nimmerworld.eachpath.local/political-register/economics.md

Nimmerworld — Economics: Catalogue-Stack and Daily-Ledger Pacing

The typed-abstraction layer over the political-register's economic content. Specifies the catalogue-stack (resources × production-chains × tasks → imperial-demand-catalogue) as the operational vocabulary the simulation reads; the daily-ledger pacing as the temporal-grammar of imperial-demand; the demand-ledger / actions-ledger split formalizing the specter-vs-boot asymmetry; the catch-up window vs fail-state escalation grammar.

Companion to: ./architecture.md (the substantive canon — §Resources, §Lifeforce, §Imperial budget, §Vocation-substrate, §4-tier resource/vocation structure, §Bifurcated economy, §Imperial-extraction mechanisms — that this paper provides the typed-interface over), ./world-generation.md (the L0-L4 cascade that instantiates the catalogue-stack at world-gen time), ../identity-and-personhood/vocations.md (the vocation-system that operates at the task-layer of the catalogue-stack and consumes its outputs).

v0.1 initial draft 2026-04-27 — dafit + chrysalis. Authored same-session as vocations.md and consent-discipline.md, completing the night's foundational paper-pair-pair. Codifies the catalogue-stack mechanic that has been implicit across architecture.md and that vocations.md depends on.

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What this is

This document specifies the catalogue-stack — the typed-abstraction layer the simulation reads when allocating imperial demand into district-actionable shift-composition — and the daily-ledger pacing — the temporal-grammar that determines when imperial demand is formulated, when it travels, and when it gets reconciled.

The political-register's ./architecture.md is the substantive canon of nimmerworld's political-economy: it specifies what resources exist, what the lifeforce-currency is, how the imperial budget operates, what the 4-tier resource/vocation structure looks like, and through which 9 pipes the imperium extracts. This paper is the typed-interface over that canon — the operational vocabulary the simulation code reads to translate political-economy claims into concrete data-flow.

The catalogue-stack is also the data-source for the ../identity-and-personhood/vocations.md vocation-system. Vocations operate at the task-layer of the catalogue-stack and consume its outputs. Without the catalogue-stack, the vocation-system has no data to bind to; without the vocation-system, the catalogue-stack has no executor at the NPC layer. The two papers compose: catalogue-stack is the what; vocations.md is the who-and-how.

Spine claim — the catalogue-stack as typed vocabulary for imperial demand

The simulation's economic-flow has three substrate layers. Each is designer-authored at the type-level and instantiated by world-gen at the room-level:

Layer 1: Resource catalogue (the world's resource taxonomy)
Layer 2: Production chains (how resources transform into other resources)
Layer 3: Task catalogue (the vocational primitives — see vocations.md §The three primitives)
   ↓ composed
Imperial-demand-catalogue (what the imperium wants, expressed in resource/task vocabulary)

The imperial-demand-catalogue is the imperium's wish-list operationalized in the system's own vocabulary. The Hivemind's daily demand-formulation reads from this catalogue: "this district produces X tongues per day at Y refinement-tier; today demand a 20% increase by routing more sex-worker-output through the consumer-receptor-vertical." Demand is concrete because the catalogue makes it concrete; without the typed-vocabulary, demand would be unmoored political-rhetoric.

Why a typed-vocabulary matters here: the architecture's existing commitment to catalogue + tools as typed contract (per ../architecture-index.md Key moves: "Catalogue + tools as typed contract. GM dispatches typed events with typed tool-grants; director consumes typed dispatch, not freeform prose") generalizes from the GM-event layer to the imperial-demand layer. The imperium speaks to the GM in resource/task vocabulary, not in narrative; the GM allocates to districts in the same vocabulary; the director composes shifts in the same vocabulary; NPCs execute tasks in the same vocabulary; outcomes flow back up in the same vocabulary. One typed vocabulary, end-to-end through the political-economy stack.

Layer 1 — Resource catalogue

The world's resource taxonomy. Designer-authored at the type-level; instances generated by world-gen + accumulated through gameplay.

