LemonadeQuest

The daily round

Once a day, each stand can open for a 60-minute sales round. The round is the heart of the game: it is where supplies become SEED, where the formula matters, and where randomness lives.

Before you open

  1. Check the weather for your city. It affects how many customers come and what they want.
  2. Buy supplies in SEED for the number of cups you expect to sell. Your storage limits how much you can hold. See Supplies.
  3. Set your jar formula (lemon, ice, sugar) and the per-cup extras. See Lemonade formula.
  4. Pay the opening tax: 5% of the expected gross for your zone, in SEED. It scales with the stand, so big stands pay more, and it is the fee that makes spam-opening pointless.
  5. Open.

The 60 minutes

For each of the 60 minutes, a number between 0 and 15 decides how many citizens walk up to your stand that minute. Your stand serves as many as its capacity allows; anyone beyond capacity walks away and that sale is lost.

Example: with the digits a 3 2 0 e f 8 1 3 … (read in hexadecimal as 10, 3, 2, 0, 14, 15, 8, 1, 3 …) a stand with capacity 8 serves 8, 3, 2, 0, 8, 8, 8, 1, 3 … and loses 2 + 6 + 7 = 15 customers in the minutes where more than eight showed up.

Because each minute is independent, a full round averages out. A capacity-8 stand serves about 345 cups per round with a typical spread of ±6%. Weather and the city multiply the customer count (a heatwave in SunLand is a very different day from rain in LemonCapital), which is where the memorable days come from.

At the end of the round you see: customers who came, cups served, cups lost to capacity, cups lost to an unhappy formula, tips, supplies used, supplies left over. The "cups lost to capacity" line is the honest argument for equipment and zones.

Where the random numbers come from

The 60 numbers come from a hash. If that hash could be influenced by the player, a bot would simply try inputs until it found a perfect day. If it could be influenced by us, you would have to trust us. It is built so that neither can happen, using a standard commit-reveal scheme:

  1. When you press Open, your inputs (supplies, formula, timestamp) are locked and hashed. This is your commitment. You cannot change it afterwards.
  2. Only after the commitment exists, the server draws a server seed that did not exist while you were choosing inputs, and publishes its hash immediately.
  3. The round's numbers are SHA-256(commitment ‖ server seed), read as 60 hexadecimal digits.
  4. At the end of the round the server seed is revealed. Anyone can recompute the hash and confirm that the numbers were exactly what the commitment and the seed produce, and that the published seed hash matches.

You could not have mined the result (you did not know the seed). We could not have chosen it (the seed hash was published before the round and your commitment was locked before the seed existed). Every round's commitment, seed hash and seed are kept in the round log, and the verification tool on the stats page recomputes any round in one click.

Leftovers

Supplies you bought but did not use carry over to the next day, with one exception: ice melts. Deciding how much ice to buy for tomorrow's weather is the small daily judgement call that keeps the game a game.

Fees

None of this touches the chain: rounds, supplies and SEED balances live on the game server, so playing every day costs no gas. See SEED & LEMON for the short list of actions that do settle on TON.