Guide
Every Sandbox and challenge-room setting, explained
Sandbox mode hands you the controls. You set the starting hand and, if you dig into the Advanced section, the entire economy. The very same dials build a custom challenge room, since a room is just a setup with the world pinned so everyone plays it identically. This page is the reference: what every setting does, and which way it pushes the difficulty.
The Basic layer covers your starting life: age, salary, balances and monthly costs. The Advanced section, hidden behind a toggle, exposes the full economy and risk model. Start from a difficulty preset there, then nudge individual dials. Multipliers marked × scale the Standard baseline, so 1.0× is normal, 2.0× is double, and 0× switches a threat off entirely.
Basic: your starting life
These set the hand you are dealt. The finish line is always age 100, so anything that shortens your earning years or thins your starting pot makes the run harder.
| Setting | What it does | Harder when |
|---|---|---|
| Starting Age | The age you begin at. You still play to 100, so a later start means fewer years of salary to build wealth. | Higher |
| Starting Cash | Money in your current account on day one. It earns no interest and inflation erodes it, so it is a buffer, not a strategy. | Lower |
| Starting S&S ISA | An existing Stocks & Shares ISA, invested in the Global ETF. Grows tax-free and does not touch this year's £20k allowance. | Lower |
| Starting Pension | An existing pension pot (SIPP), invested in the Global ETF. Grows tax-free but is locked until age 57. | Lower |
| Gross Annual Salary | Your pay before tax; the tax engine works out take-home. The single biggest lever on a run, because it sets how much you can save each year. | Lower |
| Monthly Rent | Housing cost while renting. It leaves your account every month until you buy a home, when it stops. | Higher |
| Monthly Car Lease | A fixed motoring cost with no upkeep. You can switch to owning later, trading it for running costs and breakdown risk. | Higher |
| Monthly Living Costs | Everyday spending outside housing and transport. Rises with inflation and sets the baseline you must out-earn to save. | Higher |
| Starting Debt | Debt carried from day one. It grows at the APR until cleared, so paying it off early usually beats investing. | Higher |
| Debt APR | The yearly interest rate on that debt. A higher rate makes it snowball faster. | Higher |
| Retirement Age | The age your salary stops for good. Earlier means fewer earning years and a longer stretch to fund from savings. | Lower |
| Never retire | Keep drawing your salary for life, with no retirement phase to fund. A big easing. | Off |
| Staggered product release | On, products unlock year by year as in a story run; off, the whole menu is open from the start. A pacing choice more than a difficulty one. | — |
Advanced: inflation
Inflation is the quiet tax on everything you hold in cash, and it drives your living costs up year after year.
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Inflation shocks | Allows occasional spikes on top of the usual drift. Shocks punish held cash and can raise living costs sharply for a year or two. |
| Inflation volatility (×) | Scales how much inflation swings year to year. Higher means less predictable prices and more pressure on cash and fixed income. |
Advanced: stock-market crashes
Equities are the growth engine, and crashes are the price of admission. These four dials set how often the market falls, how far, and how long it stays down.
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Crash frequency (×) | Scales the roughly 5% annual chance of a crash. Higher means crashes hit more often. |
| Crash depth (×) | Scales how far the market falls, normally a 25–45% drop. Deeper crashes cut equity harder and recover more slowly. |
| Extra recovery years | Adds years to how long the market takes to climb back, stretching out the depressed returns. |
| Bankruptcy rate / company | The yearly chance any single company goes bust, wiping its holding. It bites individual shares; the Global ETF spreads this risk away. |
This is the case for the gilt and Global ETF mix in a sentence: the ETF makes single-company bankruptcy almost irrelevant, and gilts cushion the crash years.
Advanced: unexpected events
Every so often a bill lands straight on your current account. These knobs govern how often, how large, and whether they can gang up.
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Min years between | The soonest another bill can land after the last. Lower means shocks come thick and fast. |
| Max years between | The longest quiet run before a bill is forced. Lower guarantees more frequent shocks. |
| Event cost (×) | Scales the size of every bill. Higher makes each shock more likely to force a fire-sale. |
| Net-worth cost scaling (%) | Adds this share of your current net worth to every bill. Above zero, the richer you get the harder shocks hit, so wealth stops being a shield. |
| Events can cluster | Allows a second event in the same year. Back-to-back bills are far more dangerous than the same costs spread out. |
An emergency fund is the direct counter to all five. Net-worth cost scaling is special: it is dormant in most presets and only wakes up on the toughest ones, where it makes a runaway portfolio a target rather than a fortress.
Advanced: late-life care & exotics
The endgame threats. Late-life care is the classic way a healthy-looking pot still runs dry after 80, and the exotics dial covers crypto's tail risk.
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Care-cost severity (×) | Scales the unavoidable care costs from age 80. Higher bills are the classic late-game drain. |
| Care-cover loading (×) | Scales the price of the optional long-term care policy. Higher makes that cover worse value, tilting you towards self-funding. |
| Care wealth levy (%) | A yearly means-tested charge: this share of your net worth above an exemption. Above zero, holding a large pot in late life becomes a liability. |
| Crypto collapse chance (×) | Scales the annual chance (base ~3%) of a catastrophic ~90% crypto collapse. Higher makes crypto an even wilder gamble. |
More on planning for this in late-life care and the exotics, reviewed.
Advanced: game rules
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Return-range width (×) | Widens the min–max return ranges shown on each product, so outcomes look more uncertain. It changes the display, not the underlying returns. |
| Permadeath | A single save with no recovery: lose the run and it is gone. Raises the stakes without touching the economy. |
Advanced: the pacing director
Underneath the economy sits a director that decides how eventful your life feels. It aims for a target rhythm of noteworthy moments, an event, a life-choice, a crash starting, a milestone, tighter while you are finding your feet and calmer once you are established. These dials shape that rhythm rather than the size of any single threat, so they are the finishing touch for a room host who wants a particular tempo.
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Min / Max gap (getting established) | The window of quiet years while you are still building. Lower numbers pack the early game with more to react to. |
| Min / Max gap (established) | The same window once you are established. Usually wider, so settled life feels calmer than the scramble of the early years. |
| Max gap (retirement) | The forced cap on quiet years in retirement. Kept at or below the established max so the late game never feels emptier. |
| Established age | The age you count as established no matter your finances, switching the game to its calmer cadence. |
| Emergency buffer | Months of expenses saved that mark you as having a safety net, one of the tests for counting as established. |
| First squeeze by year | Guarantees a tight financial moment within this many years, so no run drifts through an easy, eventless start. |
| Early-event cost floor | The smallest an unexpected bill can be during that opening squeeze, so early shocks still sting when you have least to spare. |
Every setting here carries a small i marker in the setup screen: hover or tap it for the same explanation without leaving the page. Once your setup feels right, start a solo run to try it, or, from the Sandbox screen, turn it into a challenge room so everyone plays the identical world. For the bigger picture on why these modes are the fastest way to learn, see learning faster with Sandbox and Challenge modes.