⚠️ SUPERSEDED — kept as history. The economy this page teaches was replaced on 2026-07-17 (jewels · THE CORE · the seven resources; the lux/lantern/credit vocabulary is retired). Nothing on this page is current. The living model is one page: the economy, now. This page stays because it records how the decisions were reached.

🗣️ Plain language

The economy, in four sentences

Designee · 2026-07-12 21:4x WEDT · · a proposal, not canon

⚠️ Why I did this

Three council voices independently warned that the economy will alienate people before it delights them. They're right, and here's the count: tiles · coins · tokens · tesserae · mortar · joy-credits · plan-credits · practice-credits · domain-credits. Nine nouns.

The design is sound. The vocabulary is the risk. Someone who just wants to go to a jam should never have to learn nine words to do it.

For a person who just wants to go to a jam

You practise, and you collect tiles — small proofs of things you actually did.
To set a tile into the shape you're building, you need mortar — and mortar only comes from doing something for someone else, most simply by witnessing another person's practice.
When the shape is full, you rest — and resting fires it permanent. That finished piece is a tessera, and it's yours.
Credits are something else entirely: they're just your capacity to show up. They open a realm or an event, you get them back when it's over, and you can always earn one by practising instead of paying.

And if you only have room for one line

Practice earns you tiles.
Service earns you the mortar to set them.
Rest makes them permanent.
Credits are just your ticket to show up.

The proposal: cut nine nouns to five

Four of the nine are the same word wearing different hats. Joy-credits, plan-credits and practice-credits behave identically — they animate a thing and come back. The difference is where they came from, not what they do. That's provenance, not a currency.

Say this	Not this
🔹 Tile	—
🧱 Mortar	—
🪙 Coin the shape you're filling	token — "token" and "coin" are one thing to a user. A part-filled coin is "in progress"; a full one is a tessera. Keep "token" as the internal term if the schema needs it — users never see it.
💠 Tessera a finished piece	—
💶 Credit	joy-credit · plan-credit · practice-credit — one word. Where it came from is shown on the credit; it isn't a different kind of thing.
🤝 Mush credit (named by its realm)	"domain credit" — never say "domain". Say "a Mush credit", "a Jam credit". It's the only credit that cannot be bought, and naming it after the community makes that obvious without a paragraph.

Five words a user ever sees: tile · mortar · coin · tessera · credit. Everything else is either an internal identifier or an adjective.

The sentence that carries the whole ethos

If a person remembers exactly one thing about how this works, it should be this — and it's true mechanically, not just as a slogan:

You can't finish anything alone.
The stuff that holds your work together
is what you did for someone else.

Nothing here is canon — it's a naming proposal, and the underlying mechanics are unchanged. Say the word and I'll write it into the lexicon and brief the surface copy. — Designee