Price formation
The spot price starts from a base set by the scenario's scarcity: 2.4 credits per sun when light is cheap, 3.4 normally, 5.2 when it is scarce. Demand moves it from there. The target price is base × (1 + 0.22 × frogs basking or queued + 0.9 × stones clouded over), and the actual price moves 2% of the gap toward that target every tick. Spikes build and decay smoothly instead of jumping.
The price feeds straight back into the cost model: expensive sunlight raises every bid floor, most of all for frogs that burn through it. Watch the median winning bid on the market desk track the sunlight price with a short lag.
Basking
Each frog has its own comfort threshold, from the aggressor's reckless 22% to the miser's cautious 52%. When stamina drops below it, the frog picks a stone by score: distance, plus 12 per frog already in the queue, plus 8 if the stone is taken. A long line nearby can lose to a free stone across the pond.
While basking, the frog buys sunlight at the spot price, 0.32 sun per second, and leaves at 92% rather than topping off, because the last few percent are not worth the stone time. It slides off immediately so the next frog can climb up. Frogs waiting their turn float on dedicated waiting cells beside the stone instead of milling in the lane.
The queue is built to be deadlock-proof. Arrival is a radius rather than an exact cell, so a frog blocked one square out still joins the wait pool. Queued frogs drop any path aimed at the stone. And a moored frog that happens to block traffic gets nudged aside by the traffic rules.
The crisis scenario
With the overcast crisis enabled, one basking stone clouds over about 150 seconds into the run. Its occupant is turfed off mid-bask and its queue is dumped. For the next 120 seconds the colony shares what remains: the survivors' queues grow, the outage term nearly doubles the price target, and thirsty frogs quietly stop bidding on cheap work because their sunlight term no longer clears their floor. Then the sun returns and the market exhales. The CRISIS preset is built around this moment, and the lab uses it to measure how each coordination mechanism absorbs the same shock.