One currency was running the whole game. We're giving it two coworkers.
That sentence is the whole redesign. If you remember nothing else on this page, remember it — every change below is just that rule applied to farms, workers, and furniture.
01 · Why change anything
Today, money does every job. So one number solves the game.
Right now every activity turns into coins, and coins buy everything back. The moment a player finds the best money-per-hour (hi, pitcher plants), every other choice stops mattering. The game is “solved,” and solved games get boring.
Today — one currency
One dial to optimize. Find the best $/hr and you've beaten LOFTS.
After — three currencies, three jobs
No single dial. Rich players still need to grow, build, and feed. Coins can't shortcut it.
02 · The three currencies
Each one has a job. None can do the others' job.
Coins
- Buy seeds, hire workers
- Pay the coin part of every build
- Trade with the market
- Luxury spending
Can never buy: materials. No amount of money substitutes for production.
Materials
- Willow wood — the new builder crop
- Flour, wax, fiber, coal — now build things too
- Consumed by construction, forever needed by machines
Can be sold for coins (badly). Can never be bought. You grow them or you don't have them.
Food & comfort
- Workers eat meals from your pantry
- Furniture makes lofts comfy
- Comfy lofts = faster workers
Replaces wages entirely. Feeding your team is gameplay, not a tax.
03 · The new crop
Willow: the crop that sells terribly — on purpose.
Willow grows in tall stacks like bamboo and drops willow wood. Selling it to the market is the worst deal in the entire game. That's not a bug — it's the whole point: wood is for building, and every plot growing willow is a plot not growing something profitable.
04 · Building
Upgrades now cost coins and a basket of real stuff.
Every room, tier, and machine keeps its coin price — and adds a shopping list of materials that makes sense for what you're building. A bakery needs flour. An apiary needs wax. A rocket silo needs coal and fiber. You gather the basket, then you watch it get built.
Grow the basket
The build screen shows exactly what's needed. Your saved materials are safe from the auto-merchant while you collect.
Preview the blueprint
A ghost outline of the new room appears on your plot with the checklist floating next to it.
Commit
Coins + basket are taken all at once, or not at all. No half-payments, ever.
Watch it rise
Scaffolding goes up and the room assembles in stages. Your wheat became a building.
05 · Workers
Wages are gone. Workers eat instead.
Before
A wage tax
You prepaid coins every couple of hours. It was a meter that drained. Nobody ever felt anything about it.
After
A lunchbox
Each worker eats 2 meals an hour from your pantry — bread, tarts, pies, whatever you've baked. Cheapest food first, never your fancy pastries. Feeding your team is now part of the farm.
Out of food? Nothing breaks and nothing is fined — the worker just naps by his bed until you feed him. New players without an oven can serve raw crops; it works, it's just expensive. And machines get hungry too: running one sips a trickle of wood + coins, so wood never stops mattering, even when you've built everything.
06 · Comfort
Furniture finally does something: comfy lofts work faster.
Every loft gets one comfort score from the furniture and decor in it. It only nudges worker speed — it never touches your sale prices — and you can see it: cozy lofts glow with fireflies, and workers hum while they work.
07 · How it ships
Three drops. Fun arrives first.
Each drop is one system, with a tester week before it goes wide. The order is chosen so players feel something on day one — no homework before the fun.
The lofts come alive
Comfort scores, ambient glow, workers sitting down to shared meals. Pure warmth, zero economy risk.
Players feel: “my loft is a home now”
Built by hand
Willow arrives together with construction costs, blueprints, and staged building — wood and its purpose land on the same day.
Players feel: “I grew this building”
Hungry workers
Wages out, lunchboxes in. Leftover prepaid wages are refunded in coins automatically.
Players feel: “my farm feeds my team”
08 · What things cost
A taste of the price list.
| Build | Coins | Materials basket |
|---|---|---|
| Tier 1 → 2 | 50,000 | 24 wood + 6 bread |
| Bakery room | free | 25 wood + 10 flour |
| Apiary room | 60,000 | 35 wood + 7 wax |
| Oven | 20,000 | 12 wood + 1 coal |
| Rocket silo | 1,000,000 | 480 wood + 7 coal + 12 fiber |
Example costs from the new economy. Final numbers get tuned during tester weeks.
09 · The safety rails
Four quiet rules keep it honest.
One-way market
Materials can be sold (badly) but never bought. Whales can't skip the growing.
Stockpiles are safe
Saved build materials are invisible to the auto-merchant. Your tier fund can't be sold while you sleep.
No infinite farms
Unattended workers (offline or AFK) cap at 12 hours of production. No perpetual-motion lofts.
Dupe watch
Every material is tracked on its own ledger. If wood appears from nowhere, the dashboard flags it same-day.