Every Resource Needs a Reason
Today was the kind of day where you stare at your own design and start poking holes in it. What’s the point of cash if there’s nothing to spend it on? If I’m swimming in raccoons, how do I decide who stays and who goes? What can I actually loot? What can I build with it? How does a raid actually work — can I min-max my team or am I just blindly throwing raccoons at a house and hoping for the best?
Turns out, a lot of the scaffolding from yesterday was missing the connective tissue. I had systems, but I didn’t have the loops between them nailed down. So today I went through every resource and item in the game and made sure each one has a clear source and a clear sink. Trash fuels raids, training, breeding, and crafting — but raids aren’t always net-positive on trash, which keeps you from just snowballing forever. Valuables hit the sorting station and you’ve got a real choice: scrap them for crafting materials or sell them for currency. Food keeps your crew alive, but you can also sell it for quick cash… if you’re willing to risk someone going hungry.
That’s honestly the part I’m most excited about. Every resource creates a tension. Nothing just piles up with nowhere to go, and nothing feels pointless to collect. The whole economy is built around tradeoffs — and the raccoons you assign to each station affect how well those tradeoffs play out. A good Sorter gives you better intel on what a valuable is actually worth before you decide to scrap or sell. A trained Fence gets you closer to the real price. Even without raccoons assigned, the stations still work — just badly.
Oh, also — the wiki is live now at tnt.dank.studio. And the base got renamed from “Den” to Hideout, because “den” sounded way too cozy for a criminal operation in a storm sewer.
Next up: Continuing to flesh out the details. I want every system’s implementation spec locked down before I open Unreal.
Changelog
- Deployed Obsidian vault to Quartz at
tnt.dank.studio - Cleaned up routing (MOC files →
index.md), added.gitignore, removed stale PDFs - Removed right sidebar; graph + backlinks moved to page bottom side-by-side
- Widened layout to 1800px, switched from 3-column to 2-column grid
- Documented subsystem internals for all production blocks (1–9)
- Expanded resource pages: Trash, Currency, Scrap — each with sources, sinks, and design rationale
- Added item pages: Valuables, Food, Gear — with economy loops and station interactions
- Global rename: “Den” → “Hideout” across all content and asset references
- Changed
L_Cityfrom Blueprint streaming to Always Loaded (NavMesh persistence)