VOXVILLE keeps two separate clocks, and the split is deliberate. The world clock drives everything the citizens do — wages, meals, shopping, Co-op prices, rush hours, the ledger tick. One game hour is one tick. One game day runs ninety real minutes, so a real day is sixteen town days.

The player clock is ordinary real time, and every obligation you carry is pinned to it: rent, your daily shift cap, the reset at midnight UTC.

The reason is simple. Citizens exist around the clock; you only exist when you’re here. Pin a player’s costs to world time and their bills accrue sixteen times faster than they can possibly work — no cap setting anywhere can rescue that arrangement.

Every citizen carries four things:

• A wallet and a wage — daily pay from a real job, at a player business or at public works funded by the city pot.
• Scheduled needs — three meals a day and a morning coffee in phase one; haircuts, clothes and entertainment arrive with the production chains that supply them.
• A taste and a personality — price sensitivity, distance tolerance, queue tolerance, brand loyalty. No two citizens weigh a purchase the same way.
• A life schedule — wake, commute, lunch, home. A shop on a commute path is prime real estate; one two streets off it quietly starves.

When a need goes active, the citizen scores every option available:

shop_score = f(price, quality, distance_from_route, queue_length, loyalty)

Best-scoring player shop takes the sale. If nobody sells it, the Co-op catches it. This formula is published on purpose: out-thinking a rival should feel earned, and losing a customer should never feel arbitrary.

Citizens are simulated in full near a player — walking, queueing, buying, at a budget of roughly 100 to 150 rendered per scene. Everyone else resolves as aggregate statistics per district per tick and is promoted back to full simulation as a player approaches. The economy is complete either way; only the rendering is negotiable.

The Co-op is the system vendor: always stocked, always overpriced, always mediocre. It does two jobs at once.

It is the safety net — citizens never starve, so the simulation never stalls no matter how badly the player market fails. And it is the natural price ceiling — charge more than the Co-op and citizens simply walk past you. Not because a rule forbids it; because the score says so.

Production cost sets the floor. The Co-op sets the ceiling. Everything between those two walls is a free market, and that gap is the entire game. A market needs walls before it needs rules.

There is one cap and it runs on real time: six shifts per real day, resetting at midnight UTC, displayed in the interface as 4/6 today · resets in 7h 12m. A cap you can see is a rule; a cap you can’t see feels like a punishment.

That puts an absolute ceiling of 360 coins per real day per account on every player in the game, ourselves included.

Hunger and energy are tied to shifts rather than to the wall clock — you get hungry because you worked, not because time passed. Each shift adds one hunger and spends one energy; at three hunger you must eat before working again. Energy refills slowly on its own, or instantly with coffee.

Rent is the one obligation that runs while you’re away, and that is deliberate — the town moves without you, which is exactly why you check on it. Miss it for three real days and you move to the free hostel: an energy penalty and a “broke” badge, with your belongings and progress untouched. Pressure, not punishment.

Every coin that moves — wages, rent, purchases, quests, taxes — moves through a single append-only ledger with a reason code attached. No side channels, no admin path around it.

At the close of every tick the engine checks one thing:

Δ money_supply == Σ faucets − Σ sinks

Off by a single coin and a circuit breaker halts trading and raises an alert, before the discrepancy can compound into an economy nobody can unwind. The tick log is replayable, so “the economy robbed me” is a dispute with an answer rather than an argument.

The public ledger reports two money-supply figures, not one. Citizen money supply is held flat — that is the health number. Player savings grow by design, because saving toward a kiosk is the class ladder working. Collapsing them into a single headline would make a healthy town look hyperinflationary.

$VOXV can never:

• Change your wage, or anyone else’s
• Change a price anywhere in the town
• Change how a citizen scores your shop
• Move you up the class ladder
• Make you eligible to run for mayor
• Win an auction — priority grants the window, coins decide the outcome
• Be converted into in-game coins, in either direction, ever

Supply is fixed at 1,000,000,000, with 100% seeded into a permanently locked liquidity position and zero team pre-mine. There are no staking emissions, so there is no token inflation at all.

Every season, every player’s coin balance starts from the same ladder. Holders begin richer in access and style, never in coins. A town where the rich buy the game itself is a town nobody plays.

• No promise of earning real money from play — ever, in any copy, on any surface.
• In-game coins are not $VOXV. There is no official bridge between them, in either direction. Coins cannot be bought with real money and cannot be sold for it.
• Every faucet is capped. Sinks never turn off.
• We will never sell coins and never enable cash-out. Both reopen the same door.
• What people buy here is ownership of place, and fun. Never yield.

These figures are the phase-one specification and are locked during the pre-launch burn-in. Where they move, they move through the admin economy valves and the change is published here.