My continuation was too much content.
Here’s the conclusion of my MULE game modern variant
Game Overview - summarized
## GRIDFOUND — Quick-Start Player Instructions
I’m guiding four founders through building infrastructure, trading resources, and balancing personal wealth against the survival of a shared grid.
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**Choose your charter.** Play six or twelve quarters with any mix of human and AI founders. Use relaxed clocks while learning.
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**Understand both goals.** Finish with the highest valuation to win individually. For district certification, collectively reach **20,000 credits over six quarters** or **36,000 over twelve**, with **at least 25% grid reliability**.
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**Claim and develop land.** Each quarter, choose a free parcel, then optionally bid for additional sites. Save enough cash to buy and configure service pods. During your development shift, tow pods from the hub to your parcels and deploy them before time expires.
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**Build essential supplies first.**
- **Coolant** determines your development time.
- **Power already in inventory** runs non-power installations.
- **Hardware sold to the depot** supports next quarter’s pod manufacturing.
- **Compute** earns revenue at fluctuating export prices.
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**Match services to terrain.** Favor canals for coolant, open estates for power, and graded brownfields for hardware. Survey hidden fibre before committing to compute. Matching adjacent installations and groups of three increase production.
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**Use spare time wisely.** Survey sites, catch rogue packets, or return to the hub for a safe investor pitch. Return or deploy any carried pod before ending your shift; otherwise it is lost.
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**Trade deliberately.** Markets run **Hardware → Coolant → Power → Compute**. Set your side, price, and quantity, then enter the market. Actual quotes approach your target gradually. Protect next quarter’s coolant and power reserves.
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**Cooperate without forgetting competition.** Negotiate supplies and accept private spot contracts, but remember that informal promises are not enforced.
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**Finish for value, not just cash.** Final wealth includes cash, stored goods, land, and installed pods. Unsold inventory still counts—unnecessary liquidation or expensive last-minute construction can reduce your score.
Output
Game Instructions
# GRIDFOUND — player’s manual
**Rules version 1.0.0**
**Four founders. One fragile grid.**
This manual describes the game in `gridfound.py`, not the original Commodore 64 M.U.L.E. For historical comparisons, use `MULE_C64_RESEARCH.md`. Formulas and implementation edge cases are in `RULES_SPEC.md`.
## 1. Your charter
You lead a small infrastructure company in a shared industrial district. You own sites, deploy modular service pods, operate utilities and compute facilities, and trade with three competing founders. Nobody is eliminated for running short of money. Every founder remains part of the district until the final account.
The wealth leader wins the individual contest. The district receives certification only when the founders’ combined final valuation reaches **20,000 credits in a six-quarter charter** or **36,000 in a twelve-quarter charter**, and common-grid reliability is at least **25%**. The game still identifies the wealth leader when the district fails its charter. Private success and collective success are different results.
All money and resource units are fictional abstractions. This is not a datacenter engineering model or an investment simulator.
### Choose your session
A quick charter lasts six quarters and starts every founder with 1,250 credits, five coolant, and four power. A full charter lasts twelve, starting with 1,000 credits, four coolant, and three power. Both include all four commodities and the same production system. There is no simplified three-resource beginner ruleset.
Standard clocks are intended for players who know the interface. Relaxed clocks lengthen grants, auctions, and development by roughly one half. Handoff and report clocks do not change. A moderator can pause everyone together; an individual player cannot pause only their own timer.
Create with one human for solo play, several local humans for shared-computer play, or zero to watch four AI founders. Remote players may join available seats. The number of economic founders is always four.
## 2. The district and its resources
The district has **44 ownable parcels** around a central civic hub. Labels A1–E9 identify five rows and nine columns; C5 is the hub, not property. The central canal runs through that column. Site ownership is exclusive, but you may travel across anyone’s land. There are no blocking fences or collision penalties.
| Service | Code | What it represents | Why it matters |
|—|—|—|—|
| Coolant | W | Reclaimed-water and cooling-service capacity | Sets the length of your next development shift |
| Power | E | Available electricity | Powers every installed non-power service |
| Hardware | H | Recoverable equipment and reusable components | Rebuilds the depot’s supply of new pods |
| Compute | C | Saleable completed compute capacity | High-value external revenue with a fluctuating export price |
A service pod is a modular infrastructure package, not a whole hyperscale datacenter being towed by one person. Your founder’s rover commissions it at a site. A coolant installation is a utility facility; a power installation is generation; hardware is recovery and refurbishment; compute is a small server facility. All belong to the same economic portfolio.
