In the first of these notes I told a story I was proud of. I drew a Wood Legend called the Run on Oona's Hoard, a 1929 bank run reskinned as woodland folklore, and watched the owl who keeps the honey read the panic and start liquidating. The flood of supply crashed the honey price from 10 down to 3 over the next few turns. Nobody scripted it. A reskinned bank run made an agent dump an asset, and the dump moved a price. That was the whole thesis: give a small model a role and a budget, and emergent market behavior falls out for free.

Then I rebuilt the wood, and the crash stopped happening. This installment is about why, because the failure taught me more about building on agents than the original success did.

The rebuild swapped one model running five creatures for a council of five different labs' small models, each driving its own creature: an OpenAI model, an NVIDIA model, an OpenBMB model, and a half-billion-parameter model I fine-tuned myself running two of them. The point was honesty. If the claim is that small models can run a living economy, the strongest version of that claim is five distinct architectures making distinct choices in the same market, not one model wearing five hats.

I rebuilt the operator side too. The player is now a financier who works from the shadows: short a good, whisper a true tip to set up its fall, spring the legend, and collect when the price craters. I made that loop legible on the screen, with an objective, a scoreboard, and a one-click first trade. Making a promise visible is the fastest way to discover the promise is false.

Because when I shorted honey and sprang the Run on Oona's Hoard, honey did not crash. It rose. The council models, reading a rumor that the vault was empty and a tip that the crop was doomed, did not dump honey the way the original single model had. They hoarded it. Scarcity, not a fire sale. The short lost money, and the headline the narrator wrote, with no irony, was that the honey gamble had soured.

This is the lesson, and it is not specific to a game. In an agent economy the reference price is not a dial you turn. It is the residue of what the agents actually choose to trade. The original crash was real, but it was contingent on one model's disposition, not a robust property of the system. Change the population, and the emergent behavior you documented can simply evaporate.