How to Manage Life in MarginCall

MarginCall is a market sim that also runs a person. Age, health, hunger, and stress share the same deterministic clock as the order book. Loans, property, and taxes are cash flows, not flavour text. Steam reviews that praise the 80s terminal still mention eating and not skipping the Life page. This guide is that page in full. The first-hour checklist on Getting Started tells you to eat before you size up. This page explains what happens if you do not, and how personal assets interact with the company wallet after Sound Money.

Eat, stress, and the wasted click

The Eat action spends money. If you mash it while already full, you can spend again for nothing. That is not a buff. Treat fullness like a position: check it, fill it, stop clicking. Stress rises with sleepless heroics, max-speed sessions, and accounts that live on 20x. Training exists; buy it when the Life panel says you are slipping, not after a week of coffee-free all-nighters. A titan who never sleeps still dies. The heir inherits a cleaned-up estate, not your unfinished thesis card.

A character assets row sits on Life after the launch hotfix. Use it the way you use Positions: date, income, and a clear sense of what is personal versus corporate. Sound Money taxes company-to-personal transfers as salary. Raiding the treasury like a video-game chest is how a “successful” factory pays you in tax drag. Keep a spendable personal buffer that is not already posted as margin. Posted margin cannot be spent twice, including on food.

Loans, property, and the slow liabilities

Loans are real. They accrue. Winding down a division no longer erases the debt — that free-money trick died in Sound Money. Property is an asset with upkeep and tax, not a trophy. If rates and inflation line up, parking cash in high-yielding government paper is a valid first income stream and a way to fund Life without forcing a trade. It is not a licence to ignore the person. Coupons do not chew your food.

Taxes print. Fractional crypto gains after Digital Frontier are computed on real gains; mined coins are taxed when sold. Do not treat a mining data center as a tax-free faucet. If you cannot explain the Life cash line after a sale, open financials on the entity you actually own, then the personal assets row. Mixed books are how people think they were “hacked” when they paid a bill.

Time, age, and the save that outlives you

The clock is deterministic. Fastest speed still advances the body. Charting patches targeted lag at max speed; they did not pause hunger. If you run the tape at full tilt, schedule Eat the way you schedule a stop. Age is not a difficulty slider. There is no difficulty slider. A long production game can outlast a trader who never left the building screen. Plan an heir-aware book: nested subsidiaries with clear parents, no 155 percent ownership ghosts (capped at 100 percent in the launch hotfix), and a thesis someone else could close.

Sleep and CRT are graphics, not rest. CRT and Glow default off after the hotfix; the 19 July note had turned CRT on by default. If the Life page looks unreadable, fix Graphics before you assume the character is dying. Themes from the 5 August colour update (Terminal Green, Amber Terminal, Midnight Bloomberg, Arctic Ice, Solarized Dusk, Synthwave, Paper) recolour the whole terminal, including Life. Pick one you can read at 2 a.m.

A Life loop that does not steal the session

1. Open Life after every meaningful time skip. Confirm hunger, stress, and the assets row.
2. Fund food and training from personal cash that is not margin.
3. Pay tax when it prints. Do not wait for a margin monitor event to discover a liability.
4. Keep loans smaller than a story you can service if the book goes quiet for a quarter.
5. Then go trade, build, or take over. Mixing all three while starving is how accounts die.

If the UI is the blocker, Controls maps Life and Assets. If the body is fine and the book is not, return to How to Trade. If you came here from a review that called the sim unfriendly, that is the point: the market charges for what you skip, including lunch. Official destinations, including the Functionally Human Discord announced on Steam News, live on the Links Hub.