Guide

Staff roles

Your team is built from staff roles: a darts coach, a physio, an agent, a practice partner and so on. Roles are content, like players or sponsors: a mod can add new ones, rebalance the core ones or replace them.

Roles live in data/staff/roles.json (or any file in data/staff/roles/). Each file is a JSON array. The editor schema is the staff roles reference. Patches target staffRole:<id>.

The game supplies the people: every month the market fills with candidates for each role, with names, faces, skills, personalities and wage demands.

A role#

{
  "id": "acme.staff.nutritionist",
  "name": "Nutritionist",
  "short": "NU",
  "icon": "🥗",
  "description": "Fuel for long days on the floor.",
  "skills": ["fitness", "psychology"],
  "effects": [
    { "hook": "fatigueRecovery", "skill": "fitness", "value": 0.03 },
    { "hook": "training", "skill": "fitness", "value": 0.2, "area": "fitness" },
    { "hook": "recovery", "skill": "psychology", "value": 1 }
  ],
  "availability": { "tierMax": 4, "followersMin": 0 },
  "wages": [40, 80, 150, 250, 400]
}

Skills#

Each staff member has a value of 1–20 in every skill their role lists. A role can use any of these:

coaching, psychology, fitness, physio, negotiation, contacts, reach, tact, media, logistics, finance, analysis, technical, practice

Star ratings come from the skills: roughly skill ÷ 4. In the market, skills are scouted as a range until the person joins you; an agent with good contacts narrows the ranges.

Effect hooks#

An effect is { "hook", "skill", "value", "area"? }. value is the full strength at skill 20: a member with skill 10 gives half. Staff with low morale work at 85%. The whole team's total on each hook is capped, so stacking staff can't break the game.

A role with a commission effect is an agent role: its people come from agencies, work mostly on commission and can be hired for no weekly wage at all.

An effect whose skill isn't in the role's skills does nothing; the loader warns about it.

The core roles#

Hiring, contracts and morale#

How the game uses your roles, so you can balance them:

• Standing (0–100) is how known you are: your tier, followers and ranking. Candidates want a minimum standing that rises with their stars, so the best people only listen once you're a name.
• Team size is capped: 2 places to start, more as your standing grows and with a year's prize and sponsor income over £50,000 and £250,000.
• Offers: you choose a weekly wage and a contract length. At or above their asking wage and a length they like, they sign. Close to it, they counter. Far below, they refuse. Every counter or refusal uses up their patience, and a lowball uses it faster; out of patience, they leave the market. Hiring needs four weeks' wages in the bank.
• Release costs a quarter of the wages left on the contract, at least four weeks' notice (never more than what's left).
• Morale drifts toward what their pay (against the role's wages), your results and your standing merit. Ambitious staff fret if you're below their level. Very unhappy staff may resign. At the end of a contract, happy staff renew, the ambitious with a small raise.

Staff tuning#

The numbers behind hiring (the team caps, standing, team size, independent agents and release costs) are staff settings: data/staff/settings.json holds one object (an array of them works too). Every field except id is optional, and a field left out keeps the game's number. The editor schema is the staff settings reference, and the Mod Studio edits them under Career rules → Staff tuning.

{
  "id": "acme.staff-settings",
  "hookCaps": { "travelCost": 0.6, "training": 1 },
  "capacity": { "base": 3, "max": 14 },
  "noticeWeeks": 8
}

Standing is rounded and kept within 0–100. Several mods can supply staff settings: they apply in load order, later fields winning (per hook for hookCaps). Reusing another mod's id replaces its record; the core record is staffSettings:core.staff-settings.

Staff settings are copied into a career's save, and a career you load picks up the installed packs' settings (saves from before them play by the game's numbers).

Staff in stories#

Stories can check and change your team (see Stories):

• Conditions: "hasStaff": "physio" (or a list, meaning any of them), "staffQualityMin": 4, "staffQualityMax": 2. "Has an agent" is "hasStaff": "agent".
• Actions: { "type": "staffLeaves", "role": "practice-partner" } and { "type": "staffMorale", "role": "coach", "by": 10, "relationship": 5 }.
• Text: {staff:physio} is your physio's name ("your physio" without one). {coach} still works.

