Hello, Fellow Citizens!
The Mission Board launch last month was our biggest release of the year — and as always, the week after a big launch is where the real work happens. This one's a story about bot farms, a red-team audit, and some quiet fixes that make the whole economy safer.
Grab a coffee, this is a good one.
The Bot Farm That Forced a Rebalance
Shortly after quests left beta, we spotted something ugly in the data: a farm of 100+ accounts grinding Tier 1 and Tier 2 quests nonstop. Why? Low-tier quests had accidentally become a ~100x cheaper path to $FLUX than the top tiers — and a source of cheap legendary relics on top.
We didn't want to nerf new players to stop a bot farm, so we built a Monte Carlo simulation of the entire quest → relic → crate → salvage pipeline (using the exact same math the game runs in production) and tested fixes against it before shipping anything. Here's what went live:
- Low-tier loot rebalance — T1/T2 quests now drop almost entirely common and uncommon relics, ramping back to the full rarity table by T4/T5. New players still get the same number of relics to progress their gear — the cheap legendary printer is what died.
- Quest costs doubled at the bottom — T1 went from 10 to 20 $SCRAP, T2 from 50 to 100. Mid and high tiers are untouched.
- Crate odds unchanged — the sim showed the loot fix alone was enough. We checked the "just buy crates instead" backdoor: it now costs ~48M $SCRAP per legendary. Dead end.
The results, straight from the simulation: the farm's efficiency dropped 8x, a 100-account operation fell from ~49 $FLUX/day to ~12, and cheap legendaries got roughly 350x harder to mint. Endgame players are completely unaffected.
Gear Now Matters on Quests
The rebalance also shipped something we've wanted for a while: your quest rewards now scale with the gear you bring. It's called the investment factor:
// Relic rewards scale with the gear equipped in your quest slot
let bareAccount = rewards * 0.30; // no gear: 30% yield
let gearedAccount = rewards * 1.00; // rare/leveled gear: full 100%
An account that never invests in gear earns like the low-investment account it is — while a Citizen who actually builds their loadout gets full rewards. You can see your current factor right on the quest screen.
The Marketplace Survived a Red-Team Audit
After the rebalance we ran an adversarial audit on the whole post-rebalance economy — basically paying attackers-on-our-side to break the game before someone else does. They found two things that made us wince:
- A purchase-amount exploit (critical). A hand-crafted buy order with a malformed amount could trick the market into crediting a seller's balance instead of debiting it — effectively minting relics and consumables for pocket change. This is fixed: every purchase amount is now sanitized and anything invalid is rejected outright.
- A gear-rotation loophole (high). Item transfers always had a 24h cooldown, but marketplace purchases didn't — so one gear kit could be rotated across alt accounts via self-purchases to fake the new gear investment factor. Marketplace sales now honor the same 24h cooldown as transfers.
Both were fixed before any meaningful exploitation. This is exactly why we run audits after economy changes, and we'll keep doing it.
We also fixed a real incident some of you hit: during a burst of rapid marketplace sales, a few sellers didn't receive their HIVE payout even though the item sold. The payout queue was rewritten from the ground up — payouts now confirm on-chain before the sale is finalized, failed payouts automatically retry, and anything that can't go through alerts us directly instead of vanishing into a log file. On top of that, if you ever send HIVE to the market with a broken or mistyped memo, it now bounces straight back to you automatically instead of getting stranded. And dust listings below 0.05 HIVE (which could never actually be bought) are now rejected at the source.
Marketplace Fees Now Feed the Buyback
One more change we want to be fully transparent about. The marketplace has always charged a 5% fee on sales — but that fee used to go straight to dev wallets and never touched the game economy. As of this patch:
// Every marketplace sale
let sellerPayout = sale * 0.95; // unchanged
let fee = sale * 0.05; // now -> terracore treasury
// The fee joins the 15-min revenue cycle:
// 50% swapped to $SCRAP (buyback -> daily leaderboard rewards)
Nothing changes for buyers or sellers — same 95% payout, same 5% fee. The difference is that half of every marketplace fee now buys back $SCRAP and flows into the daily leaderboard pool, where before it was 0%. More trading means a bigger reward pool for everyone.
Smaller Fixes
- The burnt-$FLUX stat on the site was overcounting (it still assumed quests burn $FLUX — they've been $SCRAP-only since the revamp). The chart now reflects real boss-fight and forge burns.
- Fixed Hive Engine node failover in the frontend — if a node goes down, the game now rotates to a healthy one properly.
- The site pauses its API polling while the browser tab is hidden — lighter on your machine and on our servers.
State of the Colony
Where things stand today: 2,722 Citizens registered, over 801 million $SCRAP burned to date, and the daily leaderboard pool is sitting at roughly 11,350 $SCRAP — now with marketplace fees feeding it every 15 minutes.
Wrapping Up
Launches are loud, but this is the work that keeps TerraCore healthy for the long haul: closed exploits, honest stats, and an economy where playing the game beats gaming the system. Thanks to everyone who reported marketplace weirdness during the payout incident — those reports are what got it fixed fast.
More missions, more fixes, and a few surprises are on the way. See you on the leaderboard!
That's it for today, all the links are below be sure to follow us to hear what we are working on and follow the progress!
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