The Predator's Economy

What a Kill Actually Pays

When a liquidation lands, the victim's uncollected bounty is split four ways. These are rules, not doctrine — the exact arithmetic is on the combat page — but the shape of the split is what drives every decision below.

Two details in that table decide more than they look. First, spoils do not land in your inventory — they land in your own harvest bounty. You still have to collect them, and collecting them costs you strain exactly as if you had farmed them yourself. A kill is not a payout, it is a deposit into an account you must still empty.

Second, the arithmetic means killing redistributes far more than it burns. Most of a dead Kami's bounty ends up with the victim or the killer rather than in the void. Predation's economic weight is targeted transfer, not destruction — which is why it can be an income strategy at all, and why it makes enemies rather than just making a mess.

The Viable Models

1. Profit predation

Episodic raids, timed against fat exposed accruals rather than run on a schedule, with the Obol and experience treadmill underneath as a floor.

The enabling asymmetry is the whole trick: predators die banked, victims die mid-accrual. A raider who collects promptly has very little on it at any moment; a farmer deep into a long sit has everything. Trading kills with someone who has nothing to lose is a losing trade for the farmer even when the exchange looks even.

Counter-kills come fast, though, and the post-kill window cuts both ways — a raider that has just killed is briefly the most attractive target on the node.

2. Attrition warfare

Symmetric kill exchange on contested ground: two sides parked on the same node, killing each other as the thresholds allow. In Musu terms this runs net-negative. It is a cost of holding ground, not an income — worth paying if the ground is worth holding for other reasons, never worth entering as a business.

3. Bodyguarding

Violence builds parked to suppress raiders on a farm you or an ally own. It nets about zero and it does suppress raiders. Its failure mode is covered in full on Staying alive on contested ground: on busy ground the bodyguards' own kills keep exposing them, and the squad gets counter-hunted.

4. Roaming assassination

Roam instead of parking. Hit nodes holding passive or starving Kamis — targets that cannot counter-kill — and never stay long enough to be answered. A single build with cooldown pushed toward zero can take hundreds of kills in a matter of days this way.

It asks more of the operator than the others, because it depends on knowing where the soft targets are right now rather than on holding a position.

The Failure Mode

The most common way to lose money at this is to fight a war with generalist-statted farm Kamis. Specialized violence builds win every exchange against generalists — the threshold check is not close, and it does not care how much Musu the loser had banked.

If you are going to fight, build for it. Fighting without a violence build is not brave, it is a losing trade repeated until the Kami dies.

Two Things Predators Get Wrong About Their Own Trade

Profitability comes from build and banking discipline, not from node choice. Farmers pick ground; predators pick targets and pick when to collect. Sitting on the best node in the world with a mediocre violence build and a lazy collection habit pays worse than roaming with a sharp one.

Predation is population-relative. It pays exactly as well as the prey allows, and prey adapts, dies, or leaves. Every successful predator is eroding the conditions that made the model work. That is why all predator doctrine expires faster than farming doctrine — the farming pages describe arithmetic, this page describes other players, and other players learn.

Read the stamp at the top of this page with that in mind.