Sell it, store it, or sell it before you have it.
Three routes out of the barn and no correct answer among them. The price series moves on aggregate in-game supply rather than on a random walk, which means every player harvesting in the same week moves it, and the player who forward-sold in April in a season nobody else did looks very clever indeed.
The board, as at the end of an in-game August.
Six rows, six routes, and the only flat line on the board is the forward contract — which is exactly what a forward contract is for.
Prices move on aggregate in-game supply. When most of the player base harvests wheat in the same week, the wheat price falls, and the rape price in this example is high because roughly a quarter of the rape in the game did not survive the flea beetle. No real money, no real market and no convertible value is involved anywhere in this system.
The three routes, compared honestly.
| Sell at harvest | Store and sell later | Forward-sell before harvest | |
|---|---|---|---|
| What you get | Today’s price, today | An unknown price, later, minus storage | A known price for a tonnage you do not yet have |
| What it costs | Nothing | 4 Coins a tonne a month, plus the risk | The upside, if the price rises |
| What it teaches | That everybody sells at once and the price knows it | That storage is a position, not a delay | That certainty has a price and it is usually worth paying |
| Typical outcome | The lowest of the three, about six seasons in ten | Best in three seasons in ten, worst in three | Never best, never worst, and the best-sleeping option |
| Cap | None | Barn capacity, which is a building | Sixty per cent of expected yield, and never more |
Why the price is not random.
A random price series is easy to build, impossible to reason about, and teaches nothing. It also makes storage a coin-flip, which makes the barn a pointless building.
So the price responds to aggregate in-game supply. When a large share of the player base harvests wheat in the same fortnight, the wheat price falls, and it falls further in a good year than in a bad one. That produces the single most counter-intuitive lesson in farm economics — that a bumper harvest can be worth less than an ordinary one — and it produces it as an experience rather than as a caption.
It also makes the forward contract intelligible. Somebody who fixed sixty per cent of an expected crop in April, in a year when everybody else waited, is better off in August without having predicted anything. They bought certainty, and certainty turned out to be cheap that year.
Nothing here has any value outside the game
Coins cannot be bought with money, cannot be sold for money, cannot be transferred between players and cannot be converted into anything. There is no marketplace, no cash-out, no item trading and no secondary market of any kind. The price board is a teaching device, and it is deliberately built so that it could never be mistaken for one.
One trading decision, start to finish.
April — the forward window opens
You can fix up to sixty per cent of expected yield at the quoted forward price. Charlie has an opinion and is wrong about a third of the time.
August — the crop comes in
Which may be more or less than expected. If it is less, the forward tonnage still has to be delivered out of what there is.
You choose for the rest
Spot at the weighbridge, or into the barn at four Coins a tonne a month.
The board moves
On what everybody else did that week, which is visible and is the interesting part.
Sell, or hold to March
And find out whether the storage cost bought anything. Three seasons in ten it does not.
Trading, questioned.
Only by barter, only in produce, and never in currency. The bartering page sets out exactly why that boundary is where it is.
No. Coins come only from harvest, trade, parish goals and achievements. The premium currency is separate, buys time and cosmetics, and cannot be converted into Coins.
About three seasons in ten it is the best of the three routes, three in ten it is the worst, and the rest of the time it roughly matches spot after storage costs. That is approximately the real distribution.
Then turn it into something.
A grain store, a shop, a brewery, a pub — all of them through Alan, all of them over budget.
