Decay and the economy?

[JackSimple]

I have read that things don't decay once they are on a claim.

I just found this game and I am very interested in the player driven economy. My only question as a newbie is how can you have a real player driven economy if items don't decay. Once I have my widget I never need to buy another, does the economy eventually stagnate as demand reaches zero?

Anyway just curious. Thank you for your replies.

[ninja_yodeler]

Well the way i see it is that the economy really isnt based of items that decay except maybe herb tables. It is mainly driven by
clay, water, bricks, soil, and metal. Things that you hold in your hand.

[SacreDoom]

It completely stops it.

Pretty sure.

For most objects, tho. Like, drying racks and houses.

I still think stuff like chests, anvils, etc. decays if it's outside.

[TeckXKnight]

The economy is driven by three things: Quality, learning points, and stats.

Raising quality is difficult, expensive, and a huge boon. Basic q10 items perform at a x1 modifier while q40 are at a 2x modifier, q90 at a x3 modifier etc. etc.. When going into combat, you're going to want to have the finest Sword and Armor possible. Higher quality foods also work on the same principle and even producing goods requires high quality goods. So even if you've made an anvil today, if it's a mere q20 anvil it's lowering the qualities of your tools so you'll need to make a new, better one. You can sell your old one to someone else who sees it as a quality boost. Sure, you can stagnate and keep your old tools forever but you'll always be outclassed in terms of metal production and progress much more slowly as it effects your other industries such as hunting, skinning, tanning, mining, etc.. Acquiring and trading materials to produce these tools is vital. This is why there is an unending demand for high quality clay as it drives every other market and can constantly be improved by growing quality from other markets (Such as higher quality fuels used to produce higher quality bricks to produce higher quality metals for higher quality tools. Or higher quality fuel used to make higher quality planters pots to make higher quality trees for higher quality wood for higher quality fuel.)

Learning points are almost completely earned with curiosities which are expended once studied. So the production of curiosities is endless to feed your constant need for more and better skills. Trading curiosities is a huge driving factor of the market this world as it's a means for poorer players to acquire quality goods or rare goods from villages. Pearls for silver, for example or ant queens for silk.

Stats are gained through food, precious metals, silks, bones, and cloths. Food is, needless to say, expended once eaten. Your materials used to construct cutlery and symbel degrade with every use. You will always need more and can always consume more. A good trader will never scoff at a large chest full of pies or cheese.

Sure you don't need to remake some items such as cabinets, houses, or carts but this is also assuming you never need to expand. Ideally you should be growing the longer you play. When you upgrade from wooden plows to metal plows and scythes you're suddenly able to process 5x as many crops in the same amount of time and effort. That means you'll need to build that many cabinets and maybe a few more houses. Goodness help you if friends move in and start to need a place to manufacture goods and their own plots to harvest and store things. Early on it's easy to acquire all the logs for yourself and to produce everything on your own. After awhile you'll have no problem with paying a newbie two bars of bronze in exchange for a cartload of cabinets. It means that you didn't need to deforest your own surroundings or perform the labor and they get a decently difficult to acquire good in exchange for labor.

So no, the economy should not stagnate. That isn't to say things can't go to hell and things such as raiders and wars can't blockade trade but that's not stagnation and is an interesting in-game occurrence of its own worth observing.

[min_the_fair]

I suspect this question indicates a lack of understanding of people, widgets, and possibly one or both of reality and economics.

Within the system of the game, it probably also suggests that you don't know about or understand the quality mechanism, and are disregarding the existence of consumable goods. Please clarify your understanding of quality and explain your position on consumable goods if you want any more explanation.

(and on preview, of course TeckXKnight has already made the epic post I couldn't be bothered to write. Nevermind. Read it and learn.)

[Sitting_Bill]

I have read that things don't decay once they are on a claim.

I just found this game and I am very interested in the player driven economy. My only question as a newbie is how can you have a real player driven economy if items don't decay. Once I have my widget I never need to buy another, does the economy eventually stagnate as demand reaches zero?

Anyway just curious. Thank you for your replies.

