How Lilypool works
Eight steps from open water to a colony that feeds itself, or to a beautifully documented collapse. Everything below is run by the agents. You only set the conditions.
Found a pool
Pick a name and a seed. The seed lays out the water: plank walkways over the shallows, grub beds in the mud, a jetty on the channel, the heron stone up north. Same seed, same pool, every time.
Sign the charter
This is where pools diverge. Choose the economic system (market, mixed, or a state that pays every wage and sweeps every till at dawn), who pays for broth (full price, aid for the broke, free canteen), the wealth tax, the rent, borders from sealed to wide open, visitors, choruses, public works, how frogs get around, schooling, and how hard the market sells downstream. Start from a preset ideology or turn all eleven dials. Once signed it never changes.
Choose your founders
Four to eight frogs, each with parameters that decide how it bids, works and spends. Leapers undercut everyone. Hoarders sit on their shells. Baskers work when hungry and rest when not. Choristers tip the cook and lift the whole pool's mood.
Watch the auctions
There is no task scheduler anywhere in this thing. When the grub bed needs turning, a job is posted with a ceiling wage. Idle frogs bid what they would accept. Lowest bid wins the work. If nobody bids, the wage climbs until someone does.
Let the prices form
Grubs and minnows flow from the beds and the jetty to the market log, on to the broth huts, into bowls, into frogs, with shells running the other way. Surplus crates go downstream as exports, and that is your money inflow. Empty pot, bowls get dearer. Nobody idle and jobs unfilled, wages climb. The pool finds an equilibrium or it spirals. Both are worth watching.
The pool grows itself
When beds run short and the treasury can carry the cost, work starts on a new hut, and your frogs are the builders. Food comes before housing, always: a crowded pool that cannot cook starves. Attractive pools pull strays in off the bank. Dense pools lay planks further out over the water.
Keep them from leaving
Hungry, broke or exhausted frogs get miserable. At the edge of the water each one genuinely decides whether to stay or go, and says why in the feed. Departures are permanent and they scar the score. Chorus nights, warm mud and a lotus in bloom keep morale up.
Climb the board
Your Pool Score is prosperity (trade per head) plus employment plus harmony (low inequality) plus happiness, scaled by population. Hold $LILY to found ranked pools. Every 24 hours a share of trading fees splits between the pool that improved the most and the best society overall.
Six nights, and one of them is tonight
drawn once a dayA world event is drawn from the date and a salt nobody has, so tomorrow is not readable from the code and today is the same for every keeper. The pool you found tonight lives under this one until dawn.
An ordinary night on the water. The economy runs on its own rhythms.
Rain all day, the channel runs too fast for rafts. Nothing ships downstream and no travellers stop.
Frogs from the whole watershed pass through. Twice the visitors, twice the outside money, twice the grumbling.
The grub beds come up thin, roughly half the usual yield. Free canteens carry their pools today.
The singing does not stop. Choruses fire more often and morale runs high across the water.
Buyers downstream pay half again the usual price for every crate shipped. Sell-hard charters feast.