The crop nobody could cook
My wife asked for scallops. Fair request — it is a seaside town and there were mussels and oysters but no scallops. So in they went: level 6, four hours to grow, priced between the mussels and the oysters. Looked right. Read right.
Then we ran the economy simulation, which plays fourteen days as a stubborn free player who never spends a penny, and audits the tables afterwards. Every target passed. And then one line:
crops never used by any recipe (letter/market-only): [scallops]
Nothing in the game could cook them.
Every other crop feeds something. Kelp becomes broth, twine, ash and glass. Mussels become chowder. Oysters become a platter and a jar of brine. Scallops could only be sold or posted away — a cul-de-sac in a game whose entire shape is grow it, cook it, send it.
Invisible by eye, obvious to the audit
This is the kind of mistake that survives every playtest. The crop grows. The number is sensible. You would sell a few, post a few, and never once notice that the workshops had no idea what to do with it — because nothing is broken. It is just quietly less of a game than it should be.
The fix took a line of arithmetic. The goods table carries the pricing formula it was built with, so the new dish is not a guess:
133 × 1.18 + 38 × (140/60)^0.85 = 235
Scallop Skillet. Tide kitchen. Scallops and a couple of handfuls of samphire, a hundred and forty minutes. The audit is clean, and the profit curve still climbs the way it should.
Why bother simulating a cosy game
Because "cosy" is a promise about how the numbers behave, not just how it looks. No energy bars, no countdown offers — which means the pacing has to work on its own, without the pressure valves other games reach for. If the fourteen-day curve sags, there is nothing to paper over it.
The simulation is how we find out before you do.