actual fix for eventual resource exhaustion. Costs 14 iron to build (no oil needed up front) but starts at only 25% efficiency; three upgrades (10i/2o, 20i/4o, 30i/8o) each add another 25%, reaching 100% at full upgrade. Gold goes straight to whoever currently owns the tile; sand tops up that tile's own deposit for the normal glass-smelting pipeline. Runs on its own oil tank refueled from the market. If you sell the land, whoever owns it now gets the output.

An oil drill runs on WORKERS instead of fuel — 20 iron to build, then efficiency scales linearly with headcount, 0% at zero workers up to 100% at 10. Each worker costs the owner real wages every tick (70% of that worker's share of the output's value, at the live oil price — wages track what the labor actually produces) — if the owner can't afford it, that worker is fired immediately. Workers keep living normally (foraging, trading, moving) but burn energy twice as fast the whole time they're employed, and can only hold one drilling job at a time. A cash-strapped owner genuinely cannot sustain a full crew — this isn't free output, it's a real bet.

Hoarders (g.hoard>0.5) post loan offers priced by their own priceBold gene. Needy agents (coins<0.3) take the cheapest available rate. Interest compounds on the balance every tick; repayment is opportunistic (30% of the borrower's coin balance each tick). If the borrower dies first, the lender simply eats the loss — no bailout, no ground-drop recovery.

A wealthy hoarder can hang out a shingle and take one of the fund desks, sinking half their fortune into the portfolio to open it. Some desks hold the goods themselves, bought off the market like anyone else; others track a sector and hold nothing you could put in a cart. Cautious savers — the ones who want their wealth kept rather than gambled — buy in above book value and cash out at it, which is how the manager makes a living. A desk outlives whoever sits at it: when a manager dies or cannot pay, it passes to their heir, then to the biggest shareholder, then to whoever else can carry it, and the state minds it if nobody can.

speculate 0.5-0.75 = dip buyers: buy when price sits below 80% of its own 1000-tick average. speculate>0.75 = momentum buyers: buy when price is already up 15%+ over the last ~250 ticks, chasing the trend instead of waiting for a discount. Either way, the moment they buy, TP/SL width AND a max hold time get locked in from their prudence gene — prudent agents take small, safe trades and wait longer; reckless ones swing bigger but get forced out fast. If they die first, the position is liquidated on the spot — the heir gets coin proceeds from whatever sells plus any unsold remainder as ordinary inventory, rather than the position itself drifting through another inheritance hop. With no heir, the same liquidation happens but proceeds go to the state treasury. (Every stat above except this headcount and the gene averages is a population-wide SUM, not a per-agent figure — the number of active speculators directly drives how big the total capital moving through this sector looks, independent of any individual agent's behavior changing. Read spending/P&L trends alongside the headcount above, not in isolation.)

Currently held by the population (not world deposits — see below):

Remaining above-ground, not yet gathered by hand — separate from drills, which tap a deeper source and never deplete this pool:

Net worth = coins + gold + every held good, each priced at the current discovered market rate, plus an approximate land value (landCells × mean owned-land price — not that agent's exact tile quality). Charm/tractor use a rough replacement-cost estimate since neither has ever actually been listed for sale.

Observing macroeconomic stabilization parameters…