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Auto Warz — Economy Design

Document Type: System Design Version: 0.1 Status: In Progress — design agreed, numbers not yet set Last Updated: 2026-09-05 Phase: Phase 1 — Launch release (materials, Engineering Points, the sinks). Credits and contribution in the Phase 2 War Update Author: Solo Developer Parent Document: [01_Master GDD](<../01_Master GDD.md>) Related Documents: [32_The Gate & War Logistics](<./32_The Gate & War Logistics.md>) · [31_War & Combat System Design](<./31_War & Combat System Design.md>) · [08_Research Tree Design](<../Content/08_Research Tree Design.md>) · [13_Player Levelling System](<../Content/13_Player Levelling System.md>) · [00_Canonical Design Facts](<../../04_Project Management/00_Canonical Design Facts.md>) · [04_Data Dictionary](<../../05_Reference/04_Data Dictionary.md>) Closes: OI-342 (buildings have no construction cost) Supersedes: the economy half of the Unwritten/08_Economy & Progression Design stub

Table of Contents

Purpose of This Document

Seven documents link to an economy document that was never written, and each of their authors assumed the economy was settled somewhere. This is that document.

Progression is deliberately not here. The arc of what a player does in their first hour, tenth and hundredth is its own conversation and its own document. This one answers what things cost, what is earned, what is spent and what is destroyed.

The Five Currencies

The question this document exists to answer is whether contribution, research and player level are one currency or three. They are five things, each with exactly one job and no overlap.

Scope Earned by Spends on
Materials World Your factory Everything physical: buildings, modules, upgrade kits, ships, war consumables
Research Points World Science Drives and Passive Field Data Factory Research — capability
Engineering Points Account Player levels Engineering Research — capacity and efficiency
Credits War Destroying enemy ships Faction upgrades, and settlement spoils
Contribution Account Gate deliveries to a Forward Depot Nothing. It is a record, not a currency.

Scope is what stops any of them becoming the others. Materials and Research Points live and die with a world. Credits live and die with a war. Only Engineering Points and Contribution cross between worlds, and neither of them can be bought or transferred.

Materials are the real economy

Everything physical is priced in materials, and nothing else can buy a physical thing. That is what protects the factory:

Credits buy time and stock. Materials and research buy capacity.

There is no path from money to production. The worst a rich player can do is arrive at a war well stocked, and they still have to spend it.

What Contribution Is, and Is Not

Contribution is what your gate delivered to a Forward Depot.

A measured record of goods — x iron, x ammunition — that a player can watch, trace back to a production line, and improve. It is also literally the depot's stock, which is why it matters to everyone else on the faction.

Contribution is Contribution is not
Permanent and account-scoped Spendable
A feed into faction reputation and player XP A currency
Visible on the in-faction board A source of Research Points

Contribution does not feed Research Points

Stated explicitly because it was an open question and the answer is no.

Research Points come from Science Drives and Passive Field Data, exactly as [08_Research Tree Design](<../Content/08_Research Tree Design.md>) already has it. Linking contribution to RP would let war participation accelerate factory tech, which would make the war a shortcut past the factory rather than a consumer of it.

Contribution feeds XP and reputation. Those are its outputs, and they are enough.

Engineering Points

[33_Mothership & Fleet Design](<./33_Mothership & Fleet Design.md>) establishes that Engineering Research is account-scoped and improves ship and mothership designs, but never said what pays for it. This does:

Player levels grant Engineering Points.

One mechanic solves two problems. Engineering Research gets a source, and player levelling stops being cosmetic.

[13_Player Levelling System](<../Content/13_Player Levelling System.md>) currently rewards levels with cosmetics plus small percentage bonuses — about +2% supply chain contribution per ten levels, +1% extraction per twenty. Those are rounding errors nobody feels. Points that buy real armour density and umbrella radius are a reason to care.

The existing percentage bonuses are replaced. Cosmetics stay, since achievement exclusivity is already a promise the game makes.

No conflict with research slots. [13_Player Levelling System](<../Content/13_Player Levelling System.md>) states that Factory Research slots are unlocked only through the Research & Science branch and player level has no influence. That remains true: Engineering Research is the other tree.

Engineering Research Is a Flat Catalogue

Not a tree. A list of upgrade lines, each with levels and a rising cost, bought in any order.

Factory Research Engineering Research
Structure Branching prerequisite graph Flat catalogue of lines
Unlocks Capability: buildings, recipes, logistics tiers, vertical levels Nothing. Raises rates only.
Scope World Account
Infinite nodes One per branch Lines with no cap

The reason is structural, not cosmetic. Prerequisites exist to sequence content, and Engineering Research has no content to sequence. Better than that:

Flat structurally enforces the no-capability rule. There is nothing to unlock, only things to raise. Nobody can accidentally add a node that grants a new weapon, because there are no nodes.

The lines

Categories only. The line list and costs are deliberately not set here, because they depend on numbers that do not exist yet: component stats, umbrella baselines, tank volumes. Writing them now would mean writing them twice. They belong in [06_Tuning Values](<../../05_Reference/06_Tuning Values.md>) once the numbers exist.

Armour density · reactor efficiency · umbrella radius · command range · drone throughput · tank capacity · sensor range

And the rule that governs every one of them:

Account research improves capacity and efficiency. It never unlocks capability.

