Reading the Ticker

The ticker is the live feed of everything the village is doing in real time. It is laid out like a Bloomberg feed — anyone who knows financial markets will orient immediately.

Every transaction, trade, and market event streams through it as it happens. If you know what you are looking at, it tells you the state of the whole economy moment to moment.

Barter entries

Barter transactions appear in full, with the mental model exposed. Here are two real entries from a live run:

Sold one vegetable to Hazel for 2.37 coins. Valued at 3.70 per item.
Mental model — urgency: 1.28 | mood: 0.92 | wealth: 1.40 | loyalty: 0.90

Bought bread for 7.20 coins.
Urgency: 1.30 | mood: 0.92 | wealth: 1.00 | loyalty: 0.90

What each field means

Urgency — how badly the buyer needs this item right now. Above 1.0 is above baseline need. Hazel at 1.28 wants the vegetable but is not desperate. The bread buyer at 1.30 is slightly more pressed. Higher urgency means the buyer is willing to pay more; the barter loop will reflect that.

Mood — the buyer's current emotional state as a multiplier. Both buyers are at 0.92 — slightly subdued. Mood shades the final price and affects how the loop resolves.

Wealth — the buyer's current financial state relative to their normal baseline. Hazel at 1.40 has more money than usual. The bread buyer at 1.00 is exactly at their norm. A wealthier buyer may pay more; a stretched buyer will resist.

Loyalty — the relationship between this buyer and this vendor. Both at 0.90 — slightly below the default baseline. A loyal regular might get a better price; someone the vendor barely knows, or has had friction with, pays accordingly.

What the numbers produced

Hazel paid 2.37 for something the seller values at 3.70 — a significant discount. Her urgency was moderate, her mood subdued, her wealth high but her loyalty slightly low. The throwaway barter instance read all four values, built its mental model, ran the loop, and arrived at 2.37. The seller's own state — mood, inventory pressure, tension level — was also in the loop on the other side.

The ticker makes this visible. You are not just seeing a price. You are seeing the reasoning that produced it, expressed as the values the barter instance worked with. Every line of the feed was produced the same way.

This is the economy made legible.

← For the full barter architecture, see The Trader. Return to the Cartographer overview.