# Contracts and orders

*Mechanic* · `contracts-orders` · status: **asserted**

Discrete jobs with requirements, deadlines, and payouts, such as deliveries or commissions, drive income and planning.

| field | value |
|---|---|
| aliases | job board, missions, commissions, freight market |
| family | Economy & finance |
| substrate | Rule system, Stochastic events |
| math basis | Scheduling, Optimization |
| feedback | Reinforcing (positive) |
| player interface | Choice / cards, Orders |
| legibility | 4 |
| emergence potential | 2 |
| authoring cost | 2 |
| compute cost | 1 |
| tuning difficulty | 3 |
| ai leverage | 3 |
| maturity | Classic |
| core count *(computed)* | 7 |
| earliest game *(computed)* | [Transport Tycoon](../game/transport-tycoon.md) |
| earliest year *(computed)* | 1994 |
| prevalence *(computed)* | 17 |
| prevalence rank *(computed)* | 33 |
| prevalence share *(computed)* | 0.096 |
| subgenre spread *(computed)* | 10 |
| technique count *(computed)* | 0 |
| technique exposure *(computed)* | 0.0 |

## Definition

Owns a pool of offers, each with a requirement (cargo type and quantity, a service, or an object meeting a spec), an origin and destination or a client, a deadline, a payout, and often a penalty and a reputation gate. Offers are generated from templates and current simulation state, sit on a board until they expire, and are accepted by the player. On completion the rule checks the requirement, pays out (often scaled by distance, cargo value, or speed), and updates reputation; lateness or abandonment forfeits pay or charges a penalty. Euro Truck Simulator 2's freight market, Elite Dangerous mission boards, Farming Simulator contracts, Car Mechanic Simulator repair orders, and Transport Tycoon's time-limited subsidies are common forms.

## Player Experience

A steady menu of concrete goals. The player scans offers, weighs payout against distance, risk, and time, chains jobs so trips are never empty, and races deadlines. Contracts turn an open sandbox into a sequence of short, legible tasks.

## Design Levers

- payout formula (distance, cargo value, urgency, risk) relative to running costs
- deadline tightness and the penalty for lateness or abandonment
- offer generation: random templates versus real shortages in the simulation
- reputation or rank gates that unlock higher-paying work
- number of simultaneous contracts allowed and board refresh rate

## Failure Modes

- Templated contracts detached from simulation state feel like grind, since taking the best payout per minute is the only decision.
- Abandon-and-refresh exploits let players cherry-pick outliers when boards regenerate too freely.
- Payouts that outscale costs make every contract profitable and remove route planning.

## Dynamics

- Players chain contracts into loops that minimize empty legs, producing self-discovered trade circuits.
- Reputation gating creates a ladder where risky early work buys access to lucrative later work.
- When contracts are generated from real shortages, completing them dampens the shortage that created them.

## Open Questions

- Do contracts generated by a language model from live simulation state (a town short of grain, a rival's broken supply line) feel less like grind than templated ones?
- Can open-ended commissions be judged by learned evaluators, such as a model scoring whether a built structure meets a client's brief?

## Relations

**synergy**

- [Vehicle routes and schedules](../mechanic/vehicle-route-scheduling.md): Contracts give routes a purpose and a deadline.

## Backlinks (computed)

**involved in:** [Agent ambassadors between player worlds](../opportunity/agent-ambassadors-async.md), [Generated inspection shifts](../opportunity/generated-inspection-shifts.md)

**used by:** [Bitburner](../game/bitburner.md), [Car Mechanic Simulator 2021](../game/car-mechanic-simulator-2021.md), [Eco](../game/eco.md), [Elite Dangerous](../game/elite-dangerous.md), [Euro Truck Simulator 2](../game/euro-truck-simulator-2.md), [Farming Simulator 25](../game/farming-simulator-25.md), [Game Dev Story](../game/game-dev-story.md), [House Flipper](../game/house-flipper.md), [Jurassic World Evolution](../game/jurassic-world-evolution.md), [Kerbal Space Program](../game/kerbal-space-program.md), [Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024](../game/microsoft-flight-simulator-2024.md), [PC Building Simulator](../game/pc-building-simulator.md), [PowerWash Simulator](../game/powerwash-simulator.md), [Prison Architect](../game/prison-architect.md), [SnowRunner](../game/snowrunner.md), [Theme Hospital](../game/theme-hospital.md), [Transport Tycoon](../game/transport-tycoon.md)

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Provenance: created in run `2026-10-24-taxonomy-m2`.