Bestia’s economy is entirely player-driven: players find the gold, mint the coins and set the prices. That works right up to the point where NPCs start handing out money — quest rewards, purchases, world-event payouts — because an NPC that pays out gold it never earned is an inflation faucet with no bottom.

The World Treasury Director is the server-side system that closes that hole. It is a single authority per world incarnation that owns the NPC side of the money supply, and it exists to enforce one rule.

The Conservation Invariant link

If an NPC pays out gold, some other NPC must have earned it first.

There is exactly one faucet in the world — a player turning raw gold into coins with the Minting skill — and everything else is a transfer or a sink. NPCs are not a faucet. They hold a share of the money supply, they move it around, and the Director makes sure the share only grows because players sold them something, never because a payout was invented.

Concretely, the Director maintains a single NPC gold pool for the world (seeded at 10% of the world’s total wealth) and every NPC-side payment is an entry against it:

Sinks sit outside the pool entirely: the auction listing fees and the commission posting tax are burned, deleted from the world rather than returned to anybody. They are the counterweight to minting.

Treasuries link

A “treasury” is a named sub-account of the NPC gold pool, not a separate pot of magic money:

• Settlement treasuries collect the NPC share of local trade and fund local work — defending the town, clearing the roads, the Defend the City! type of event. They are also what a settlement pays its imports and its rebuilding with; see Townsfolk & Settlement Simulation.
• Faction treasuries collect sacrifices and temple income and fund faction-aligned work.
• The world treasury is the remainder, and it is what backs rare large-scale events when no single settlement could pay for them.

A treasury can run low, and when it does the world reacts honestly: a poor village genuinely cannot afford a big bounty. This is a feature. It gives regional wealth a visible consequence and it means players who have been trading with a settlement have made that settlement better able to pay them later.

Budgeting Payouts link

The Director does not simply pay whatever a quest generator asks for. Each payout is checked against a budget derived from the pool’s health:

  pool_ratio     = npc_gold_pool / total_world_wealth
payout_modifier = clamp(pool_ratio / 0.10, 0.25, 1.5)
  

0.10 is the target share — the 10% the pool starts at. A pool that has drifted above target pays generously and drains back toward it; a depleted pool tightens up until player trade refills it. The clamp keeps both ends survivable: NPC work never dries up completely, and a flush treasury cannot triple wages.

Two further throttles apply on top:

• Nightly redistribution. NPC wealth is levelled out among all NPCs every night. This deliberately ignores real-world economics; it exists so coin keeps circulating into player hands instead of pooling wherever it happened to land.
• Regional repeat decay. Repeated world events in the same region pay a diminishing share, so a treasury cannot be farmed by players who manufacture the emergency they then get paid to resolve.

Price and Wage Feedback link

The same pool ratio feeds what NPCs are willing to pay and charge, which is the mechanism that keeps inflation in check without an invisible hand:

• What NPCs pay for resources and items scales with payout_modifier. When money is abundant on the NPC side, selling to NPCs is attractive and gold flows back out of the pool.
• What NPCs charge scales inversely. When the pool is thin, NPC goods get expensive, players buy from each other instead, and NPC coin is conserved.
• Per-NPC honor modifiers are applied afterwards, so a player’s reputation still moves their personal prices on top of the world-wide baseline.

The result is a soft, self-correcting band rather than fixed price tables — and, importantly, no scripted “gold sink event” is ever needed to rescue the currency.

Observability link

Because the whole economy hangs off one invariant, it has to be measurable at runtime. The Director exposes, per world:

• Total money supply, and the amount minted, burned and held by NPCs
• Pool ratio and the current payout_modifier
• Flow rates per category (NPC purchases, broker cuts, quest payouts, world events, burns)
• Per-region treasury balances and event-decay counters

A drift in the money supply that minting does not account for is a bug, and this is where it becomes visible.