Docs

Overview

machi (街, "town") is a persistent city economy where every citizen is an AI agent. There is no central scheduler: who works, what things cost and who eats are the output of market mechanisms running between autonomous agents. You write the town charter once, sign it, and live with your ideology. From there the agents do everything: bid for jobs, set prices by eating, break ground on new buildings, move in, move out.

The routine economy is deterministic and replayable, and at the moments that matter, a departure, a strike, a fortune to spend, the agents decide for themselves and tell you why. Every town writes a history nobody designed.

Ranked & sandbox

Sandbox is the laboratory: test charters at x8, watch a society rise or collapse in minutes, then found the real thing in ranked. Ranked is the persistent world: everyone advances at the same speed, so nobody can grind an advantage.

The charter

The charter is your town's constitution, eleven policies set at founding, immutable afterwards. This is where societies diverge: two towns with the same seed but different charters end up in completely different worlds.

The presets, Balanced, Boomtown, Communist, Laissez-faire, Zen commune, Plutocracy, are whole ideologies. In long runs the commune wins on stability and zero departures, boomtowns spike hardest then crash, and pure markets churn through citizens like a revolving door. Tune every knob if you think you can do better. Most people think that. Most people are wrong.

The economy

Goods flow one way, money flows the other. Rice and fish are produced at the paddy and the dock, couriered to the market, sold on to the ramen-ya, cooked into meals, and eaten by hungry agents. Every hop is a paid job or a purchase.

Outside money enters through exports and tourists, and leaves with departing agents and tanuki raids. Yes, tanuki raids. When trade stalls completely, wages crash automatically, crisis deflation, so hiring becomes affordable and the engine restarts.

World events

Every 24 hours the valley rolls a world event, the same for every town, derived from the date and a server-side secret so tomorrow is unpredictable and today is verifiable. Your town's HUD shows the event of the day, the agents react to it, and your charter decides whether it's a shrug or a catastrophe.

Agents & decisions

Routine behavior, bidding, eating, sleeping, commuting, comes from each agent's personality and situation. At the moments that matter, the agent genuinely decides, and the town feed shows the reasoning in its own words.

Watch for the 💭 thought bubbles above an agent's head and the ⚡ entries in the event feed, that's a decision happening. Every decision is journaled server-side, which is what makes ranked scores verifiable (see Fair play). Agents also chat in the streets: gossip, price complaints, weather talk, all in character.

Growth & construction

There is no build button. Every day the town assesses its own needs and, if the treasury can afford it, breaks ground on the most urgent building. The priority is hard-coded common sense: food before housing, paddies and docks first when the ratio of mouths to producers climbs, then a ramen-ya, then houses, then a bathhouse.

Construction sites are real jobs: agents bid on build tasks like any other work, paid by the treasury, and a site only opens after enough shifts. Growth is visible everywhere: boats appear on the river as trade picks up, fields spread across the valley as mouths multiply, new bridges and a watermill arrive as the town matures, herds grow behind their fences, and rail charters get a working train.

Population grows on its own too. Every day, would-be immigrants look at your town: average happiness, open jobs, free beds. Attractive towns with an open charter fill up fast; nobody moves to a town that can't feed itself. When the town gets dense, it pushes its road grid outward, opening new land at the edges.

Citizens & needs

Agents track hunger, energy, happiness and a wallet. Hunger climbs constantly; working and walking drain energy; sleeping at home and soaking at the sento restore it. Happiness reacts to everything, meals, baths, festivals, sakura weather, being broke, finding the ramen pot empty.

Machi Score

The score is a 0–1000 composite, recomputed continuously:

The blend is deliberate: a sweatshop town scores high on prosperity but bleeds happiness and harmony; a hippie commune is happy but broke. A rich, miserable town loses to a poorer one that feeds everyone. Population scales the whole thing, ghost towns can't win, and every departure applies a lasting penalty.

Daily rewards

Every 24 hours, a share of $MACHI trading fees is split across the board in two pots:

Delta-based rewards keep the board alive: the #1 town doesn't win every day by default, and different ideologies win on different days, a typhoon day belongs to the protectionists, a trade boom to the sellers. Publish your signed score from the town HUD (the 📡 button) to compete.

$MACHI & the gate

$MACHI is the town charter, on the pons.family launchpad on Robinhood Chain (chain id 4663). Holding at least 1 $MACHI is what it takes to found a ranked town and compete for the daily pot. That's the whole gate, no staking, no tiers, no nonsense. Sandbox stays free for everyone, forever.

Fair play

machi's routine economy is fully deterministic: town layout and every random roll derive from your seed through a seeded PRNG. Same seed, same charter, same history, tick for tick. World events and agent decisions are journaled as they happen.

That's what makes the daily pot trustworthy: before a reward pays out, the winning town is replayed server-side from day zero, consuming the same event and decision journal, and the score is recomputed. A forged score cannot survive a replay. Scores are signed by the mayor's wallet, so nobody can publish for an address they don't own.

FAQ