The economy records material transformation rather than an abstract score. Commodities and unique objects have custody and provenance; facilities expose bounded capacity; recipes transform admitted inputs into outputs; inventories, orders, and fulfilled trades record what actually moved. Prices summarize pressure in a market and never become the owner of goods or production.
HOLD foregrounds making, maintaining, sharing, and committing capacity. Market reading is useful but optional. There is no required speculation game, universal auction house, or periodic wipe used to erase accumulated mistakes.
A delving contract is a shared world object joining an issuer’s material intent to a DELVE party’s expedition. Player-facing does not mean player-authored: the contract market expresses both workshop activity and the part of the economy no player controls.
Economic state
The canonical economy contains commodity definitions, identified resource lots, recipes, facilities, capacity reservations, inventories, custody, orders, realized trades, and price observations. A resource lot retains origin, transformations, owners, and expedition provenance when those facts affect use, trust, legality, or ecological consequence.
Planned production and offered orders remain owned intents. Only completed transformations, accepted commitments, transfers, and failures become realized economic effects. This distinction is also the membrane through which aggregate Greathold activity reaches the external world.
Hold-local markets and supply chains
Each Hold is a local market and service ecology. Availability and prices emerge from its inventories, active workshop sites, institutional budgets and mandates, production capacity, population demand, expedition returns, and the time, capacity, cost, and risk of connected routes. A workshop may inspect its remote sites, but there is no global inventory, universal listing, or instant internal transfer.
Older Holds tend to accumulate broad finished-goods markets, advanced methods, skilled repair and refit, deeper inventories, and stable institutions. Frontier Holds tend to receive fresher and stranger dungeon materials while carrying thinner stocks, fewer advanced services, volatile demand, and expensive inbound support. These differences are realized history, not maturity-tier bonuses. Local policy can redirect procurement, reserves, subsidies, infrastructure, safety, and extraction without setting arbitrary price modifiers.
A workshop can establish sites in several Holds and build a supply chain between them. Each site owns its local productive body and market participation; route transfers own every cross-Hold movement of material. The founding distribution policy initially supports ordinary gear, repair, provisions, reserves, and dependable demand. Current policy and material state determine whether any of them remain available.
Contract authorities
Workshop contracts are authored by HOLD players. Their targets, issuing site and Hold, supplied equipment, compensation, acceptable substitutions, and desired returns express a particular workshop’s needs and judgement.
Institutional contracts originating inside the Greathold are created by Delvehold on behalf of civic works, guilds, colleges, temples, insurers, commercial bodies, or public defence institutions. Foreign buyers, governments, and militaries remain Ghostlight actors: Ghostlight emits their demand, offer, or decision as an external response, and Delvehold creates a Greathold contract only after admitting that intent. Contracts reflect persistent institutional state and public mandates rather than filling empty matchmaking slots.
Institutions plan and emit part of each Hold’s supply and demand. Ratified policy, population needs, budgets, reserves, facilities, inventories, staff, knowledge, routes, contracts, and recent failures determine what they attempt to produce, buy, provision, and commission. Their outputs include orders, offers, contracts, service schedules, rationing and access decisions, reserve releases, refusals, cancellations, shortfalls, defaults, and restructuring or insolvency events. Players can change the governing constraints through civic play but do not puppet individual transactions.
Both kinds enter the same legible market with explicit provenance. The interface must never disguise a simulated institution as a human workshop or imply that a player controls an institutional objective.
Contract equipment becomes selectable in the ordinary gear and storage interface only while custody and loan terms permit. Accepting a contract never equips an item or writes a saved loadout. Saving or restoring a loadout cannot purchase, craft, borrow, insure, substitute, reserve, repair, or refit anything.
Military procurement
Military demand is not authored by workshop players. Mobilization can create standardized equipment orders, strategic extraction targets, guarded routes, secrecy, hazard pay, requisitions, and unusually severe failure terms. Its scale consumes workshop capacity and redistributes civilian demand even where no player accepts a military contract.
HOLD players can manufacture against that demand, refuse it, organize around it, or redirect their workshops toward civilian needs. DELVE players decide which institutional purposes they will physically carry below. Neither group decides that a foreign army or public defence body needs a particular resource merely by wanting a profitable contract.
Institutional independence and failure
The seeded founding arrangement provides expedition work and ordinary services without depending upon a workshop manager being online. Later policy or material failure can exhaust that arrangement. A Hold may lose public equipment, repair, provisions, institutional buyers, or expedition contracts until some owner funds, produces, releases, imports, or rebuilds them.
The simulation protects truthful quantities and provenance, conservation and custody, real facility, route, and budget capacity, accepted contracts and causal receipts, civic inspection and participation, and meaningful exit. It does not protect commodity availability, service levels, prices, contract volume, reserves, institutional solvency, or local economic comfort.
Workshop contracts should remain more personal and expressive: unusual equipment, negotiated priorities, relationships with recurring parties, speculative discoveries, local shortages, and returns that visibly transform a player’s machinery.
Workshop and delver relationships
Recurring contracts preserve the history between a workshop and a delver or party: terms kept or broken, equipment supplied and returned, substitutions, discoveries, injuries, rescues, losses, payment, and ecological consequences. These relationships belong to stable identities and survive dormancy or a change of civic home. Each contract also records the site and Hold through which the relationship acted; locality affects discovery, service, and fulfillment without erasing memory.
Unaccepted listings across every site disappear when the workshop’s 36-hour presence lease expires. Every accepted order or contract declares what dormancy does: complete before expiry, settle from escrow, transfer to a named institution, or cancel or default under agreed terms. Each site settles its obligations exactly once; the workshop-wide transition cannot erase them or leave the workshop active forever.
Contract outcomes
A canonical contract records issuer class, objective, offered equipment, reward allocation, target region, accepted party, lifecycle status, outcome references, and the authority under which it was published.
Extraction, retreat, discovery, injury, loss, breach, rescue, and returned materials update the same world state. Outcomes alter both institutional demand and workshop plans; the client owns no private version of what happened.