What did Atrus do to get money?

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"To a well organised mind, death is but the next great adventure"

Simple:

He wrote an age which had financial attributes in the soil.
He planted his income and watched his savings grow...
Eventually, after many long years of carefully managing his investment, he was able to reap the rewards by pruning the fruit of his labours and taking the cash straight from his savings branch.
Because he'd nourished his investment, it had a good strong trunk and steady growth.

I might be barking up the wrong tree here, but I always thought money didn't grow on trees!

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Inferiority Complex
Everyone has a better name than me...

I think he didn't need any money. He gathered materials himself from his Ages. As for food, perhaps he traded? (Like his grandmother did when Atrus lived with her in the Cleft)

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URU blog | Archives of the Restoration

Search this forum. there are some threads where the subject of D'ni money and whether they would have had a 'Star-Trek' economy are discussed.

Consider that if one could write an age with mountains made of solid gold... or any thing valuable, what value would those things have? Information, knowledge and art would likely be the only things to retain value.

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Nalates - GoC - 418 - MOULagain: Nal KI#00 083 543, Nalates 111451 - Second Life: Nalates Urriah
Guild of Cartographers

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Wasn't Gehn some kind of nobility/royalty?

It seems that they had a normal economy, even with books, in which artisans (crafters, cooks, architects to build in D'ni, etc) and farmers were still needed, just not so much raw resources (I don't think). Books were also sold, like real estate, and most people didn't own books- they still had to buy materials they needed.

Anyway, I'm pretty sure there was a 'D'ni money' and that it was mostly used to buy things that were built- money is just a medium of rating how one thing should be exchanged for another thing, and they still exchanged things in D'ni. At the very least, written books take time to craft (a novel you buy is not priced for the paper and ink it is written with, is it?) and they used magic ink and paper or something, which I'm sure was limited in some way.

Atrus (and probably other age-writers, who were a small upper class, and very distinct from commoners) seems to have "homesteaded" by writing and maintaining Myst, Tomahna, and the Cleft entirely by his own toil, just as a frontier family of yore who made almost everything they needed themselves.

That said, when he did need money (IE, food before he wrote his home) I think Gehn's deep pockets provided it. It doesn't seem that Atrus ever had a job, though it's not impossible- hell, maybe he used to work part-time making hamburgers for the guild of caterers.

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