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.