System mechanic — added v226 · pays nothing, on purpose

The Errand

A citizen's favour you genuinely could not have satisfied the moment it was asked — fulfilled anyway

The game's 24 named citizens have taken requests and kill-favours since very early in its history, and the Citizen Journal already tracks a relationship level, when you met, how many requests you've done, and which backstory tier that's unlocked for each of them. What none of it ever recorded is whether you actually had to go and get what was asked for. A favour might ask for 12 stone or 60 coin — and a drifter who's been playing for months typically has hundreds of stone in their pack and thousands in the vault already, so most fetch requests are satisfied the instant they're spoken, collapsing to two clicks: read, hand over, collect. The difference between a courier and a friend was never the delivery. It's whether the thing was actually in your hands when you were asked for it.

What makes a favour an errand

An errand is a citizen's favour that you could not have fulfilled at the exact moment it was spoken — and you go and get what's needed, then fulfil it anyway. Each one counts, once, forever. There's no roster to complete and no final tally to reach.

The inversion: a full pack disqualifies you

This is a genuinely harsh rule. Every stockpile you've ever built makes the next favour less likely to qualify as an errand — and there's nothing you can do to a request after it's been spoken to make it harder to already own. Coin can't buy an errand either: donating something you can already afford is just a payment, not a trip. The poorest drifter in the world runs errands constantly without even noticing; the wealthiest one might go a full month without a single qualifying favour, and has no way to buy their way to one. Wealth doesn't merely fail to help here — it actively works against you.

Kill-favours can never qualify at all, and the reason is a deliberate one: a kill request is measured against whatever your kill tally already stood at the moment it was spoken, so nobody ever has the corpses "in advance" and every single kill favour would trivially qualify for free. A test that everything passes measures nothing, so they're excluded outright — and the game's own help reference says so plainly.

What it deliberately doesn't do

• A qualifying favour is never marked. No badge, no "you can't do this yet," no note in the citizen's own panel, nothing in the journal, and no count of how many are currently open. Reading a request against what's actually in your pack right now is the entire activity — you find out whether it counted only when you hand it in, not one second before.
• Pays absolutely nothing extra. The reward coin, the friendship token, the relationship bump, the backstory tiers, and the cooldowns on requests are exactly what they've always been. This layer only watches whether the favour qualified — it never touches what fulfilling it actually pays.

History

• v226 — added. Ships exactly as described above — four new save fields, every one read defensively, so a character saved before this version loads with no errands behind them and loses nothing.

Trivia

• Before this system was built, the idea of tracking something across every discipline at once — combat, gathering, selling, banking, and travel together — was checked against A Day's Work first and found already covered by it, so it was deliberately dropped rather than built as a second, competing version of the same idea.