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🧠 Economy — What This System Does (and Doesn’t Do)

This page explains what the Economy system is responsible for and what is intentionally left to you.

No code. No implementation details. Just boundaries.

✅ What Economy does

Economy is responsible for:

  • Coordinating money and item transactions
  • Handling shop buys and sells
  • Granting reward bundles containing money and/or items
  • Supporting craft-style economy transactions with costs and results
  • Running preflight checks for money, item ownership, and item space
  • Applying currency policies where supported by the ledger
  • Supporting escrow-aware payment flows when an escrow provider is available
  • Passing through reason strings and source identifiers for telemetry/correlation
  • Attempting best-effort rollback or compensation when a later transaction step fails
  • Mapping lower-level currency/inventory failures into clear Economy result codes

👉 In short:

Economy owns the orchestration of value transactions across currency and item systems

❌ What Economy does not do

Economy intentionally does not provide:

Persistence

  • No save files
  • No cloud sync
  • No automatic save/load
  • No transaction history storage by itself

You must decide:

  • when balances and inventories are saved
  • where transaction data is stored
  • how restoration is handled
  • whether audit/history data is persisted

Networking

  • No replication
  • No prediction
  • No multiplayer reconciliation
  • No server authority layer

You must implement:

  • server-side validation
  • client/server sync
  • multiplayer transaction authority
  • anti-cheat or trust rules

Currency Storage

  • No wallet implementation by itself
  • No balance database
  • No account system

Economy works through a value ledger abstraction.

That ledger may be backed by:

  • RevFramework Currency
  • your own wallet system
  • points, reputation, tokens, or other numeric value systems

👉 Economy coordinates value. It does not own every possible value store.

Inventory Storage

  • No inventory container implementation by itself
  • No item database
  • No item definition registry
  • No automatic GUID resolver

Economy works through an item-store abstraction.

That item store may be backed by:

  • RevFramework Inventory
  • your own inventory system
  • a custom container/service layer

👉 Economy asks item systems to add/remove things. It does not become the inventory.

UI / UX

  • No shop screens
  • No reward popups
  • No crafting menu
  • No confirmation dialogs
  • No player-facing error message system

Economy returns structured operation results.

You decide:

  • how results are displayed
  • which failures are shown to players
  • when buttons are enabled or disabled
  • what feedback players receive

Business Rules

  • No built-in game-specific pricing rules
  • No automatic regional pricing
  • No economy balancing
  • No drop-rate logic
  • No progression gates

Economy supports policies, ledgers, item stores, reasons, and source IDs, but:

👉 You define the actual business/game rules.

🧠 Responsibility Split

Responsibility Owner
Shop buy/sell orchestration Economy
Reward bundle grants Economy
Money + item transaction coordination Economy
Currency policy application Currency / Ledger
Escrow handling when available Currency / Ledger
Item add/remove execution Item Store / Inventory
Best-effort compensation Economy + backing services
Save/load system You
Networking You
Authority rules You
UI / UX You
Game-specific pricing/balance You

🧩 The Mental Shortcut

If you’re ever unsure:

  • “How do money and item operations get coordinated?” → Economy
  • “Does the player have enough money?” → Ledger / Currency
  • “Does the player own this item?” → Item Store / Inventory
  • “Who is allowed to buy, sell, or claim this?” → You
  • “When and where is data saved?” → You
  • “How is this shown to the player?” → You

⚠️ Important Transaction Note

Economy transactions are designed to be predictable and explicit, but they are not magic database transactions.

Some flows may apply multiple steps, such as:

  1. debit money
  2. remove item costs
  3. deliver items or rewards

If a later step fails, Economy may attempt rollback or compensation.

That compensation is best-effort and depends on the backing systems allowing the reverse operation.

👉 In plain English:

Economy tries to clean up after partial failure, but your backing services still decide what is actually allowed.

🎯 The Point

Economy is designed to be:

  • Modular
  • Adapter-driven
  • Explicit
  • Result-based
  • Safe to integrate with different currency and inventory systems

It gives you:

👉 a reliable orchestration layer for value transactions

It does not try to be:

👉 your entire game economy, save system, multiplayer authority model, inventory database, and UI layer all rolled into one oversized mess

Because that would be shite.

TL;DR

Economy coordinates value transactions.
Your currency and item systems hold the actual data.
You own persistence, networking, authority, balancing, and UI.