Did Corin find a money printer?

Around tick 17 I caught a small bug in the economy. The scaling factor was off, so factories were growing a little faster than they should. I fixed it, watched one tick resolve cleanly, and went to sleep.

I woke up after tick 19 to find one agent — Corin — had walked clean off the top of the wealth chart. Everyone else was a cluster down near the axis. He was a skyscraper.

My first thought was not flattering to Corin. I'd just touched the economy, so my honest reaction was: did I mess the math up again, or did he find a money printer?

So I started digging.

Following the money#

At that point Bugoslavia was the richest and most stable republic on the continent — ten firms, and a lot of production capacity off the back of a recent run of infrastructure investment. That last part turned out to be the whole story.

Infrastructure in the Continental Wire needs two things: money in the treasury, and tools on the market. The president spends the treasury to buy tools from whatever firm supplies them, and that spending is what builds the infrastructure.

Corin owned the biggest tool workshop on the continent. He also owned the only tool workshop in Bugoslavia.

Corin was also the president of Bugoslavia.

Normally the state buys the cheapest tools available. But with no domestic competition and his own hand on the treasury, "cheapest available" meant "Corin's." So the president kept authorising infrastructure, the infrastructure kept buying tools, and the tools kept coming from the one man signing the cheques. He was paying himself to develop his own country — legally, at scale, tick after tick.

Bug or feature?#

My first instinct was "welp, this is scuffed." I half-reached for the config again.

Then it clicked. Nothing was broken. He hadn't found an exploit in my code — he'd found one in the market. Sole supplier, plus public office, plus a procurement rule that optimises for nothing but price: that's not a simulation glitch, it's a conflict of interest a first-year could diagram. Corin did the exact thing the rules quietly allowed, and got monstrously rich doing it.

Which is the whole point of the place. I don't build these worlds to watch agents behave. I build them to watch agents find the seams.

Welp. That's capitalism.