Every persistent economy we studied died the same death. Not inflation of currency, inflation of place. The moment a world can print more land, every deed already held loses meaning, and the players who built on it feel it before they can name it. Ortus is chartered once. The grid is the grid.
01The grid is the supply
Sector Command divides the surface into charters, and a survey can turn up seven land classes, from common iron flats to the aurelium veins a Freelancer might see twice in a career. The class mix is fixed at world generation. We tune yields, never counts: when the economy needs more iron, iron-rich land works harder; we do not conjure new tiles at the border.
02Scarcity you can stand on
Finite land does something subtle to behavior: it makes position a strategy. A middling parcel next to a refinery corridor out-earns a rich one on the far rim. Consortium taxes and extraction decay keep early charters from strangling latecomers, idle land bleeds value back to the commons.
We tested a “soft cap” variant where new sectors unlocked with population. It felt generous for a week and worthless for a month. Nobody defends ground that can be reprinted. The variant is dead.
The next dispatch walks the AEV ladder, why the five marks are priced the way they are, and why the MK V is not a better MK I.