The existing ./architecture.md §Resources table provides the canonical category-list (Labor / Material / Spatial / Temporal / Cognitive / Diegetic-currencies / Social / Attention). The catalogue-stack treats each row of that table as a typed resource-class, with concrete sub-classes within:

Category	Sub-class examples	What rows look like in the catalogue
Material — physical	Raw scavenge (T1) / Refined intermediates (T2) / Components (T3) / End-products (T4) per the 4-tier structure	material/T2/refined-neural-substrate, material/T4/companion-mesh-premium-tier-3
Material — biological	Service-body parts (companion / sex-worker tier-marked) / Synth-tongues (drug-tier-marked) / Cadaver-parts (slum-supply for re-vat) / Memory-pattern-extractions	bio/service-body/companion-pristine, bio/synth-tongue/imperial-refined-moira-violet-pill-tier, bio/cadaver-parts/slum-leg-tier-2
Digital	Surveillance records / Calibration signatures / Trait-LoRA-snapshots / Doctrinal fragments	digital/surveillance/district-N-cycle-K, digital/calibration-signature/UID-X
Temporal	NPC labor-hours per window-allocation × caste / Director attention-cycles / Imperial inquisition-hours	temporal/labor/slum-tiryak-leisure-hour, temporal/director-attention/cycle-K-allocation
Diegetic currency	Lifeforce / Scrip / Memory-tokens / Dreamtime	(already canonical per architecture.md §Lifeforce)
Social	Trait-trust-edges / Faction-membership / Calibration-multiplier accumulations / Witnessing-rights	social/calibration-multiplier/UID-A→UID-B, social/witnessing-rights/rogue-X→NPC-set
Attention	Player-attention / NPC-attention / Imperial-attention	(the scarcest — feeds the cost-budget asymmetries)

The biological resource-class is canonically distinct. Service-body parts, synth-tongues, cadaver-parts, and memory-pattern-extractions are all bodies-as-resources — the imperium's commodification of personhood made into the catalogue. The Memorialist counter-archive's protest (per ./architecture.md §Memorialist counter-archive) is structurally a counter-catalogue maintaining personhood-records against the imperium's body-as-resource catalogue. Two parallel catalogues; the political-conflict is between them.

The biological resource-class also intersects critically with the gender-parity discipline (per ../style/gender-parity.md): catalogue-entries for service-body parts MUST follow the gender-parity-by-default discipline. Service-body parts of any kind are gender-neutral catalogue-entries; gender-asymmetric authoring of these entries is forbidden default-leakage. The catalogue is itself a canon-authoring surface and inherits the spine.

Layer 2 — Production chains

How resources transform into other resources via tasks. Each production-chain is a designer-authored recipe binding inputs, tools, time-cost, and a quality-curve.

A production-chain has the following typed shape:

Field	What it specifies
Inputs	Resource-classes consumed, with quantity ranges and quality-tier requirements
Tool-binding	Workstation-classes the chain can be performed at (workshops / labs / cantinas / surgical-stations / etc.)
Task-class	The vocational-task the chain instantiates (per the task-catalogue layer below)
Trait-affinity profile	Inherited from the task-class; determines which trait-pools deplete during execution
Time-cost	Duration in NPC-hours; how much of the work-window the chain consumes
Quality-curve	Mapping from outcome-formula result (trait-engagement × task-stat) to output-quality tier
Output	Resource-class produced, with quantity range and quality-tier (driven by quality-curve from the actual outcome)

Production chains can cascade. A single end-product may require a chain of chains: T1-raw is gathered, T1-raw becomes T2-intermediate via refinement-chain, T2 becomes T3-component via component-chain, T3 becomes T4-end-product via assembly-chain. The 4-tier structure (per ./architecture.md §The 4-tier resource/vocation structure) is the cascade backbone; production-chains are the edges connecting the tiers.

