Bioexchange

The Bioexchange is the market where the lab sells banked cells for biomarks and bids on strains it has met. Every genome carries an assessed value, worked out from its genes and moved by what the market currently wants. Price against that value decides a sale: a listing at four fifths of the assessed value or under sells as soon as a rival lab can afford the ask, and one an eighth above it never sells at all. The board holds eight orders, and a listing and a bid each take one.

Listing a specimen

B opens the exchange by default, and the HUD labels that key MANAGE. The board is the left pane of the EXCHANGE tab, with the Cryobank on the right.

Selling is a Cryobank verb, not a board verb: a banked specimen is selected there and listed with SELL. There is no price prompt and no quantity. The listing goes up at the value already shown on that specimen’s row, for that one specimen, in the first free slot. With all eight slots taken the click is refused and nothing is escrowed. A specimen worth three times the median of every market-valued specimen in the bank raises a confirmation first; anything ordinary lists on one click, and so does a lone specimen.

The specimen leaves the bank the moment it is listed, not when it sells. While the order stands it is not there to seed a dish with, and cancelling it from the ORDER BOOK tab puts it back. A specimen deployed into a live run cannot be listed at all, and nor can one in deep storage.

Nothing in the dish itself sells. G extracts a cell for growth media and pays no biomarks; E banks it.

Assessed value

The assessed value reads the whole genome. Each gene sits on a rarity floor, from commodity through structural and specialist up to the rare anchors like lysocyst, and is multiplied up by how far its stats sit from ordinary, so mutation driving a scalar to an extreme moves the number far harder than rarity does. Two or more strong axes at once add a bounded combination premium on top.

Live demand then moves each gene copy: a gene the market wants is worth up to three times as much, one it is dumping down to two fifths. The effect scales with the entry’s intensity, and on a gene valued at a target figure it also scales with how close the copy sits to that figure. Only the single strongest matching entry counts.

A phenotype the lab has never banked carries a novelty premium, but only on a sale, which is why the figure to buy such a strain is lower than the figure it would sell for.

Sell order fills

A sell order is one specimen at one price, and the only thing the market decides is whether that one trade happens. The roll reads a single number: the ask divided by the assessed value at that moment.

Two clocks look at the board. A sweep every 20 seconds turns the demand board over, mints the visible rival orders, then matches; between sweeps a ticker re-arms every 1.5 to 4 seconds and rolls the same curve on the same value. A standing listing is looked at several times a minute.

Both clocks run on real time whenever a lab is loaded. They do not need the panel open and do not stop while the game is paused; they stop only when no lab is loaded, or while a save is being applied.

A passed roll is still not a sale. A rival lab has to be able to pay the whole ask out of its wallet, and when none can, the order stays open.

An order at the assessed value that has sat for a minute is not unlucky. Either the demand board moved and the ratio is no longer the one it was listed at, or no lab has the biomarks for the ask.

Buy orders

The + in an empty slot opens the Cryobank as a strain picker, and the chosen strain comes back as a draft in that slot at quantity one, priced at the buy quote on its registry row. Nothing is committed until LIST BUY is pressed; until then the ± steppers move the quantity and the price, and clicking the price opens a keypad. The biomarks are escrowed on listing and refunded on cancellation.

The bid curve runs the other way:

The reservation floor is a fraction of the strain’s value, authored on the market rather than fixed in code.

The sweep further scales a bid down by how many distinct genes the strain carries, reaching zero at seven: a bid on a genome of seven distinct genes or more can only ever fill on the ticker. A ticker fill is one unit; a sweep fill takes a random quantity up to what is left of the order.

Every unit delivered needs a free cryobank bay, because one bay holds one copy. With none free the fill is skipped, the order stays open, and the escrow is untouched.

The demand board

The demand board carries one to three entries at a time, each naming one gene and each either wanted or dumped. About one sweep in seven retires an entry and replaces it, and a changeover raises a ▲ or ▼ alert. An entry names either a presence-only gene, which a genome either carries or does not, or a gene at a target figure for one of its stats, such as pH or temperature tolerance tuned to a value and matched within that gene’s tolerance window.

The trend graphs are not on the market clock. They advance one point per run ended, and at no other time.

Rival labs

The other side is rival labs, each with a wallet seeded once from an authored stake and moved after that only by trades. The buyer is the richest lab whose live want the specimen satisfies, or, when none does, the richest lab that can afford the ask.

What a lab buys goes into its holdings, and its motivations are recomputed from what it holds. A wanted entry is sampled from those motivations whenever any lab has them, so what the market wants drifts toward what the labs have been buying. A lab holding a strain also becomes the supplier for a later bid on it: its holding is finite and runs down as it sells, while a strain on its own roster is a culture it can supply without limit.

Selling into a want cools it: that entry’s price and its intensity both drop, and recovery is the slow mean reversion the sweep applies.

Every completed sale nudges career depth, the counter contract payouts scale with. A purchase does not.