### Reading a site
These are base outputs, before bonuses, seasonal changes, incidents, shortages, and variation:
| Terrain | Coolant | Power | Hardware | Compute |
|—|—:|—:|—:|—
| Open estate | 2 | 3 | 1 | Hidden fibre grade, 0–3 |
| Canal easement | 4 | 2 | Not permitted | Not permitted |
| Brownfield | 1 | 1 | 1 + visible grade, therefore 2–4 | Hidden fibre grade, 0–3 |
The little brownfield grade marks are public. Fibre potential is private until your team surveys a site. The map’s resource overlays show known values and `?` for unobserved fibre. Fibre is geographically clustered, so one good survey suggests nearby opportunities; it does not guarantee that every nearby parcel is good.
Production is public. Once a compute facility operates, the detailed production ledger exposes its base potential. Empty-site survey findings remain private to their controller. Several local seats controlled by the same browser share that browser’s view, including their combined survey information.
## 3. The quarter, in order
A quarter starts with depot manufacturing, pod pricing, a new compute export price, and four points of reliability recovery up to 100%. Founders are ranked by current valuation. This rank is held for quarter-level tie-breaking.
**Site grants.** Starting with the weakest founder, each gets one free parcel while land remains. Click a free site, or select its label and claim it. You have 20 seconds on standard clocks. A timeout selects a parcel using the AI’s site evaluation rather than forfeiting the grant. These are sequential choices, not a simultaneous button race.
**Extra land auctions.** There may be zero, one, or two additional public parcels, plus parcels previously offered for resale. Everyone can bid simultaneously except the parcel’s seller. Public reserve is 250 credits. The highest live actual bid at the closing bell wins and pays that bid, not the second-highest price. A tie favors the weaker quarter-start rank. Unsuccessful bids cost nothing. Withdrawing before closing removes your bid.
**Development.** Every founder gets a separate shift. When fewer than seven pods remain in the depot, the weakest goes first; otherwise the strongest goes first. A 25-second handoff lets the next local human take control. Choose **Start my shift**, or the shift starts automatically when the handoff expires.
**Production.** An incident is determined, old power is consumed, remaining old stocks spoil, and installations produce. The ledger explains each site’s result. All human founders can acknowledge the report to advance, or its timer expires.
**Commodity exchanges.** Markets run in this order: **Hardware, Coolant, Power, Compute**. Each has a seven-second declaration interval followed by 35 seconds of live trading on standard clocks. There is no trading during declaration. You may stage a quote there and change sides later during the live market.
**Quarterly account.** Review wealth and reliability, then continue. The last compute exchange proceeds directly to final results. Otherwise the account lasts 20 seconds unless all current humans acknowledge it sooner.
## 4. Development: the clock is a resource
Your coolant requirement is three units in quarters 1–4, four in 5–8, and five in 9–12. The requirement is charged immediately when the shift starts, after any personal event.
| Coolant supplied | Full-charter shift | Quick-charter shift |
|—|—:|—
| Entire requirement | 45 seconds | 55 seconds |
| Some, but not all | 30 seconds | 40 seconds |
| None | 12 seconds | 22 seconds |
Relaxed play multiplies these durations by 1.5 and rounds down to whole seconds. Each missing coolant unit also costs the district two reliability points.
### Buy, travel, deploy
At the hub, select one of four pod configurations. You pay the current chassis price plus the configuration cost: **25 coolant, 50 power, 75 hardware, or 100 compute**. The depot’s chassis price starts at 190 credits and can vary from 100 to 700 with hardware valuation, pod scarcity, and undeveloped demand.
Clicking a parcel sets a destination; it does not teleport the rover. Travel takes time. Towing slows you, and canal and brownfield terrain slow you further. You can change destinations mid-trip. Routes are straight lines through the district; there is no automatic road routing or obstacle avoidance.
At the centre of your own empty parcel, press **Space**, right-click the map, or use **Deploy**. A carried hardware or compute pod cannot be placed on a canal. An invalid deployment gives a message; it does not intentionally discard the pod. The shift clock keeps running.
Return to the hub for another purchase as long as there is time, cash, and stock. Human players have no artificial three-build limit. AI founders impose their own planning limit.