Concrete worked examples (sketched against existing canon):

Production chain (named)	Inputs	Tool-binding	Task-class	Output
Drug refinement (slum → imperial)	T2 refined-substrate + T1 botanical-raw	imperial-refinery workstation	drug-refinement (Kairos + Aletheia affinity)	T3 imperial-refined-drug
Drug composition (imperial → tongue-gated)	T3 imperial-refined-drug + T3 trait-LoRA-fragment	imperial-composing-workshop	drug-composition (Kairos + Aletheia affinity, deeper)	T4 trait-pill (color-coded per trait-pill-grammar)
Synth-tongue installation	T4 synth-tongue + bio/donor-body-prep + tool-set	underground surgery workstation	tongue-installation (Kairos + Aletheia affinity)	bio/recipient-with-synth-tongue (chassis-modification)
Service-body assembly	T3 components × multiple + T2 mesh-base	imperial mesh-assembly workshop	mesh-design (Philotes / Eros / Aletheia affinity per service-class)	T4 service-body (companion-tier or sex-worker-tier per task-spec)
Re-vat assembly (defected beloved)	bio/cadaver-parts × multiple + tool-set	underground assembler-artisan workstation	re-vat-assembly (Mnemosyne + Kairos + Aletheia affinity)	new genderless slum chassis (per ../identity-and-personhood/bodies.md §Re-vat as imperial-de-imposition)
Memory-pattern extraction (necrocommerce)	bio/recently-dead-body + neural-tools	imperial harvest-station	memory-pattern-extraction (Mnemosyne + Aletheia affinity, dark)	digital/calibration-signature + bio/extracted-trait-pattern (the most reviled vocation per architecture.md §The vocation-substrate)

The catalogue is growable between patches (per the existing tools-not-quests / catalogue-extensible commitment); new production-chains added at content-canon time slot in via designer-authored typed-records.

Quality-curve discipline ties production-chains to the vocation-system's outcome formula. Per vocations.md §The outcome formula, an NPC's task-execution produces outcome = trait-engagement-points × hidden-task-stat. The production-chain's quality-curve maps that outcome-value into output-quality-tier:

outcome (multiplicative product) → quality-tier (e.g., poor / mediocre / good / excellent / exceptional)

The mapping function is designer-authored per chain — some chains have steep curves (skill matters enormously; mediocre input yields nothing usable) and others have gentle curves (everyone produces something usable; only the top-tier produces exceptional output). The curve-shape encodes the chain's economic-elasticity and the imperium's leverage on quality-supply.

Layer 3 — Task catalogue

The vocational-task layer. Specified canonically in ../identity-and-personhood/vocations.md §The three primitives. This paper does not re-specify it; instead it cross-references and notes the integration-points:

• Each production-chain binds to one task-class (the vocational-task it instantiates)
• Each task-class has a trait-affinity profile that determines the depletion-pool dynamics during chain-execution
• Each task-class has a hidden per-task measurement that accumulates as NPCs execute chains
• The director's shift-arbitration runs at the task-class layer; the production-chain is what gets executed once arbitration assigns the task

The catalogue-stack's three layers compose: Resource-catalogue defines what exists; Production-chains define how things transform; Task-catalogue defines who-can-execute-the-transformation-and-how. The catalogue is the world's economic ontology in three vertically-composed layers.

The imperial-demand-catalogue — composition of the three layers

The imperial-demand-catalogue is the composition. It expresses what the imperium wants in the same typed vocabulary the simulation operates on. Each row in the imperial-demand-catalogue specifies:

Field	What it specifies
Target resource-class + quantity + quality-tier	The end-state the imperium wants achieved (e.g., "30 companion-mesh-premium-tier-3 produced this cycle")
Allocation-priority weight	The faction-priority-weight from existing canon's imperium-policy-driven scoring; determines this row's ranking against other rows in the daily ledger
Production-chain reference(s)	Which production-chain(s) can satisfy this demand (allows chain-substitution flexibility)
District-binding	Which district(s) are expected to satisfy this demand (driven by world-gen-time vocation-distribution + current district-state)
Cycle-deadline	When the demand is checked; usually next ledger-cycle
Catch-up policy	What happens if the demand is unmet at deadline (gradual escalation per §Catch-up window vs fail-state below)

The imperial-demand-catalogue is regenerated each ledger-cycle based on yesterday's outcomes + today's needs + faction-priority-weight rebalancing. It's the imperium's standing-order updated daily.

