The economy

Feeding your people

Stockfish does two jobs at once. It's a good you can sell, and it's what feeds everyone in your jarldom, your people and your Housecarls alike. Every isle you own also costs upkeep in gold, and the bigger your jarldom grows, the more that upkeep adds up.

If you can't cover your food or your upkeep, you fall into arrears. It isn't an instant collapse. It scales with how far behind you are: some of your soldiers start to desert, and a share of your isles go Dormant each day, producing nothing until you pay to bring them back online. Nothing is lost for good until you've stayed badly behind for days on end.

The Harbor Authority offers a Relief Loan to anyone in arrears, at a steady daily cost, specifically so a bad stretch has a way out that doesn't require begging a rival for help.

How the Harbor Exchange works

Every good in the game, stockfish, bog iron, tar, timber, salt, and furs, trades on the Harbor Exchange, priced in Hacksilver. Four rules keep it fair, and they hold no matter who you are or how much gold you have:

• The price only moves because of buying and selling. Nobody sets it by hand.
• Your own wealth never buys you a better rate. A poor jarl and a rich jarl pay the same price at the same moment.
• Buying a lot at once costs exactly the same as buying it in small pieces over time. There's no trick to splitting an order.
• Buying and selling always costs you a little either way, so a quick buy-then-sell round trip loses money rather than making it.

Buy a lot of one good fast and the price climbs as you go, then drifts back down toward normal over the following hours once you stop. This is also where Free Isles go up for sale. See Growing Your Jarldom for how buying one works.

The Counting House

The Counting House is Islejarl's bank, and it gives you three things to do with gold besides spend it.

• Deposit it. Gold left with the Counting House earns steady interest, a little every day.
• Borrow against it. If you're short, you can take a loan against the value of your jarldom, up to a limit, at a daily cost that rises when a lot of the world is in debt at once.
• Buy a Harbor Bond. Bonds pay out more than a plain deposit, but only once they mature, and cashing one in early costs you a real penalty. Bonds can't be looted or ransomed by another jarl, which makes them the safest place to keep gold, though you can't vault everything: some of your liquid wealth always has to stay exposed.

The Salvors' Union

When a salvage run brings back a haul from a wreck near the skerries, it doesn't go to the open Exchange. It goes to the Salvors' Union instead, an outside buyer that pays a steady, published price. That keeps one lucky salvage run from crashing a market overnight.

The Union also posts open contracts for goods that have gotten too cheap, at a price below what the Exchange would give you, which puts a soft floor under prices without letting anyone farm it for easy gold. It never deals with Outlaw Crews, and its whole contract list is public in the Lawspeaker's Log.