RESOURCE MANAGEMENT
Weapons consume a finite ammo resource that must be found, bought, crafted, or conserved, turning every shot into a small economic decision.
Crafting recipes must be found in the world or researched from materials — scanning wreckage, analyzing fragments, buying schematics — rather than arriving automatically with level-ups, making knowledge itself the loot.
Single-use items — potions, grenades, food, scrolls — that are destroyed on activation, creating a running economy of acquisition and expenditure alongside permanent gear.
Raw resources gathered from the world — ores, hides, herbs, monster parts — that feed crafting recipes.
A generation-and-distribution network that must supply enough power to every connected building or machine, with brownouts or shutdowns if demand outpaces supply.
Weapons, tools, and armor degrade with use and eventually break, requiring repair or replacement.
Consumable food as a survival resource — hunger meters demanding regular meals, expedition provisions that gate journey length, colony stockpiles that determine who eats this winter.
A consumable resource that vehicles, tools, or generators require to operate, depleting with use and demanding periodic resupply through gathering, crafting, or purchase.
A finite number of item slots the player must manage, forcing decisions about what to carry, drop, or leave behind.
Several parallel money types — gold plus gems plus tokens plus reputation scrip — each earned from different activities and spent at different sinks.
Gathering resources from fixed world points — ore veins, herb spawns, fishing holes, berry bushes — that deplete on harvest and respawn on timers or conditions.
Resources that accrue without active play — rent collecting hourly, mines producing per tick, idle earnings accumulating offline — decoupling income from moment-to-moment attention.
People as the productive resource — colonists assigned to jobs, city populations filling workplaces, worker units gathering and building — where labor allocation is the economy's core decision.
Known formulas converting inputs to outputs — three wood and two iron make an axe — as the atomic unit of crafting economies.
Paying to restore degraded equipment and structures — durability loss charged in gold at the anvil, materials consumed patching walls, escalating maintenance on damaged vehicles.
Transforming one resource into another at set rates — trading posts exchanging wood for gold, generators burning fuel into power, markets converting surplus into whatever's scarce.
Players collect raw materials from the environment — chopping wood, mining ore, harvesting plants — as the foundational input for crafting, building, and progression.
Resource availability oscillating over time — seasons of plenty and famine, boom-bust market cycles, drought years testing stockpiles built in wet ones.
One money for everything — gold as the universal denominator for shops, upgrades, repairs, bribes, and fast travel, with no parallel token economies.
The two-tier monetization economy — soft currency earned abundantly by playing (gold, credits) and hard/premium currency bought with real money (gems, crystals), each with distinct stores and exchange asymmetries.
Finite storage as a designed constraint — warehouses with capacity caps, stockpile zones that fill, resource maximums that overflow into waste, granaries whose size is a build decision.
Military units and territories must maintain a connection back to a source of supply; cut the line and units suffer attrition, reduced effectiveness, or collapse.
Recurring costs for what you own — army wages draining the treasury each turn, building maintenance eating city income, supply consumption per unit, the standing costs that make holding assets a continuous decision rather than a one-time purchase.
Carried items have weight, and exceeding a capacity threshold slows movement, blocks fast travel, or prevents further pickups, forcing players to prioritize what they carry.