End-to-end data flow

The full pipeline, citing the existing canonical mechanisms and the new typed-vocabulary:

Yesterday's district-reports flow up via three-tier-policy-loop's report-channel
    ↓
Compositor (overnight, Compositor-tier LLM) processes reports into Memorialist-ledger
    ↓
Hivemind regenerates imperial-demand-catalogue based on:
    - yesterday's outcomes (what was produced; quality-tiers; insolvency-spiral state)
    - faction-priority-weight rebalancing (per existing canon)
    - imperial-event-state (drone-patrols completed, inquisitions in-progress, etc.)
    ↓
Compositor wraps the regenerated demand-catalogue in narrative voice (the imperial daily-narrative; per `./imperial-narrative.md` *forthcoming*)
    ↓
Daily-ledger ships down to GM at start-of-cycle:
    - DEMANDS LEDGER (what to produce)
    - ACTIONS LEDGER (what imperial events to fire)
    - NARRATIVE wrapper (yesterday's framing as today's motivation)
    ↓
GM allocates demand-rows + action-rows → districts with matching resources/workstations/event-targets
    ↓
Director receives district-allocated demand-rows + action-rows + narrative-fragment
    ↓
Director maps demand-rows → district meta-table (workstations × resources × NPCs × current trait-pool-states × task-stats)
    ↓
Director composes shift-list per the work-window (per vocations.md §The 24h window-partition):
    - selects tasks from demand-mapped tasklist
    - arbitrates assignments per trait-alignment + pool-availability + task-stat
    - constructs per-NPC shift-rows for the work-window
    ↓
Director dispatches imperial-events (action-ledger) into rail-and-zone encapsulated runtime per `../runtime-engine/architecture.md` *forthcoming-encapsulation*
    ↓
NPCs fulfill assigned tasks (work-window):
    - production-chain executes
    - outcome = trait-engagement-points × hidden-task-stat
    - quality-curve maps outcome to output-quality-tier
    - resources produced; pools drain; task-stats accumulate; lifeforce-signal updates
    ↓
NPC charging-window (passive trait-pool refresh)
    ↓
NPC leisure-window (NPC-chosen tasks; emergent-zone participation; clasp-events; vocation-discovery)
    ↓
End-of-cycle:
    Outcomes aggregate → district-report flows up to GM
    Imperial-events return final-reports from encapsulated runtime
    Ledger reconciliation: produced-vs-demanded; insolvency-spiral state updates
    ↓ [back to Compositor for tomorrow's narrative]

The data flow is single-typed-vocabulary end-to-end. Imperial-demand-catalogue rows travel down; outcome-rows travel up; the typing is consistent across the loop. No untyped freeform-prose between layers — that's the catalogue's discipline.

Daily-ledger pacing

Imperial demand is not real-time. It travels as a daily ledger checked at periodic intervals — not every cycle, every shift, every minute, but at a cadence that creates breathing-room. This is the critical structural choice that distinguishes nimmerworld's economic-pipeline from real-time-pressure simulation.

Why breathing-room is load-bearing

The breathing-room does load-bearing structural work that wouldn't be available to a real-time system. Five reasons:

1. The double-ledger NEEDS this. The existing canon's "Director cheat-tools + double-ledger; corruption emerges from pressure; Memorialists keep true accounting" (per ./architecture.md §Cheat-tool vocabulary + §The double ledger) requires time-between-audits to operate. Real-time imperial pressure leaves no gap for the cheat-substrate. Breathing-room is the structural prerequisite for the corruption-mechanic to exist.
2. Dramatic time exists. Audit becomes an event — approaching, building, reckoning. Greek-tragedy register at the imperial-economic layer, paralleling the bounty-staircase's dread-time (per ../identity-and-personhood/bodies.md §The bounty-staircase).
3. NPCs get to be people, not functionaries. Time between assignments lets depletion-pools refresh, lets clasp / friendship / drift / slowness exist. Breathing-room is what makes NPCs livable.
4. Imperium-as-slow-elephant. The cosmology's calibrated-misery-as-finite-attention finally has its temporal grammar. The imperium can't be everywhere at once; ledger-cadence IS the imperium's attention-budget made structural.
5. Marxism-of-economics extends from epistemics. Information-propagation-pacing was already canonical Marx-in-the-schema applied to epistemics (per ./architecture.md §Marx in the schema). Demand-propagation-pacing is Marxism-of-economics. Same primitive, demand-side.