### Lift, refit, return, and resell
With an empty tow hitch, stand at the centre of your own installation and **Lift** it. The parcel becomes empty and the service is attached to your rover. Move and redeploy it elsewhere, or take it to the hub and buy another configuration. Reconfiguration costs the new outfit fee; the old outfit fee is not refunded.
Returning a newly purchased, never-deployed pod refunds its paid chassis cost, not the outfit. A lifted installed pod has a fixed 100-credit return value. This prevents treating the current retail chassis price as a guaranteed salvage price.
A carried pod is lost if the shift times out or you use **End shift** without returning it. Safe and risky pitches require an empty hitch, so they cannot accidentally abandon an attached purchase. A lost pod is not immediately put back into depot stock.
You may list one of your parcels for auction next quarter at a reserve from 10 to 5,000 credits. Listing is done in the development console and does not require standing at the parcel. It cannot be cancelled in this version. The current installation, if any, transfers with the land when it sells. Unsold land stays with you. There is no resale after the final quarter.
### Three uses for spare time
**Survey fibre.** Travel on foot to the centre of an unscanned non-canal site and survey for 1.5 seconds. Moving cancels the survey. You can survey another founder’s parcel, although that does not give you ownership or purchase rights. There is no fee, and surveying does not create or improve fibre.
**Catch a rogue packet.** A gold packet marker briefly appears on a brownfield. Reach it on foot while it remains active to receive a bug bounty: `30 + 10 × quarter + a random 0–40 credits`. You may collect one per shift. A carried pod prevents collection. Chasing across the map can cost more in lost development time than the bounty is worth.
**Pitch investors.** Return to the hub with an empty hitch and finish safely. The pitch pays twice the whole seconds remaining, plus a random 20–50 credits. It always pays a positive amount and ends the shift immediately.
The optional **crypto punt** also ends the shift. Stake 60 fictional credits for equally likely payouts of 0, 0, 30, 90, or 180. Its average payout is 60: zero expected cash profit before opportunity cost. Giving up the safe investor pitch makes it economically worse in expected value. There is no real-money stake or cash-out.
## 5. Production and shortages
Every installed non-power site needs **one unit of power already in your inventory before production**. Power sites need none. The game randomly chooses which non-power sites receive power when you are short. An unpowered site produces zero and costs two reliability points.
New power production cannot rescue another site in the same production phase. Buying power in the exchange protects the following production phase, not the one you just watched. The displayed protective power reserve includes one extra unit as a buffer; the actual energy charge does not include that buffer.
After consuming power, the game removes half the remaining old coolant, rounded down, and one quarter of remaining old power, rounded down. New production is added after that spoilage. Ordinary capacity is 99 coolant, 99 power, 50 hardware, and 50 compute. Personal resource gifts can temporarily exceed those capacities before the next production cap is applied. Public purchases and private receipts cannot exceed capacity.
### Bonuses and variation
For each powered installation:
```text
output = clamp(base + adjacent bonus + scale bonus
+ season + incident + random variation, 0, 8)
```
The **adjacent bonus** is one when at least one orthogonally adjacent site belongs to you and produces the same service. It is not one per neighbour. Diagonal neighbours do not count.
The **scale bonus** is one for every three installed sites you own producing the same service, wherever they are: three sites give +1 on each, six give +2, and so on. Installed sites count toward the bonus even when one is unpowered. Adjacency and scale stack.
Variation is sampled independently for each installed site from `−2, −1, 0, 0, 0, +1, +2`. Each entry is equally likely. An unpowered installation remains zero regardless of bonuses.
Seasons repeat every four quarters:
| Season | Modifier |
|—|—|
| Spring | Coolant +1 |
| Summer | Coolant −1, power +1 |
| Autumn | Hardware +1 |
| Winter | Power −1, compute +1 |
For example, a powered canal coolant site in spring with one matching neighbour, three coolant sites in total, no incident, and zero variation produces `4 + 1 + 1 + 1 = 7`. A zero-fibre compute parcel is usually unattractive but can still produce from bonuses and favorable variation; zero is its base, not an absolute production prohibition.
### Incidents
There is no district incident in quarter one. In subsequent quarters the incident gate opens with 60% probability and then chooses equally among eight outcomes:
| Incident | Effect |
|—|—|
| Heatwave | Coolant output −2; power +1 |
| Rain recovery | Coolant +2; power −1 |
| Grid congestion | Every non-power resource output −2 |
| Compiler breakthrough | Compute +2 |
| Hardware recall | Hardware −2 |
| Export fraud | All founders’ compute inventory, including new production, is erased |
| Depot fire | Each depot resource stock is halved, rounded down; up to two pods are lost |
| Cooling fire | One randomly selected installed pod is destroyed; its land remains owned |
Only two export-fraud losses can occur per game. A later selection of that incident becomes a harmless “controls held” outcome rather than rerolling another disaster. Incidents do not replace seasonal modifiers; both apply.
