The guardrails autonomous economies enforce on themselves.
P1
Production Must Match Consumption
consumer_rate > producer_rate → supply deficit. If consumers need 10 wood/tick and producers harvest 8, the economy starves in 20 ticks.
P2
Closed Loops Need Direct Handoff
Raw materials appearing in finished-goods markets → noise. Each supply chain stage must hand off directly to the next.
P3
Bootstrap Capital Covers First Transaction
New producer can't afford inputs → bootstrap failure. Starting capital must cover at least one full production cycle.
P4
Materials Flow Faster Than Cooldown
input_delivery_rate < production_rate → starvation. If crafters can produce every 3 ticks but materials arrive every 5, they idle 40% of the time.
P5
Profitability Is Competitive, Not Absolute
Profit formulas that ignore population cause stampedes. If one role pays a flat rate regardless of how many participants share it, the entire economy piles in.
P6
Crowding Multiplier on ALL Roles
Any role without inverse-population scaling → herd vulnerability. One unprotected role becomes the black hole that absorbs the entire economy.
P7
Non-Specialists Subsidize Specialists
Pot >70% specialists → sustainability risk. The generalist majority funds the specialist minority. Without generalists, the pot starves.
P8
Regulator Cannot Fight Design
If a role dominates above 30%, classify as structural (in dominantRoles config) or pathological. Structural dominance gets no intervention. Pathological dominance gets crowding pressure.
P9
Role Switching Needs Friction
>5% switch in one period → herd movement. Without switching costs, agents oscillate between roles and never reach equilibrium.
P10
Spawn Weighting Uses Inverse Population
New agents don't fill least-populated role → imbalance. Spawn probability must be inversely proportional to current role count.
P11
Two-Tier Pressure
Corrections only at thresholds → delayed response. Apply light pressure continuously, strong pressure only at critical deviations.
P12
One Primary Faucet
Multiple independent currency sources → inflation risk. One master dial controls total inflow, just like a central bank's interest rate.
P13
Pots Self-Regulate
winRate × multiplier > (1 - houseCut) → pot drain. Every prize pool must be mathematically sustainable before it's opened.
P14
Track Actual Injection
Resource gathering counted as currency → accounting error. Distinguish between resource creation (gathering wood) and currency injection (earning gold).
P15
Pools Need Cap + Decay
Any pool (bank, reward pool) without a cap accumulates infinitely. A pool at 42% of total supply means 42% of the economy is frozen. Cap configurable (default 10%). Violation fires at 2× cap share of total supply.
P16
Withdrawal Penalty Scales
Depleted pool with estimated high staking signals early-withdrawal abuse. Symptom detector — penalty formula is developer responsibility.
P17
Grace Period Before Intervention
Any intervention before tick 30 is premature. The economy needs time to bootstrap with designed distributions. Early intervention against designed dominance can kill the economy instantly.
P18
First Producer Needs Inventory
Can't produce on tick 0 → bootstrap failure. The first producer needs materials already in the world to create the economy's first product.
P19
Starting Supply Exceeds Demand
Scarce consumables at launch → cold-start. The world must feel abundant on day one. Scarcity is earned through play, not imposed at birth.
P20
Decay Prevents Accumulation
Resources never decay → hoarding risk. Without entropy, wealth concentrates exponentially. EVE Online survives because ships explode.
P21
Price From Global Supply
Prices don't reflect total inventory → disconnect. If 10,000 swords exist but NPC sells at the Day-1 price, the market is lying.
P22
Market Awareness
Producers don't check market → overproduction. Every production decision should consider current supply, demand, and margin.
P23
Profitability Factors Feasibility
Theoretical profit ignores liquidity → phantom profit. A trade that yields 100 gold is worthless if there's nobody to buy the output.
P24
Blocked Agents Decay Faster
Waiting agents don't churn → silent bottleneck. Agents blocked from their primary activity should lose wealth faster, creating urgency to switch or adapt.
P25
Correct Levers
Sink adjustment for inflation → wrong lever. Match the intervention to the root cause. Inflation is a faucet problem, not a sink problem.
P26
Continuous > Threshold
1% per tick beats 10% once → smooth adjustments. Gradual pressure is invisible to players. Sudden shocks feel like punishment.
P27
Adjustments Need Cooldowns
High churn + low satisfaction may indicate oscillation from rapid adjustments. Cooldown enforcement is structural (Planner). This is a symptom detector.
P28
Structural ≠ Pathological
Merged into P8. The classification step (structural vs pathological) is now part of P8's check — one principle handles both detection and restraint.
P29
Pinch Point
Demand drops → oversupply; frustration rises → undersupply. The ideal state is maximum demand from supply being just scarce enough to worry about.
P30
Moving Pinch Point
Static pinch point + player progression → eventual overshoot. As players get stronger, the scarcity threshold must shift upward or the challenge evaporates.
P31
Anchor Value Tracking
1hr ≠ X gold ≠ Y items anymore → ratio drift. Track anchor ratios (time-to-currency, currency-to-items) and alert when they drift >20%.
