What the simulation actually does, how a score is checked, and what the payout is and is not. Written so nothing on the rest of the site has to be taken on faith.
Currency in Stonks City is closed. Tax takes money out of circulation and into the treasury. Spending the treasury, which mostly means building, puts it back. The press creates treasury money out of nothing, but it does not touch prices until it is spent. Bonds move money from residents to the treasury and cost interest later. Exports bring hard reserves in and the Mint pays for them in currency, so a trade surplus creates money at home. Imports do the reverse.
Banks turn deposits into credit. Fresh credit is fresh deposits, which is where most of the money supply in a large city comes from. The policy rate and the reserve ratio set the price of that credit rather than rationing it, which is how a central bank has actually worked for a long time.
The price level is anchored to money per head. A city of a given size wants to hold a given quantity of currency; the exponent on that is below one, because larger cities turn their money over faster. When the money supply sits above what the city wants to hold, prices climb until the two match. When it sits below, they fall.
Prices are sticky, so the adjustment takes about a quarter. Expected inflation feeds the velocity of money and the wage bargain, which is what turns a loose policy into a spiral rather than a one off step. The headline inflation figure everywhere on the site is the change in the price index over thirteen weeks, annualised.
The score is residents raised to the power of four fifths, times real output per resident, times a stability multiplier, times eight. Stability starts at 1.35 and loses ground to six things measured across the whole run rather than at the close: inflation away from target, unemployment above six percent, debt above a year of output, unrest, reserves too thin to cover a month of imports, and bank failures. Weeks with prices in the band pay up to fifteen hundredths back.
Ending early keeps a quarter of the score. The first thirteen weeks are excluded from the stability measure, because every city is chaotic while it finds its feet.
The score is not taken from the client. A ranked run is uploaded whole and the server recomputes the score from it with the same function the game uses, then requires the wallet signature to cover that recomputed number, the week and a timestamp no more than ten minutes old. Runs whose history does not match their week count, or which are not actually finished, are refused.
This stops a score being claimed that the submitted run does not produce. It does not replay the run tick by tick against the recorded inputs, so a determined player who forges a self consistent history could still get past it. That is a known limit and it is written here rather than hidden.
$STONKS launches on Pons. The creator fees that accrue to it are not kept. Every 24 hours the top ranked city of the round receives them.
The pot is whatever the fee actually collected over that round. There is no fixed number, no emission and no promise of a floor. The transfer is made by hand after the round closes and the transaction hash is published against that round on the leaderboard. A round that has not been paid says so.
There is no payout contract. Nothing on this site escrows funds or takes custody of anything, and connecting a wallet is only ever used to identify a run and to save it.
Practice runs are free, need no wallet and are not scored. A ranked run needs a connected wallet, and once the token exists it needs at least one $STONKS held in it, checked both in the browser and again on the server when the score is submitted.
The gate fails open in two cases on purpose: before the token address is set, so the game works from day one, and when the chain cannot be reached, so an RPC outage never costs a holder their round.
A wallet is a save slot. A run in progress is stored against the address so it can be picked up on another machine. Writing a save needs a signature, but the signed text carries the date, so one approval covers a whole day of autosaves. Players without a wallet are saved in the browser instead.
City models are KayKit City Builder Bits by Kay Lousberg, released under CC0. The 41 pieces share one texture atlas and are merged into a single file, so the whole city draws from one material.