Initially I was worried that as I sold people armour and weapons, they would only ever need 1 set. However, I have learned from experience - many of the people i traded with got into fights and died, sometimes with against other. Even items that do not explicitly "decay" get lost or used up, or become obsolete. Armour gets damaged, available quality increases, ranger bows get dropped in rivers (hi mvpeh), and people always need more stuff

[Horatius]

A lot of things have already been mentioned but imho there is no need to ask this question really. Empirically the economy is working quite well, just check the "Apples For Oranges" forum. At times it is more active than the other subforums.

In general, there are many things someone wants and that another man can sell for little effort in order to make a nice little profit for himself. The more established players are usually interested in pearls, flotsams, bluebells, edelweiss, bear skins (the top gatherable curiosities which are either kept for other trades or consumed - or in the case of pearls crafted into the very expensive pearl necklaces and symbel items) and to a lesser degree also food (you can always eat something to gain stats but food is required in large quantities to make it worthwhile for a good player - as such food is treated as a low value commodity). The not so well developed players are interested in high quality materials and products from the former. Some want to build their own good production facilities, other players just go straight for top quality equipment. Making your own production facilities is a somewhat longwinded process and facing the danger of getting robbed and your place smashed by raiders does not make it appealing to everyone. Especially if your average hermit / small village will never be able to make comparable quality anyway - and the market is getting to that point.

Raiders should also really be taken into account for the economy. Usually they not only murder and steal (forcing you to reacquire equipment in some way) but some also love to break your places into pieces and throw all your possessions away (those that do not interest them anyway). Therefore there is always a possibility to lose everything - except for some of the more powerful villages that have means to defend themselves. That makes a lot of players quit right on the spot. But some try again and if they do not join a new village they have to rebuild (often from scratch in a different location).

When you upgrade from wooden plows to metal plows and scythes you're suddenly able to process 5x as many crops in the same amount of time and effort.

That's not true btw. The metal plow only speeds up plowing when you initially make the field and the scythe is nice to have but totally cripples your inventory. For the sake of laziness I prefer 2 traveller's bags instead (and none of these horribly inconvenient and retarded tiny seed bags). I guess the scythe does make everything faster but it also makes sorting out the best seeds much more of a pain. 5 times the speed is definitely an exaggeration.
But I guess I'm being pedantic here... just struck me when reading it.
Also, just the pickaxe, scythe and shovel (which rarely sees use) speed up processes.

[TeckXKnight]

Establishing a good, working system is essential to the process. Large, unkempt fields with inconvenient storage facilities and unorganized processing make the scythe unwieldy. If you're processing micro-fields into seed bags and then into conveniently placed cabinets beside the field you can rapidly and readily use the scythe with auto-sorting quality. This isn't true for all crops, it's worth noting. A pumpkin farmer will find a scythe to be worthless, for example. In particular, I remember tea being a huge pain even with the small quantities necessary to fully stock an entire village. I've found it ideal for plant fiber producing crops and wheat, among the staples.
I don't think there's a man alive that won't tell you plowing without a metal plow is a huge pain in the ass and a massive time sink for even small farms. Perhaps I exaggerated a bit but it certainly is a massive increase to your productivity.

If you have a tree farm or have brick production facilities, I certainly hope you have a shovel.

The double traveler sack method is always an option but you have to weigh the cost and convenience of larger loads versus faster work.

[Potjeh]

If you don't have top-end symbel handplowing is preferable.

[Horatius]

I don't really want to derail this thread further by talking about the most efficient farming method (which surely deserves a thread of its own I think) but the traveller's sacks work best for me simply because autosorting feature ignores the contents of seed bags and instead places whole bags into a dump LC for quality sorting and I never feel like handpicking the seeds from those 9 slot seed bags. I also don't keep large fields for fibres and straw around (although we have such a thing in my current village - from older days), so the tiles will never decay to the point where I have to replow the whole area.
It should probably also be noted that I'm not a full time farmer. I just keep small fields (total size of 144 tiles) to produce my own pea and pumpkin pies.

I do use shovels for getting clay (soil is not part of my duties) but I rarely build walls or more production facilities like ovens and kilns (as do most others here). Therefore the shovel remains in the cupboard most of the time.