The Price of Money

I'm really not much of an economics guy. Seriously. But a few days ago I started thinking about money in Ark Frontier, a society with thousands of refugees stuck on board a sealed ark-ship for nearly two decades. Here's what I came up with.

Oh, by the way, I've come up with a name for the world: Arat. The two native intelligent species, the vaion and the raxene, are collectively referred to as the Aratene.

The Ark was designed to become a self-sufficient arcology city, able to indefinitely support nearly 50,000 people. So the day-to-day needs of everyone on board can be met with only a little effort in production, maintenance, and distribution. Even with the population growing since the doors closed, there's little danger of exceeding the Ark's capacity for quite some time.

Everyone on-board receives a basic ration of essentials, has quarters assigned, and receives a small basic income of credits, the currency used by the human colonists. Those who perform additional services (maintenance, making and selling goods, policing, government, and so on) receive extra credits.

Of course, the reason credits are the basic currency is because the Ark turned up and saved people from the teeth of a worldwide apocalypse. When the Aratene came onboard, most of them had only the clothes on their backs, and only a few had decided to grab their life-savings in the face of imminent death. This means that the supply of gold pieces on the Ark is severely limited, which has inflated their value considerably. In addition, it's an unofficial currency mostly used by the underworld and the black market.

Now, all of that is about to change, as the Ark's doors are finally opened.

While the Ark will continue to subsidise and support  the colonists as settlements are established and life returns to normal, as the settlers become self-sufficient that support will be rolled back, allowing the Ark's resources to be saved for emergencies or used where they are most needed for the overall benefit of the colony.

Perhaps more importantly, as gold pieces are recovered from the ruined settlements and cities now devoid of life, the shadow economy will be rocked as the market is flooded with gold coins. I can see this having several effects.

The relative value of gold will begin to drop. By the time gold returns as a standard currency, it'll likely be worth a tenth of its former value.

Crime bosses, whose wealth currently comes from gold and a captive population, will need to react quickly if they want to maintain their hold on power. They'll need to send teams out to secure gold before someone else finds it, meaning some of the first registered Blazer teams may actually represent criminal syndicates. This will likely result in the frontier becoming treacherous and lawless, and bandits who can look after themselves in the Phantom-infested wilderness may become a real problem.

What do decent folks think about recovering gold from ruined cities — cities occupied by their kin only eighteen years earlier? Is it pragmatic, or grave-robbing? I can see strong opinions forming here, although the naysayers are likely to be powerless in the face of economic reality. Some people are going to be driven to collect the coins, and once they enter circulation there's not much you can do.

It also gives Blazer teams the chance to amass a lot of wealth, if they're willing to overlook the moral concerns. Will adventurers become the nouveau riche?

The more I dig around, the more details I uncover. I can feel Arat coming into focus... although it's still a land in flux. I'm actually planning to detail several potential points in the colony's timeline, to plot a sort of road-map for the colony's likely development and also provide additional game launch-points. But that's a topic for another post.