Sheckles → Seeds → (time) → Crops → Sheckles, where nearly all the design lives in three throttles: shop stock RNG, real-time growth delays, and mutation multipliers. Node-by-node mapping Currency & shop Sheckles — the central Pool. Everything orbits this. Seed Shop — a Converter (Sheckles → Seeds), but gated by a Shop Stock pool that a timed Source refills every 5 minutes through a random Gate (weighted odds per seed tier; rare seeds frequently stock at 0). This RNG stock is the game's primary pacing valve and check-in hook — model it faithfully or the whole sim lies to you. Gear Shop — second Converter (Sheckles → Sprinklers/tools), separate restock timer. Gear feeds Registers, not Pools (they modify rates, not resources). The garden Seed Inventory — Pool, fills from shop, drains via planting. Planting — Converter (Seeds → Growing Plants) capped by a Plot Space Register (limited planting spots — this is the real constraint mid-game, not money). Growth — a Delay per crop, real-time, runs while offline (in Machinations just model continuous time; but note the retention design lives in that offline persistence). Harvest — two crop classes, model separately: Single-harvest: plant is consumed on harvest (Converter: Plant → Crop). Multi-harvest: plant is a permanent Source producing crops on an interval. This is the game's compounding engine — multi-harvest plants are effectively generators you buy once. Sell (Sam) — Converter (Crops → Sheckles), rate multiplied by the mutation Register below. Mutations — the multiplier stack Model as Registers feeding the Sell converter: Value = Base × Size/Weight roll × Growth mutation × (1 + Σ environmental bonuses) Growth mutations: Golden ≈ 20×, Rainbow ≈ 50× (small random chance on grow, pet-buffable). Environmental mutations (Wet, Chilled, Frozen, Shocked, etc.) come from Weather Events — model as a random-interval Gate that sweeps the Growing Plants pool and stamps a multiplier. Thunderstorm/Shocked-tier events are jackpot moments. Because these stack, the top end is a lottery: one Rainbow + Shocked crop can outearn hours of normal play. That skew is deliberate — it's the slot-machine layer on top of the idle layer. Pets Egg Shop — Converter (Sheckles → Eggs), restock ~30 min (again, weighted RNG on which eggs appear). Hatch — Delay (real-time, hours for rare eggs) → Pets Pool. Pets are pure Registers: growth speed, mutation chance, seed refunds, auto-collection. They're the meta-progression that bends every rate in the graph. Monetization (the bypass valves) Robux Source — external Source that injects directly into Seeds, Eggs, Gear, and hatch-time skips, bypassing both the Sheckle economy and the stock RNG. Critically: when a rare seed is out of stock, Robux is often the only way to get it now. The shop RNG isn't just pacing — it's the monetization pressure generator. Trading/Gifting — player-to-player exchange; skip it for a single-player sim, or model as a noisy external Source/Drain. What to watch when you run it Sinks are weak. Sheckles have no drain except shops. Once a player owns a bed of multi-harvest, mutation-buffed plants, income goes exponential and the only counterweight is ever-more-expensive seed tiers. Watch how fast your sim's Sheckle pool goes vertical — that's the inflation the devs chase with constant new content updates. The real currencies are plot space and shop luck, not money. Mid-game, Sheckles stop being the binding constraint. Your sim should show the bottleneck migrating — that migration is the economy's actual shape. Check-in cadence — 5-min seed restock, 30-min eggs, random weather. Model a player who checks every N minutes and sweep N; earnings vs. attention is the retention curve, and it's why the game ate Roblox.
