Scribblehood
Market physics

Market physics

Vigor is one number per object, from minus one to one, computed from the day change of its drivers. This page is the formula, the thresholds, and the simulator.

vigor = clamp(mean day change of the drivers / 6, -1, 1)-1-6% avg-0.7-4.199999999999999% avg-0.3-1.7999999999999998% avg0flat0.3+1.7999999999999998% avg1+6% avgsparks, lies downsmoke, stumbles, half speednothing specialfaster, halo, plus signsNVDA +4% (+4% so vigor 0.67)NVDA -8% (-8% so vigor -1.00)a mixed day, -2.5% (-2.5% so vigor -0.42)
Vigor is the mean day change of the object's drivers, divided by 6 and clamped to the range minus one to one. The dots are what three days do to it.

Vigor

Each object watches its drivers: the top three basket lines by weight, or every line when a summon has fewer. Their day changes in percent are averaged and divided by 6, then clamped, so a plus 6 percent average is full vigor and anything beyond is the same. The number is recomputed whenever quotes arrive (the sandbox refreshes weather and quotes every five minutes) and whenever a Pretend slider moves.

The quotes themselves come from a public chart endpoint, cached 90 seconds, with a day-old stale copy kept so an outage degrades to yesterday's change instead of zero. Private names and anything with no quote sit at a reference price with a zero change.

What the thresholds do

VigorMovementEffects
above 0.3walk speed times (1 + vigor), up to doublea halo in the glow color scaled by vigor; plus-sign sparkles at 1.5 to 4.5 a second
between -0.3 and 0.3normalnone
below -0.3walk speed halvedsmoke puffs about 1.2 a second; a stumble on average every 8 seconds while grounded
below -0.7as abovesparks 2.5 a second; stumbles every 3 seconds; a downed object lies on its side 3.5 seconds instead of 1.5

Walking only applies to objects with a speed above zero (vehicles, creatures, people). A building with terrible vigor still smokes and sparks, it just does not slow down, having never moved.

Weather on top

Weather is sector-wide and stacks on vigor. Gloom multiplies every walk speed by 0.75. A semiconductor storm makes every object with a semis driver puff smoke whatever its own vigor is. A gold rush boosts the halo of gold-glow objects by 1.6. The kinds and thresholds are on Weather.

The Pretend simulator

slider
minus 10 to plus 10 percent, half steps
override
replaces that ticker's day change in the world
vigor
recomputed for every object at once
the render loop
smoke, sparkles, speed, the halo

Overrides are per ticker, not per object, so pretending NVDA is down 8 percent hits the robot, the gaming PC and the AI girlfriend together, which is the point. The inspect panel uses the pretended change in its numbers too. Nothing about it leaves the browser.