SenTOS Economy Summary

Event Summary

This keeps happing. I think of a funny idea, and it ends up going a little too far. For Christmas in 2024 and 2025, I hosted Naughty or Nice polls that determined what kind of Stormworker you were. I ended up making full websites for these two polls unintentionally because I like seeing data, and 180 data points from Stormworks players is in fact a lot of data.

For April Fools 2026, I originally thought it would be funny to ping people saying they got alpha access. Access to what? Nothing! But then I thought "No, they should have something." And at 11:30pm on March 31st, I had the glorious idea of making an economy bot for my Discord server. I would allow people to buy items, steal from others, and to add some incentive for people to use the thing, allow people to buy each other.

I knew I wouldn't have it done if I wrote it myself, so I spun up GPT Codex and got straight to work. And by "straight to work", I of course mean I gave it a prompt to create a coin system that can be used by invited users with buy, pay, steal, etc commands. I also had it add in an interest system so users had passive income. The following morning, I set it off. I invited my admins first, then slowly we added more and more people to the test.

It was immediately a huge success. It took a while for people to figure out what I had even done, but once they did, they were hooked. It's weird for me to look at the early messages and see people with only a few hundred coins. People started requesting for me to allow people to steal from the bot, and to be able to own multiple people. I also learned I had many bugs to fix (blame AI code lmao). The first update included a government treasury, user auctions, jailtime, bounties, selling items, and revolting from your owner.

Regular updates continued based on player feedback. I let players free their owners, added over 200 items, fixed bounties at least half a dozen times, item expiration, and more. Unfortunately, this item expiration wasn't popular. People stopped buying items entirely since they had no uses. I didn't like that, so I needed a way to encourage item purchasing, and fast. I had the idea of Rituals, a system to let you get rid of items in exchange for an event happening, like boosted success chances or inverting the interest rate. I had Claude implement rituals, tested them a little bit, and they were ready. Rituals were pretty much my hail mary for this project, I was out of ideas if this didn't work.

By the time Rituals got added, there had already been a strong meta. People had figured out that if they bought someone, sold all of their items, then freed them, they could make a lot of money. People had also figured out that stealing from the government was more profitable than stealing from users, and that stealing from jailed users was more profitable than stealing from non-jailed users. I had to show people rituals could be good at first, and it took a while for it to take off, but once people realized rituals were good (and after I deleted the old meta), they immediately took off. People thoroughly enjoyed buying lootboxes (another new addition) to burn them on rituals. I liked seeing players reverse the interest rate, or lose tens of thousands of coins, or get angry over spending thousands of coins for nothing to happen. I was content. People were playing the game as I had designed it.

I closed it a couple days later after things had settled. "Marriages" became popular, two people owning each other to have a hugely inflated net worth. I closed it when I did to keep the novelty of it. To prevent people from getting bored and just not playing anymore. I had speedran the live service game lifecycle in just a few days, which was fun because I had never done anything like it before. I learned a lot, and I appreciate everyone who played, and everyone who contributed ideas and items. And yeah it was AI coded.

Below is a summary of the entire economy, with a bunch of graphs (thank you plotly) and data. On PC, you can box select areas of scatter plots and bar graphs to zoom. At the bottom is the full chances for everything at the end of the game. Enjoy.

- Senty (April)