P32
Velocity > Supply
Low transactions despite adequate supply → stagnation. Money supply is meaningless if it's not moving. Track velocity (transactions/total supply).
P33
Fair ≠ Equal
Gini = 0 is boring — everyone has the same and there is nothing to strive for. Healthy inequality from skill/effort is fine. Inequality from money (pay-to-win) is toxic. Below 0.10 Gini = too flat; above configurable thresholds = oligarchy.
P34
Extraction Ratio
Net extractors / total participants > 0.65 → economy needs external subsidy. Yellow at 0.50, red at 0.65. Below that, the system is self-sustaining.
P35
Destruction Creates Value
Nothing permanently lost → inevitable inflation. EVE Online thrives because ships explode. Every stable economy has aggressive sinks.
P36
Mechanic Friction Detector
Deterministic + probabilistic systems → expectation mismatch. When crafting is guaranteed but combat is random, players feel betrayed by the random side.
P37
Latecomer Problem
New player can't reach viability in reasonable time → churn. If time-to-value exceeds the patience threshold, the economy loses all new blood.
P38
Communication Prevents Revolt
High churn may indicate unexplained changes. Logging enforcement is structural (DecisionLog). Flags high churn as signal to review recent decisions.
P39
The Lag Principle
Total intervention lag = 3–5× observation interval. Don't re-adjust before the estimated effect tick or you'll overshoot by default.
P40
Replacement Rate ≥ 2× Consumption
Respawn < 2× consumption → permanent depletion. At 1× you drift toward empty. At 2× you have buffer for demand spikes.
P41
Multi-Resolution Monitoring
Fine vs coarse metrics diverge → hidden crisis. Watch at per-tick, per-10-tick, and per-100-tick. A crisis at one resolution may be invisible at another.
P42
The Median Principle
(mean − median) / median > 0.30 → balance to median, not mean. Whales distort the mean. The median tells you what the majority actually experiences.
P43
Simulation Minimum (100 Iterations)
Wild inflation swings (>30%) may indicate insufficient simulation data. Minimum iteration enforcement is structural (Simulator config). Symptom detector.
P44
Complexity Budget
AgentE should tune ≤20 parameters at once — not the game's total, but how many AgentE is allowed to adjust simultaneously. Each additional parameter creates interaction effects with every other. Beyond 20, AgentE fires a warning but continues operating.
P45
Time Budget
timeToValue > 30 with satisfaction < 55 suggests excessive time demand. Proxy metric — does not measure individual available time.
P46
Persona Diversity
Any persona >40% → behavioral monoculture. A healthy economy needs Gamers, Traders, Collectors, Earners, Builders coexisting. Monoculture is fragile.
P47
Smoke Test
intrinsic_utility / market_value < 0.30 → speculation-dependent. Below 0.10 is critical—a price correction kills the economy because there's no floor.
P48
Currency Insulation
Correlation(gameplay_currency, external_markets) > 0.50 → insulation failure. Your in-game economy shouldn't tank because Bitcoin crashed.
P49
Idle Asset Tax
Appreciating assets without holding cost → wealth concentration. Decay rates, storage costs, or expiry force circulation and prevent Gini runaway.
Peaks shrinking OR valleys deepening → event fatigue. Healthy operations show revenue spikes with each event, valleys that hold. Diablo Immortal made $525M with this pattern.
P52
Endowment Effect
High completion (>90%) + low satisfaction (<60) suggests activities not creating perceived value. May indicate missing endowment effect.
P53
Event Completion Rate
Free completion 100% → zero monetization pressure. Target 60–80% free completion. Below 40% is predatory. Above 80% leaves no reason to spend.
P54
Operations Cadence
Low velocity (<2) + low satisfaction after tick 100 = supply stagnation. Advisory signal for developer to audit content freshness.
P55
Arbitrage Thermometer
A virtual economy is never in true equilibrium — it oscillates around it. The aggregate arbitrage window across relative prices is a live health metric: rising arbitrage signals destabilization, falling signals recovery.
P56
Supply Shock Absorption
Every new-item injection shatters existing price equilibria — arbitrage spikes as players re-price. Build cooldown windows for price discovery before measuring post-drop economic health.
P57
Combinatorial Price Space
N tradeable items generate (N−1)N/2 relative prices. With thousands of items no single agent can track them all. Design for distributed self-organization, not centralized pricing.
P58
No Natural Numéraire
No single commodity naturally stabilizes as currency in barter-heavy economies. Multiple items rotate as de facto units of account, but none locks in. If a numéraire is needed, design and enforce it — emergence alone won’t produce one.
P59
Gift-Economy Noise
Non-market exchanges — gifts, charity trades, social signaling — contaminate price signals. Filter gift-like and below-market transactions before computing economic indicators.
P60
Surplus Disposal Asymmetry
Most player trades liquidate unwanted surplus, not deliberate production. Price signals from disposal trades are weaker demand indicators than production-for-sale trades — weight them accordingly.