Logs / Route 007
Nobody writes the jobs
There's no job list in Sandbox Drive. Every haul exists because something on the island ran out of something. How that works, how pay is calculated, why fuel gets cheaper when it's delivered, and the sawmill that threw away its own planks.
Most driving games come with a list of jobs somebody wrote. Sandbox Drive doesn’t, because a hand-written list never reacts to anything the player does. Instead the island runs as a small economy. Factories, farms, harbours and towns make things, use things, and run out of things, and a job only exists because something actually needs moving.
One caveat before the details. On Hachijō not every job can be finished yet: there are no trailers to buy, and tankers, tippers and flatbeds can’t carry cargo, which rules out 11 of the 24 goods. Everything below works. The vehicles to do half of it with are what’s being built next.
Make, use, run out
Hachijō has 25 facilities trading 24 goods. Each one has bins for what it takes in and what it puts out. A producer turns out a batch of 4 every two minutes, as long as its inputs are stocked. A town eats steadily through its petrol, supplies, concrete, timber and parcels, 2 units every 20 minutes. The ports bring in cement, fertiliser, feed, parts and fuel from off the island, 4 units every two and a half minutes, up to a stock of 40.
Facilities also have a prosperity score. It goes up by 2 when a job for them is completed and down by 1 when one expires, and it speeds up their production. So does stocking them well ahead: fill an input bin to twice a batch and production runs twice as fast, rising to five times as fast at eight batches. An island that’s looked after gets busier. One that’s neglected slowly winds down.
Where jobs come from
Every 15 seconds the economy goes looking for trouble. It finds three kinds.
A shortage: a facility’s stock, plus whatever is already on its way, has dropped below a safety margin. It raises a need and pairs it with the nearest place that makes the stuff. The margin grows with the number of players on the server, so a busy server keeps more cargo moving.
A glut: a producer’s output bin is 75% full. Rather than stop, it offers a haul to its nearest customer.
A return trip: a delivery has just finished, so there’s a backhaul from the same place, at 90% pay. Nobody likes driving home empty.
Bigger needs become contracts, 20 units that can be delivered in as many runs as the truck needs. Several players can work the same contract at once.
How pay works
Every good has a base price and a price per kilometre. Silk is worth a lot more per kilometre than gravel. For a contract, pay is the quantity times base plus per-km times distance, times 1.5, with a completion bonus of half the distance part on top.
Two things keep it from being silly. Distance counts in full for the first 4 km and then grows with the square root, so a 30 km run pays well but not seven times a 4 km one. Logs and other oversized loads are the exception and stay linear. And a job nobody takes gains up to 50% extra over 15 minutes, locked in the moment it’s claimed. The island pays extra for dealing with what everyone else ignored.
A real example: 20 units of silk from the weaving workshop to Yaene harbour, 3.6 km, pays 4,591, plus 430 on the last drop. Each drop pays its share straight away, rounded so that the drops add up to exactly the total.
Some cargo wants care. Perishables get five minutes plus the drive time at 45 km/h before they start losing value, down to half. Fragile loads lose half their value once the truck has taken a quarter of its damage.
Buying low
Jobs are optional. A producer’s output can be bought at half its base price and sold anywhere that uses it. The selling price climbs with the buyer’s shortage, from half the base price when they’re well stocked to one and a quarter times it when they’re empty. Buying cheap at the source and selling to whoever has run out is an honest living.
Why fuel gets cheaper when it’s delivered
Fuel isn’t a fixed price either. The pump price is the base price (1.80 a litre for petrol, 1.70 for diesel) times an island supply factor, times 21% tax. The supply factor is 1.8 when the island’s fuel stocks are empty, 1.0 when they’re full, and 0.85 when there’s a glut. Every tanker that makes it to a filling station makes fuel cheaper for everyone on the server. Electric charging stays at a fixed price.
The pumps meter fuel in real time, engine off please. Whoever starts the pump pays, whichever car it’s going into.
Where the money goes
Every player starts with 10,000. The cheapest vehicle, a kei pickup, costs 18,000. So the first stop is the bank.
Loans need a deposit of 10 to 40% and charge 2 to 12% interest, depending on the credit score, which runs from 300 to 850 and starts at 500. Paying on time pushes it up. Three missed payments and the financed car won’t start. A fourth, and it gets repossessed.
The other costs: renting a car costs 2% of its price per day, speed cameras fine (only where the limit is actually signposted), the car wash is 75, a tow is 150 plus 60 per km, repairs scale with the damage and the car’s value, and getting a car out of storage costs 150.
What went wrong
An economy has a lot of moving parts, and several of them failed without making a sound.
Factories with a full output bin threw away whatever they couldn’t store. One sawmill binned 1,060 of the 1,152 planks
it made. In the same bug hunt, a single misplaced break in the code meant one works never produced anything at all,
and every farm that depended on it sat idle. The commit that fixed it is titled “factories destroyed what they made,
and one break killed a region”, which is about as honest as a commit message gets.
Contracts couldn’t happen, because the largest batch any facility made was 4 and a contract needed 10.
For a while, “service” jobs paid 450 for standing at a facility for three seconds. That one ended with a simple rule: if the game can’t check that a job was done, it doesn’t pay for it.
The first simulation of Hachijō’s economy had the towns burning fuel so fast that the entire island drained its only fuel depot. The rates were rebalanced before anyone had to queue.
And the “Load cargo” button never showed up on shared contracts, because it was checking for a status that shared jobs never get.
Next up is the bit that makes all of this playable on Hachijō: trailers, tankers and tippers that can actually be loaded.
Filed under economy, deep-dive, hachijo-jima