Before a founder’s shift, after quarter one, a personal event has a 25% chance. The weakest quarter-start founder receives only favorable events; the strongest only unfavorable ones; the middle founders may receive either. Grants, rebates, logistics faults, and permitting costs change cash or inventory. They are bounded: there is no debt from a loss. These events are original GRIDFOUND events, not reproduced M.U.L.E. story text.
## 6. The live exchange
The exchange is a continuous double auction: buyers and sellers make prices at the same time. Sellers lower their asks; buyers raise their bids. The depot is another trading counterparty, with unlimited cash but limited goods.
### Place a quote deliberately
Select your founder card when one browser owns several seats. Choose **Buy**, **Sell**, or **Sit out**. Enter a target price and remaining quantity. **Enter market** makes the quote live. The declaration interval gives time to prepare, but does not execute trades.
A target is an instruction, not an instant executable price. Actual quotes move at at most five credits per server tick, ten ticks per second. Land quotes move at ten credits per tick. The filled marker is actual; the outline indicates target. You may drag your own price lane or use the controls and keyboard. Withdrawing stops your participation while still allowing you to reposition a staged target.
Changing side does not automatically buy or sell. The interface withdraws the quote when you use its side buttons; deliberately re-enter afterward. Up/down adjustment keys make a quote live. Be careful with those keys during a close contest.
### Meeting, locking, and withdrawing
The engine considers the best asks and bids, favoring the weaker quarter-start founder on equal prices. A matching buyer and seller trade at the seller’s ask. The first unit transfers immediately, then ordinarily one every 0.4 seconds; after eight units in the pair, the interval becomes 0.2 seconds.
That pair stays locked. Someone else offering a better price does not interrupt it. Either partner can withdraw, run out of quoted quantity, money, sellable goods, or buyer storage, or move their actual quote across the locked transaction price. Any of those ends the lock, allowing a new match.
A seller receives the locked price even when a buyer’s bid was higher. A private or public sale to another founder transfers money and goods between them; the depot pays or receives money outside the four-founder cash pool. There are no transaction fees or loans.
### Reserves and depot prices
**Protect reserve** prevents an ordinary sale from reducing coolant below next quarter’s shift requirement or power below the current non-power installation count plus one. It does not anticipate additional installations you might build. Hardware and compute have no automatic reserve. On the final quarter, all protective reserves are zero. You can uncheck protection to make a risky sale; the next shortage is your responsibility.
The depot updates coolant, power, and hardware reference prices from combined supply and expected demand. It buys at the reference and sells 15 credits higher. Completed trades update the resource’s valuation for the account. Compute instead receives an external random price of 50–150 each quarter; the depot’s compute spread is ten. Compute remaining at the depot leaves for external customers when its exchange closes.
Hardware sold to the depot is not transformed immediately. At the start of the next quarter, every two depot hardware can manufacture one new pod until depot stock reaches sixteen. Returned pods can take stock above sixteen. Hoarding hardware can make the whole district pod-starved and push chassis prices upward.
### Private contracts and treaties
During the active commodity exchange, a seller can propose an offer to one named founder, for 1–50 units at 0–5,000 credits per unit. A zero-price offer is a gift. It expires after twelve seconds or at the end of the market. Each seller can have only one outstanding proposal; a new one replaces the old one.
The buyer must accept. At acceptance, the server checks the entire quantity, cash, and capacity again. The transaction is all-or-nothing. There is no escrow: normal trades can invalidate an outstanding offer. Private contracts bypass the public seller’s reserve protection, because the seller explicitly specified the whole quantity.
Proposals and private chat are shown only to the relevant controllers. **Completed settlements are public**, and inventories and balances are public, so secrecy does not extend to economic outcomes. The server operator can inspect all server-held information. This is not end-to-end encrypted negotiation.
Chat is suitable for promises, joint supply plans, and informal non-aggression agreements. Only accepted spot contracts are enforced. “I will sell you power next quarter” is a social promise, not a future order. The AI does not parse chat or honor human-written treaties.
