Guide

Banks and loans

A country's banks lend to a player who lives there: a personal loan, a loan for a move, a loan towards a deposit. What they offer, at what rate, and what a missed payment costs is one record of the content type loans, in data/loans.json or any file in data/loans/. Each file is a JSON array.

A record serves the nations its nations lists, and one record of the loaded content is marked "default": true: the banks of every nation no record names. The core pack has one record, core.loans.uk, for England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, which is also the default. It is keyed exactly as a housing market is, and the two usually come as a pair for a country.

Mortgages are not here: what the banks lend against a home is the housing market's mortgage.

A record#

{
  "id": "acme.loans.ned",
  "nations": ["NED"],
  "lateFee": 40,
  "missedToDefault": 3,
  "missPenaltyRate": 1.5,
  "missMemoryMonths": 24,
  "earlyRepaymentFee": 0.01,
  "debtShareMax": 0.4,
  "garnishShare": 0.5,
  "barMonths": 24,
  "repossessionDiscount": 0.15,
  "tourCardIncome": 30000,
  "rankBands": [
    { "rankMax": 16, "rate": -2.5 },
    { "rankMax": 64, "rate": -1 },
    { "rankMax": 128, "rate": 0 }
  ],
  "products": [
    { "id": "personal", "name": "Personal loan", "purpose": "any", "min": 500, "max": 25000, "incomeMultiple": 0.5, "rate": 8.4, "terms": [12, 24, 36, 60] },
    { "id": "relocation", "name": "Relocation loan", "purpose": "move", "min": 1000, "max": 20000, "incomeMultiple": 0.6, "rate": 6.9, "terms": [24, 36, 48] },
    { "id": "deposit", "name": "Deposit loan", "purpose": "deposit", "min": 2000, "max": 40000, "incomeMultiple": 0.8, "rate": 7.9, "terms": [36, 60] }
  ]
}

Amounts are in pounds; rates are per cent a year.

Field	What it does
`id`	The record's id, starting with your mod's id.
`nations`	The nations (three-letter codes) these banks serve. A nation two records list is served by the first of them in load order, and the loader says so.
`default`	`true` on the one record that serves every nation no record names. The first such record in load order is the default (the core's).
`lateFee`	Added to a debt for each payment missed.
`missedToDefault`	Payments missed in a row before the bank acts.
`missPenaltyRate`	Added to the rate of a new loan for each recent miss.
`missMemoryMonths`	How long a miss counts against you.
`earlyRepaymentFee`	The fee on an amount repaid early, as a share of it.
`debtShareMax`	All monthly debt payments together may not pass this share of monthly earnings.
`garnishShare`	After a default on an unsecured loan the bank takes this share of prize and sponsor money.
`barMonths`	No new loan for this long after a default.
`repossessionDiscount`	A home the bank takes and sells goes for this much under its value.
`tourCardIncome`	A Tour Card holder's earnings count as at least this a year when the bank works out what it will lend.
`rankBands`	Players ranked `rankMax` or better get `rate` added to a loan's rate (a negative number makes it cheaper). List the bands in rising order of `rankMax`: a band after a wider one is never reached.
`products`	The kinds of loan, one to twenty.

A product#

Field	What it does
`id`	A short name inside the record: lowercase letters, digits and dashes (`relocation`). Not a full content id.
`name`	What the player reads.
`purpose`	`any`: anything, taken from the Home & loans tab. `move`: offered inside the costs of a move to another country, when the cash falls short. `deposit`: offered towards a home's deposit when buying.
`min`, `max`	The least and the most the product lends.
`incomeMultiple`	The most it lends to one player, as a share of a year's earnings.
`rate`	Before the ranking band and any penalty for past misses.
`terms`	The lengths on offer, in months.

What a career does with it#

Loan payments fall with the month's housing payments, in one line the Finances screen forecasts.
A junior living with the family is not lent to.
The offer a player sees is the product's rate, moved by their ranking band and by recent misses, and capped by max, by incomeMultiple of their year's earnings and by debtShareMax.
A career keeps a copy of the record it started with. Changing a pack does not change the loans of a career already under way.

What the loader checks#

A record that breaks the schema is an error and switches the pack off. Beyond that the loader warns, on the Mods screen, and the pack still loads:

rankBands out of rising order;
a product whose max is under its min (it is never offered);
two products with the same id (the first is used);
a nation another record serves already, or a code no nation has;
a record with no nations that is not the default;
a second default, or none at all.

In the Mod Studio#

Banks and loans are under Countries in the Mod Studio's list of types. nations is a search box over the installed nations.

Written for Darts Player Simulator 0.50.32. Built from the game's own schemas and its base pack.