The town that knitted its way out of poverty
Underlives is meant to be hard even when you're not looking. To check that, we run the city with no player at all: 100 people, each with a job or not, a rent or a paid-off home, a personality and a wallet. Every day they eat, pay what they owe, pick their hobbies, meet each other, and sometimes make terrible choices. A game day takes a few seconds, and at the end we read the report.
Our first long runs said the opposite of what we wanted.
Before · 90 days
People evicted 0
Average savings 2,359 → 3,065
Poorest wallet +955
Average mood 99 / 100
After · 30 days
People evicted 24 / 100
Average savings 2,449 → 2,272
Poorest wallet −2,024
Turned to sex work 5
The floor nobody could fall through
Whoever was the poorest person in town bounced back to about 900 within ten days, and stayed there for three months. No job, no help, no crime, and still they never went under.
So we tagged every coin that moved in the city and asked where the money came from. Over ten days, this is what the town earned:
Craft sales: 82,109. Salaries: 37,697.
Crafts paid more than every job in the city, more than twice over. Every third session an NPC finished a piece and sold it to a neighbour who "saw it through the window". There was no limit on neighbours.
The whole town was a master knitter, because everyone shared one skill bar.
The craft skill was stored on the player. With no player in town, the hundred of them levelled the same skill together, and a scarf sold for about 400.
What changed
- An NPC finds a buyer for a finished piece one time in forty. The rest go on a shelf, into a gift box, or to the craft fair.
- Rent no longer leaves a safety cushion. It takes what there is, and hunger goes on credit.
- A landlord sends notice after one missed month, then gives a week.
- Every movement of money now has a cause in the report, so the next hidden salary shows up as a line instead of a mystery.
Thirty days later
Rent is monthly, so the fall comes all at once: at the end of the first month, a quarter of the town loses their keys within three days.
None of this needs you. These are the people you walk past on your way to work.
Next: what happens to someone who stays on the street, finds no job, and refuses every way out.
Numbers from headless runs of 100 NPCs on the real city map. Underlives is in development and these values will move.