{
  "id": "acme.story.nutritionist-chips",
  "trigger": "weekTick",
  "condition": { "chance": 0.01, "hasStaff": "nutritionist" },
  "title": "{staff:nutritionist} Bans the Chips",
  "body": "{staff:nutritionist} has found the chip shop receipts.",
  "choices": [
    {
      "id": "comply",
      "label": "Fine. Salad it is",
      "effects": { "fatigue": -0.05, "morale": -2 },
      "actions": [{ "type": "staffMorale", "role": "nutritionist", "by": 5 }]
    },
    { "id": "rebel", "label": "Chips are a human right", "effects": { "morale": 3 } }
  ]
}

Philosophies#

A coaching role can carry a philosophy: a way of working that suits some players and not others. Philosophies live in data/staff/philosophies.json (or data/staff/philosophies/), one array; patches target staffPhilosophy:<id>. The core pack ships four for the darts coach (Power scorer, Finisher, Technician, Old school), two for the mental coach (Calm head, Fire in the belly) and two for the fitness coach (Endurance, Recovery first). A role with no philosophies works as before.

{
  "id": "acme.philosophy.wall-of-sound",
  "role": "core.staff.mental-coach",
  "name": "Wall of sound",
  "blurb": "Practise with the crowd turned up. Nothing on the night should be louder than the practice room.",
  "areas": { "mental": 1.1 },
  "suits": [{ "attr": "crowdHandling", "when": "below", "weight": 1 }],
  "temperament": { "volatile": 0.3, "calm": -0.2 },
  "conflicts": ["core.philosophy.calm-head"]
}

The fit scales that member's training hooks by 1 + staff.philosophy.fitRange × fit (then the team cap as always), sets their mood (a misfit is an unhappy coach) and nudges your own morale baseline. The Team page shows the philosophy, a word for the fit (suits you, a stretch, a poor fit) and, once they have been with you revealWeeks (or at once with an analyst's scouting), the exact figure.

Staff who act#

• Arenas. A role's arena (performance or business) says which corner of the team it works in. Two members of one arena clash when their egos (1–20, from the id) add up to staff.clash.egoSum or their philosophies conflict, unless both get on with you better than calmAt. A clash costs both morale and a share of their effects, brings a letter and then a story (core.narrative.team-clash, condition flag: staff-clash, text variables {clashA} and {clashB}) whose choices set the flags staff-clash-choice:back-one, bang-heads or let-it-ride; the game reads the flag the next week. A role with no arena never clashes.
• Mood with reasons. Each member's morale target now carries a misfit, a clash, the season goals missed at the last review and the rank lost since the season began (staff.leave.*). Under warnAt a letter says why; a resignation is noticeWeeks of notice at noticeEffect, and releasing someone on notice costs nothing. At the season's end an ambitious member (ambitionAt) who wanted a winner may leave (resultsChance).
• Poaching. A slumping computer player inside staff.poach.rankMax may come for your darts coach (quality ≥ qualityMin, morale under moraleAt or ambition with your standing under theirs): a letter, a card on the Team page, and two answers. Match, and they may raise once more; let go, or say nothing by the deadline, and the coach joins them (a world story, and heat on a rivalry). The other way, a computer player's coach can be on the market (unsettledExits, marketMax, premium): hiring them takes them from the player. Real (named) players' coaches are never involved.
• Computer players' coaches are people: the Player page shows their stars and philosophy once the world has given them one.

Texts: team.fit.*, team.mood.*, team.notice.*, team.leave.*, team.clash.*, team.poach.*, team.candidate.coach-of*, world.coach-poached.*, world.coach-hired.*. Numbers: the staff.* block in Tuning.

Old saves#

Careers started before staff roles existed keep their staff: a darts coach, mental coach or fitness coach becomes the core role with the same legacy kind, keeping their name, stars and wage, and gains skills, a personality and a one-year contract. Staff roles missing from a save are added from your installed packs when it loads.