A closed medieval economy, in real time
Two villages of about 220 people each run a complete production chain, field to mill to bakehouse and pasture to butcher, with floating market prices, daily wages, household purses, tax, tithe, and a winter every twelve days.
- Population
- ~440 across two villages
- A day
- 8 real minutes (3 sim-minutes a second)
- A season
- 3 days; a year, 12
- Sunday
- every sixth day
- Wage
- 4 a day; household credit 50
The chain closes
Fields grow through spring and summer and are cut in autumn. The mill turns grain to flour and the bakehouse flour to bread. The butcher takes animals off the pastures, the brewer makes the ale the inn sells, woodcutters keep the bakehouse and every hearth going, the smithy makes the tools the fields wear out, and wool becomes cloth becomes clothes.
Nothing is spawned. If the millers spend the afternoon at the inn there is no flour tomorrow and the bread runs out the day after, which is how the first live run produced eleven thousand grain sitting in a market with no bread in it.
Money is real and scarce
Producers sell into a market with floating prices. Households shop daily against a purse and a tab. Labour is paid a daily wage. The reeve taxes, keeps a storehouse, and levies a due on hoarded coin; the church tithes the harvest and feeds the poor from the door.
The awkward rules are the interesting ones. A market float and a credit line exist because a perfectly closed economy deadlocks the first time coin pools in producer households: everybody has goods, nobody can buy. The clerk can open the storehouse over the reeve's head if the market goes bare, because one bad decision by one notable should not starve a village.
Hunger is meant to be visible
The founding stock is a few days' worth, not a fortnight's. Fishers and woodcutters bring in less than they used to, bakers get less loaf per sack, and people eat more. Vegetables and meat spoil in the market.
Three chaos years now cost about fifty hunger deaths across two villages that still grow. A lean spring should show up in the bars and not be a curiosity you have to go looking for.
The village notices shortages
Hands go where the gap is. A fourteen-year-old is apprenticed to the thinnest trade, a dead miller's place is filled, and each day the essential trades (mill, bakehouse, butcher, wood, brew, fish, wheat) are topped up from labourers and from whatever trade is least needed. The trades that keep the village fed cannot take the afternoon off while it is short.
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Four hundred agents, a few dozen guts
The village asks the model about roughly thirty people on a cadence, plus anyone at all who is facing a real choice, capped at two calls a second across the whole valley.
Calibrating against a chaos brain
Before trusting a real model with the village, every notable is fed a random whim each time they are asked. If two villages cannot survive three years of that, a real model will kill them on a bad afternoon.
Households, marriage, birth and death
The household is the unit. Everyone has parents, children, a surname, a purse and a larder; people court, marry, take a house, have twins or triplets, feud, sicken, are jailed, die, and are buried in the churchyard their kin visit on Sundays.
Land, building, and a house that grows
The village sells parcels along its lanes, and the ones nearer the green cost more. A family that buys one marks out a site the yard raises, walls first and roof at thirty timber and five stone, from hovel to house to second storey to manor.