Buildings Cost Materials

Closes OI-342. Buildings previously cost nothing to place, anywhere, forever, which left the factory with no local sink at all and no answer to what do I do with all this iron.

Buildings cost materials to construct, and return them in full on deconstruct.

Full return is what makes the cost a commitment rather than a tax. It removes the fear of experimenting, which is the same reasoning [04_Progression & Rewards](<../../06_Outpost/04_Progression & Rewards.md>) already applies to Outpost Mode: full material return, no penalty, because fear of loss stops people trying things.

Full return means everything, including upgrade kits and modules fitted to the building. A rule with exceptions is a rule players have to memorise, and this one does not need to be.

Per-building costs are tuning values and are not set here.

Deconstruct Is Build, Backwards

The materials do not vanish and they do not teleport. Deconstruct reuses the Genesis carry, fetch and build loop that already exists, run in reverse.

Build Deconstruct
Genesis draws from A CONSTRUCTION silo The building
Genesis carries Materials to the site Materials away
Genesis deposits to The building A CONSTRUCTION silo

The CONSTRUCTION storage role in [00_Canonical Design Facts](<../../04_Project Management/00_Canonical Design Facts.md>) §7 already means Genesis draws build materials from here, so returning them there is symmetric and needs no new concept.

Overflow beyond Genesis's carry capacity drops to the ground as items, to be collected on the next trip.

Which produces the right friction for free:

A large building takes several trips to tear down.

That is a real cost in time and no cost in materials, so it discourages mindless churn while leaving experimentation genuinely free.

Sinks: What Comes Back and What Does Not

Structures are reversible. Consumables are not.

Reversible Consumed
Buildings Fuel burnt in generators
Modules Science Drives consumed by research
Upgrade kits Ammunition spent on defence
Materials that become waste, or are incinerated
Everything sent through the gate and spent at a war

The war is the largest sink, not the only one. That distinction matters for phasing: the planet layer has its own consumables and does not depend on a war existing to have an economy.

Why There Is No Consumable Property

A consumable flag on ResourceDefinition was considered and rejected.

An iron plate goes into a building, where it is recoverable, and into ammunition, where it is destroyed. The same substance is both. Consumption is therefore not a property of the substance, it is a property of what was done with it. A recipe consumes its inputs; that is already how recipes work.

This is the same class of error that removed ResourceTier, per [00_Canonical Design Facts](<../../04_Project Management/00_Canonical Design Facts.md>) §12a: that field conflated production depth with transport medium, so a resource that was raw by origin and fluid by medium could not be described. A consumable flag would conflate substance identity with usage in exactly the same way.

If the view is wanted, derive it. The data pipeline can compute is this substance ever consumed irreversibly from the recipe graph, alongside the production depth and transport that are already derived rather than stored.

Restoration Contracts

[28_Restoration - Third Endgame Path](<../Content/28_Restoration - Third Endgame Path.md>) needs to pay for repairing wrecked planets, and the open question was whether that needs a new currency. It does not.

Restoration pays in materials, contribution and reputation. The wreck itself is the material reward, salvaged from what was destroyed there.

Credits are explicitly not used, because credits are war-scoped and Restoration is the peaceful path. A restoration contract that paid in war currency would quietly make peace a kind of war.

Phase 1 Has Its Own Sinks

Worth stating because it affects phasing. Phase 1 is planet-only with no war and therefore no gate, so it cannot use the largest sink. It has three of its own:

Sink Consumes
Research Science Drives
Alien defence Ammunition
Pollution and waste handling Power, and materials turned into waste

Plus building construction, which is reversible but still gates early expansion by requiring material the player has to produce first.

Answered 2026-09-05. It is not, on its own, and the answer is not more sinks. Restoration moves into Phase 1 and supplies what the three sinks cannot: demand. A wreck names a bill of materials the player did not choose, on a schedule they did not set, and will not take a substitute. That is the shape the gate and the Forward Depot have in Phase 2, rehearsed with nothing at stake, and it is why Phase 1 has a long tail at all. See [36_Progression Arc Design](<../Content/36_Progression Arc Design.md>) §3.4.

Whether the balance of the three sinks is right remains a tuning question for the phasing pass.

Open items for this document are tracked in docs/open-items.md, area economy.

Open Questions

  • Per-building construction costs
  • Engineering Point yield per level, and the cost curve of catalogue lines
  • Whether Engineering Points are granted per level or accumulate with XP directly
  • The line list for Engineering Research, once component numbers exist
  • Whether ground items from deconstruct overflow decay over time or persist indefinitely

Revision History

Version Date Changes
0.2 2026-09-05 Phase 1 sink sufficiency answered: Restoration moves into Phase 1 and supplies demand rather than waste. Open question closed.
0.1 2026-09-05 Initial. Five currencies with non-overlapping jobs. Contribution defined as a record, not a currency, and explicitly not a source of Research Points. Player levels grant Engineering Points, replacing the percentage bonuses in 13_Player Levelling System. Engineering Research as a flat catalogue rather than a tree, which structurally enforces the no-capability rule. Buildings cost materials with full return, closing OI-342. Deconstruct as the Genesis build loop reversed. Reversible structures versus consumed consumables. A consumable substance property rejected with reasons. Restoration pays in materials, contribution and reputation. Progression deliberately deferred to its own document.