The stranger economy: what it costs to keep other people alive

Open the supplies list Every supply with its Satiety, weight and price, sorted by Satiety per dollar. This opens on White Sugar, the richest Satiety per dollar on any shelf and the yardstick the money figures on this page are measured against.

The phone has the people: who messages you, what shelf they carry and what they want for it. This page has the arithmetic behind them, which is what a survivor costs to keep alive, what a gift is worth against a trade, and what a trade actually draws.

Three things a survivor is to you

The game keeps three counters and does not mix them. Reading the system as one relationship is where most of the confusion comes from.

Only the first of the three is what the Stranger ending reads. Its target names 6 survivors alive and nothing else. The tables price the tracks separately too: a gift is worth 30 towards helped and a delivery is worth Satiety, and nothing exported turns one into the other. Clearing the helped threshold with 2 gifts feeds nobody.

What keeping one person alive costs

One survivor eats 0.5× what Wage Slave burns. The ending’s 6 eat 144 Satiety a day between them, which is 3.0× your own drain, and every point of it comes out of the same store that keeps you alive.

Two rules soften that, and neither removes it.

A delivery stocks someone for 14 days. One drop leaves a survivor holding up to 336 Satiety, so you are not sending food daily, you are sending it every 14 days per person. Carrying 6 survivors from day 5 to the check is 30 deliveries, which is 5 each.

A survivor lasts 10 days on nothing. That is the margin for a missed week. Set against the check it gives two dates worth writing down: day 57 is the last day a full drop still covers day 71, and day 61 is the last day someone’s food can run out and still leave the whole grace window between them and the count.

The bill from the day it opens to the check

Feeding 6 survivors from day 5 to the check on day 71 is 9,504 Satiety. Two ways to read a number that large.

Against the game’s own targets, it is 7.9× the 1,200 Satiety the Iron Barrel Hub ending asks you to have sitting on a shelf. That ending wants a stockpile; this one wants the same food handed away and gone.

Against money, it is 1,901 servings of White Sugar White Sugar Food · Seasonings Satiety +5 Morale -1 500 g 2×1 cells 50.0 Satiety/kg $10 360 d shelf life Waste at day 1800 Seasonings Cook or use directly , the richest Satiety per dollar on any shelf at 2.50 Satiety a dollar. Buy every point of it at that price and the bill is $3,802, against the $1,000 Wage Slave starts with. Nobody buys it all, because you grow and cook and catch most of it. The figure is there to say what the commitment weighs: 3.8× a starting purse, for a line you can only enter once.

One full drop is $134 at the same price, and one survivor for one day is $10. What a supply is worth has why the shelf price is the wrong number to send by.

Giving, and what it is actually worth

A gift is worth 3.8× a trade. The threshold the game treats as helped is 60, which is 2 gifts or 8 trades. If the relationship is what you are after, the trades are almost beside the point.

Giving pays twice. Beside the affinity, the tuning table carries a base of 2 Morale for giving something away, and 3 of the talents below add more Morale on top of that per transaction. Morale has what a point of it is worth elsewhere.

What the discount does not say. The tables carry a ceiling on how far a deal can come down, 60%, which is deeper than the deepest shop discount, the 50% on the Clearance shelf in what you are really buying. What they do not carry is a route to it: the step stored for a single deal line is 0. So 60% is a number the game holds, not a return the site can promise you on your gifts, and nothing exported ties the helped counter to a price.

What a trade puts on the table

A trade hands you two things. The shelf is the named stockpile a message offers, it is a list you can read before you spend anything, and the phone has who carries which of the 8 stockpiles. The draw is the other half, and it is this page’s.

Every pool belongs to a person. Each of the 20 trading contacts has a pool of their own, keyed to them by id, so the 20 pools and the 20 traders are the same list read twice. Nobody wanders in with a cart. The pools are not the same size either: the widest holds 12 entries and the narrowest 4, so which contact you are dealing with decides how wide the lottery is. The widest belongs to Sales Assistant, Discount Mart, Supermarket Clerk's Home Inventory.

A draw takes 2 to 4 kinds and 1 to 2 of each, so the most a single trade can hand over is 8 items.

Read the last column as a floor rather than as odds. A pool’s entries are weights that add up to one whole draw, so the figure is the item’s share of a single slot, and a trade fills 2 to 4 slots. The chance of actually seeing the item is higher than the share, and the tables do not say by how much.

75 different things can turn up across all the pools, and Disinfectant Spray Disinfectant Spray Meds · Snacks 500 g 1×1 cells $50 Keeps indefinitely Snacks Spray to disinfect. is in every one of the 20. That makes it the most reachable thing in the system, not a certainty: its best share of a draw is 10%. 46 of the 75 sit in a single pool, so most of what exists here is behind one person.

The draw is not where the food comes from. 29 of the 75 are food, 23 of those restore any Satiety, and the richest is Cold Cuts Cold Cuts Food · Meat Satiety +50 Morale +5 Life +5 1500 g 2×2 cells 33.3 Satiety/kg $120 30 d shelf life Waste at day 105 Meat Open and ready-to-eat; temptingly delicious at 50, which sits in 1 of the 20 pools. Even a draw that came up perfectly, 8 items of the richest food in these pools, would cover 2.8 days of the ending’s upkeep. The people you feed do not feed you back.

What the drone brings home

3 items a day is a trickle, and it runs in the opposite direction to the upkeep. What the drone is for is reach, not volume: it is how goods get to you from people you never visit. The last two rows are the part worth knowing before you send it, and they are also where the exported tables stop. They carry the size of the risk, a 10% base chance and at most 1 per dispatch, and not its shape. Nothing says what the meeting turns into.

The trade limit and the foraging limit are separate counters, and both of them move. The talents below raise each one on its own.

The talents that move these numbers

12 talents change something on this page, and all but 1 of them are drawn during a run rather than bought between runs, so most of this list is luck rather than a plan.

Read down the last column and the gap is the point: they raise what a transaction returns and how often the drone flies, and not one of them lowers what a survivor eats. The upkeep is the one figure in this system that no talent touches. Which talents to buy covers what the permanent tree costs as a whole, and the talents list has every level of each.

What to do

1. Decide on day 5 whether this run supports people. The bill starts when you say yes and runs to the check whether or not you keep up.
2. Budget 24 Satiety a day per survivor on top of your own and size the stockpile for both. The supplies list sorted by Satiety per dollar shows what covering that costs.
3. Send full drops, never top-ups. One delivery covers 14 days, so a full drop is one trip where daily ones are 14, and 30 drops cover the whole run.
4. Give rather than trade when you want the relationship. 30 against 8 is not a margin, it is a different action, and giving pays 2 Morale on top.
5. Put day 57 and day 61 in front of you once the run is past the middle. After the first there is no drop that reaches the check, and after the second there is no grace window left to spend.
6. Judge a trade on the shelf, not on the draw. The shelf is a list you can read; the draw is 2 to 4 kinds out of a pool of up to 12.

Quick reference

• Trading opens: day 5.
• Per survivor: 24 Satiety a day, $10 at the best price on any shelf.
• The ending’s 6: 144 a day, 3.0× your own drain.
• One delivery covers 14 days (336 Satiety).
• Grace window: 10 days on nothing.
• Last full drop for the check: day 57. Last meal: day 61.
• The whole bill: 9,504 Satiety, 30 deliveries.
• Gift 30, trade 8, threshold 60.
• Deal discount ceiling: 60%, with a per-line step of 0.
• Drone: 1 trade dispatch a day, 1 hour, 3 items, and a 10% chance of meeting something.
• The draw: 20 pools, one per trading contact, 75 different goods, 29 of them food.