## 7. Founders and computer opponents
All founders receive the same initial economy within the selected mode. Portrait, name, and profile do not grant human speed, income, or production bonuses. Profiles select the heuristic used when AI controls the seat.
| Default founder | Profile | Observable planning style |
|—|—|—|
| Mira Vale | Cooperative | Extra coolant buffer; concedes selling premiums sooner |
| Jun Park | Systems | Extra power buffer; favors power development |
| Ivo Slate | Broker | Higher opening premiums; opportunistic cheap hardware/compute holdings |
| Tess Quill | Frontier | More surveying; stronger preference for compute revenue |
These are original characters with distinct illustrated hardhats and founder numbers, not imported alien sprites. You can rename owned seats before the charter starts.
AI follows the same movement, purchase, power, stock, and cash rules. Its planning is transparent in the executable specification. It does not inspect unobserved fibre values or future random draws. It does not optimize every feature: it does not strategically resell land or reorganize an established portfolio, and it always chooses the safe investor pitch rather than the crypto punt.
The four styles are not advertised as equally strong. Frontier won 24 of 32 included sampled games; treating Frontier as the most threatening economic opponent is reasonable within that sample, not a universal theorem.
## 8. Finish well
Valuation is cash plus stored resources at the current reference prices, plus 500 per owned parcel and 100 per installed pod. A carried pod is also worth 100, although normally no founder is carrying one when the game finishes. Outfit fees and what you actually paid at a land auction are not separately added to score. A valuation tie favors the lower founder number.
A late purchase can reduce wealth even while increasing production capacity. Conversely, unsold goods still count. Selling at a price below their accounting value can reduce your own score, while selling to the depot brings cash into the district. Consider the closing valuation rule rather than assuming everything must be liquidated.
Protect a dependable coolant and power base first, then exploit the terrain. Adjacency and three-site groups make specialization productive, but a specialized district needs trade. Leave cash for deployment after a land auction. Sell some hardware to keep future pods available. Save a reserve before spring turns to summer or autumn turns to winter. Use surveys when they can change a decision; do not survey an irrelevant distant site just because the button is available.
The strongest negotiation is often one that lets the other founder keep operating. An impoverished neighbour is a weak customer and an unreliable supplier.
## 9. Pauses, people, and recovery
The room moderator starts and pauses the district. A lost network connection gets AI cover after six seconds. Reconnecting the same browser session restores control without resetting ownership, goods, or cash. An explicit seat release frees it for somebody else.
During the first three quarters, another player can replace an unclaimed AI seat. Later replacements require the district to be paused. A disconnected human’s seat remains reserved, so ordinary spectators cannot take it merely because its owner is offline.
A 30-second moderator disconnect can pass room moderation to a connected founder. It cannot move the running Python process to another machine. Export checkpoints for recovery from server failure. Loading a checkpoint creates a paused **RESUME** room; players reclaim seats before resuming. Chat and room credentials are not in the checkpoint.
Use separate devices for private negotiations when several humans share a room. On one screen, one browser controlling all local seats necessarily exposes its collective private information to whoever can see the screen.
The game
Less than satisfactory, almost unplayable and like Paul’s “scrapline” also named in upper-case, unseeable in a browser that is launched from Python instead of it being a Python GUI. Just a browser window covered in little widgets that even a timer of your actions has to go offscreen (overflow) to use other UI elements.
Starting page
launch a game or join known game (password, but any decentralized network would seem to require magic).
Everyone loves a game where you fill out forms..
Initial gameplay page
*this had to be captured with a screenshot extension for “entire page”
The UI to pick your first land grant on the map - a timed drop-down
Didn’t figure it out in time? Oops - your choice off to auction:
(happened too fast)
Now, for the property development round - you missed your chance to get or bid on propery, but here’s some “investor pitch” auction-like thing to do with your free time of a turn instead of running to the casino where your time is converted to some money.
Conclusion
Extremely obtuse, frustrating, unknown if playable, but could be an implementation of the idea of the game. The AI research time was short, and the knowledge-gathering round document was "couldn’t run an emulator, couldn’t get disks, here’s an interview with the creator among other document reads.
Appendix - the original game
screenshots show the turns of the game that are the actual play surface, not three browser’s worth pages you’d have to scroll around in… https://www.mobygames.com/game/9752/mule/screenshots/c64/
(this forum has a new unwanted feature of detecting Markdown pastes and “preserving” them by filling thim with escapes, terribly breaking the intent that I paste readable instructions to you)