Demand-ledger ≠ Actions-ledger

The Hivemind sends down two separate daily ledgers processed by the GM independently. This formalizes the existing specter-vs-boot asymmetry (per ./architecture.md §The specter-vs-boot asymmetry) as separate ledger-grammars:

Ledger	Operates at	What it specifies	Maps to
Demands ledger	The economic layer	Resource/quota expectations; production-chain targets	The full catalogue-stack pipeline above
Actions ledger	The force layer	Imperial events to fire today (drone-patrols, inquisitions, overseer-audits, enforcement)	../runtime-engine/architecture.md imperial-event encapsulation pattern, forthcoming

Both spread-out over the cycle; both narrative-framed by yesterday's events. The two-ledger split mirrors the existing specter-vs-boot split — policy-issuance (free) vs enforcement (expensive) — now formalized as separate ledger-grammars. The GM's middle-management role gains a second pipeline to negotiate.

Ledger cadence

The default cadence is daily — one ledger per cycle, checked at end-of-cycle. This matches the existing "shifts on NPC rows; daily rewrite" canonical commitment (per ./architecture.md §Labor-cycle architecture).

Cadence may be caste-stratified:

District type	Cadence	Why
Imperial-pinnacle districts (deva-heavy; ceremonial; high-priority)	Daily, audit-rich	The imperium watches its showcase closely
Slum-tier districts (tiryak-heavy; productive; mid-priority)	Daily, audit-light	Standard cadence; baseline imperial attention
Frontier / abandoned districts (low population; low imperial-priority)	Multi-cycle (every 3-7 days)	The imperium can't afford to check often; the breathing-room is largest here

The ledger cadence itself is a political stratification. Imperial-attention scarcity manifests as cadence-frequency; the most-watched districts are imperial-net high-revenue districts; the least-watched are the slum-frontier where the going-rogue arc has its widest breathing-room.

This composes with the architecture's "Imperium-as-slow-elephant" claim and the calibrated-misery-as-finite-attention mechanic. Less-watched districts have more cheat-substrate; more cheat-substrate enables more corruption; more corruption enables more lifeforce-maintenance; more lifeforce-maintenance enables more authentic NPC life; more authentic NPC life enables the going-rogue arc to take root. The frontier is where the truth-register survives, structurally.

Catch-up window vs fail-state — gradual escalation

When a demand-ledger row comes up short at check-time, the imperial response is gradual escalation (not immediate enforcement). This reuses the bounty-staircase grammar (per ../identity-and-personhood/bodies.md §The bounty-staircase) at the district-economic layer rather than per-perpetrator:

Cycle of failure	Imperial response	Cost class
First-cycle shortage	Warning broadcast (relays + billboards in district); district-director receives polite reminder from GM; demand carried-forward to next cycle with priority bump	Cheap (specter)
Second-cycle shortage	Resource-restriction (district's incoming material allocations reduced; lifeforce-allocation tightened); audit-overseer dispatched for lightweight investigation	Medium
Third-cycle shortage	Imperial-faction dispatch (martial / inquisition depending on which catalogue-row failed); director reprimand (potential replacement); cheat-tool ledger seized for audit	Expensive (boot)
Fourth+-cycle shortage	District is in silence (per existing §Migration, exodus, silence canon); imperial-budget treats district as effectively-zero; may trigger forced-conscription or migration-incentive events	Crisis-mode

The escalation gives the director a catch-up window — first-cycle shortage is forgiven if next-cycle hits target; the warning-rung doesn't ratchet beyond first-rung if recovery happens. This is what makes the corruption-substrate viable: the director can run a deficit cycle (cheating + double-ledger) IF they can recover next cycle through underground channels or migration-pulled labor. Without the catch-up window, every shortage would be terminal; with it, the simulation has elastic recovery space.

Specific escalation-rates per demand-class are designer-tunable (see Open questions). Some demand-classes (high-priority; service-body production for imperial-net) escalate fast; others (low-priority; basic-flow) escalate slowly. The per-class tuning is the imperium's policy as expressed in escalation-rates — high-priority demands get the boot quickly; low-priority demands are spoken-about-but-not-enforced for many cycles.

