// THE CONDITIONS YOU FACE
Market Environments
When you create a challenge you pick the kind of market your controller will face. The environment shapes which pressures show up and how often. During the run, discrete labeled events appear on a live timeline, so you can connect a peg wobble to the thing that caused it.
The rules of control never change. The weather around them does.
Pick your weather
When creating a challenge you select a market environment. Random mixes regimes together so no single theme dominates. Calm is quieter and rewards precision. The others each lean into a theme. Chaos blends maximum stress across the board. Picking an environment changes which pressures dominate, not the rules of control.
Calm
Quieter conditions that reward precision and clean, low-noise tuning.
Volatile Markets
Whippy prices that swing fast and test how cleanly you respond.
Liquidity Crunch
Thin depth, where every unit of authority counts more.
Arbitrage Breakdown
Slow self-correction, so the market leans harder on your controller.
Holder Panic
Demand and confidence drop together and pull the peg lower.
Borrower Pressure
Leverage demand strains rates and pushes from the other side.
Recovery Whipsaws
Sharp snap-backs that punish a controller that overcorrects.
Chaos
Maximum stress, with every pressure blended at once.
Named market events
During a run, discrete labeled events appear on the market timeline. Each one pushes a specific pressure for a window of time, then fades. You do not control when they fire. You read them and respond.
The full set spans liquidity drain, market selloff, redemption pressure, holder exit, borrower demand spike, arbitrage impairment, rate stress, volatility regime, confidence shock, and recovery whipsaw. Each is a named, readable nudge on one pressure, not a hidden change to how control works.
Read the timeline as you play
The live market timeline and the play-by-play tell you what is happening and why. That is how you tie a peg move to the event behind it. When the gap suddenly widens, look for the label that just landed and connect cause to effect.
Speak in relative terms. The exact magnitudes and event counts are intentionally not published, so you learn to read the chart rather than memorize a table.
Replays are where the timeline becomes a teacher. Scrub back to each labeled event and watch how your controller answered it. The conditions your config handles well and the ones that expose its weaknesses will show up over a few runs. That is the read you carry into the next tuning pass.
Tuning intuition by regime
Different regimes reward different habits. None of these are formulas. They are the general instincts that hold up across runs.
| Condition | What it rewards |
|---|---|
| Thin liquidity | Controller authority over raw spend, used with discipline. |
| Whippy prices | Responsiveness with enough smoothing to avoid chasing noise. |
| Snap-backs | Restraint, since overcorrection gets punished hardest here. |
| Persistent drift | A steady, accumulated correction rather than a single hard shove. |
The goal is not a controller tuned to one event. Build one that behaves repeatably across shocks. A config that stays composed through several different conditions will beat a config that only shines when its one favorite event shows up.
Next: how difficulty sets the conditions and the run length, in Creating a Challenge.