The Core Loop

Every system in the game feeds one loop: you act, the world reacts, you adapt. This page shows how the pieces connect so the rest of the wiki makes sense.

The loop, step by step

Step	Stage	What happens	System
1	You act	You set goal priorities for the crew	-
2	Crew plan	Each pawn plans with GOAP, goals filtered by traits and priority	GOAP
3	Actions run	Pawns deal, launder, extort, fight on the map	GOAP
4	Traits shift	Actions move trait values (Greed up, Stress up)	Traits
5	Thresholds	Traits crossing cutoffs unlock new goals (DEFECT, RAT)	Traits
6	Heat rises	Crime raises heat per section, pulling police in	Heat
7	Director scores	Cash, activity, time, and jitter build a threat score	Director
8	Events fire	Patrols, raids, and rival hits spawn	Director
9	Consequences	Arrests, gang war, losses land	Combat
10	You adapt	Move work, bribe, lay low, buy intel, then back to step 1	-

Steps 4 and 5 feed back into step 2 (new goals change what pawns plan). Step 6 feeds step 7 (heat is part of the pressure the Director reads). The loop never stops turning.

Who owns what

Layer	Owns	Tick cadence	Reference
GOAP planner	Per-pawn goal selection and action execution	Every tick, per agent	GOAP
Trait system	Personality values, threshold-triggered behavior changes	Updates on action/goal completion; thresholds checked periodically	Traits
Historian	One-time backstory and trait seeding at worldgen	Game start	Historian
Heat	Per-section crime pressure and decay	Raised on crime events, decays on a timer	Heat
Director	Global pressure scoring and event firing	Every tickInterval ticks	Director
Drama	Emergent betrayal, defection, contagion, breakdowns	Reactive to trait thresholds and events	Drama

The key design rule

Traits affect outcomes and thresholds, not GOAP priorities directly.

This is what keeps the simulation from locking up. A trait never silently forces a pawn to want something; it either changes the result of an action or unlocks a new goal when it crosses a threshold. The player's priorities and the planner stay in charge of what gets attempted. See GOAP.

Reading the money side

The economic half of the loop runs in parallel: crew buy product, sell it, and the proceeds move through the clean/dirty/wallet money model. See Economy for the full cash flow and the laundering split.