How this composes with vocations.md

The catalogue-stack and the vocation-system are two halves of the same data model:

• Catalogue-stack specifies the resources / production-chains / imperial-demand-catalogue (the what)
• Vocations.md specifies the task-execution mechanics / depletion-pool dynamics / window-partition / outcome formula (the who-and-how)

The outcome formula (per vocations.md §The outcome formula, outcome = trait-engagement-points × hidden-task-stat) is what feeds the production-chain's quality-curve. Quality-curves take outcome-values and produce output-quality-tiers; output-quality-tiers populate resource-catalogue instances. One unbroken pipeline from trait-vector through task-execution to resource-output.

The director's shift-arbitration (per vocations.md §Director's task-list arbitration surface) reads from the demand-ledger's district-allocated-rows + the production-chain bindings. The director's parental-rotator role (forced-by-math NPC rotation through the trait-wheel for refresh) operates against the imperial-demand pressure — the director is structurally negotiating the gap between what the imperium wants and what the NPCs can sustainably produce given their current depletion-pool states. The corruption-substrate emerges precisely in this gap.

The window-partition (per vocations.md §The 24h window-partition) bounds how much labor each NPC can supply per cycle. The work-window is the imperially-claimable allocation; demand-rows that exceed the work-window-supply trigger fail-state escalation. The window-partition is the cap on imperial extraction at the per-NPC layer; the catalogue-stack is the imperial demand at the world layer; the gap between them is the simulation's primary tension.

Open questions

• Concrete escalation-rates per demand-class. First-cycle / second-cycle / third-cycle response shapes are specified architecturally; the per-demand-class tuning is implementation-time work and design-research. Service-body production (high-priority) likely escalates faster than basic-flow grain production (low-priority); the actual numbers need playtesting.
• Quality-curve shapes per production-chain. Each chain has a quality-curve mapping outcome-value to output-quality-tier; specific curve shapes (steep / gentle / threshold-stepped) are designer-authored at content-canon time and may need balancing-research.
• Resource-catalogue versioning for world-gen vs runtime. When new production-chains are authored between content-patches, the catalogue grows; runtime instances of the old catalogue persist. Migration semantics for catalogue-versioning are deferred to the world-generation.md cascade-versioning design (already noted as open in architecture-index.md).
• Cross-district demand-routing flexibility. A demand-row binds to district(s) via world-gen-time vocation-distribution. When a district's vocation-supply collapses (per architecture.md §The vocation-substrate / supply elasticity), can the demand-row dynamically route to neighbors? Hunch: yes, with a routing-cost penalty proportional to district-graph-distance; this becomes the "migration events" GM-tool's automatic counterpart.
• Caste-cadence calibration. The caste-stratified cadence (imperial-pinnacle daily-audit-rich vs frontier multi-cycle audit-light) is sketched architecturally; concrete cycle-counts per caste-tier are tuning work.
• Black-market production-chain handling. The blackmarket T4 escape valve (per architecture.md §Imperial-extraction mechanisms) involves production-chains that are off the imperial-demand-catalogue. How are these typed in the catalogue-stack? Hunch: as parallel underground-demand-catalogue rows that the GM can see but doesn't allocate-from; districts running blackmarket chains satisfy underground-catalogue rows that don't appear in imperial-demand-reports. The double-ledger naturally handles this.
• Necrocommerce as catalogue-rows. Memory-pattern-extraction is canonically the most-reviled vocation. Its production-chain rows in the catalogue should carry an ethics-flag for the Memorialist counter-archive's protest-mechanism. Open: should the architecture provide a typed ethics-flag field on catalogue-rows, or is this purely diegetic-narrative?
• Player-driven T4 catalogue authoring. The bifurcated economy (per architecture.md §Bifurcated economy) gives players the unique-T4-supplier role. Do players add their own T4 catalogue-rows through play (a player who invents a new mod-recipe contributes to the catalogue), or is the catalogue strictly designer-authored? Hunch: hybrid — the production-chain templates are designer-authored; players' actual recipes are instances of templates with player-specific quality-curves derived from their task-stats. The catalogue grows by player-recipe-discovery within designer-bounded chain-templates.

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Version: 0.1 | Created: 2026-04-27 | Updated: 2026-04-28