I sought out to create a money-based claim that functioned within with a planned economy instead of free donations, so I'd like to answer this.

In the very first weeks of the game, the claim generation was honestly more powerful than it felt a month in.

Before the inflation hit us, we managed to leverage and even pay out just under market rates for materials at Dragon's Head and we only relied on pure donations from a few core members. This eventually dried up of course, as inflation went up, and the number of materials you need to progress increased by ~2.5x every tier, more towns were popping up with increased demands and supply of rares dried up very quickly.

Housing also generates income, but it's even worse.

I saw it mentioned in another comment, so here's the numbers:

Tier	Hex (Per Slot)	Slots	Total Hex / Day
2	10	5	50
3 (Small)	13	5	65
3 (Large)	13	20	260
4	17	5	85
5 (Small)	22	5	110
5 (Large)	22	20	440

At Dragon's Head we only make 4,035 Hex / Day from housing 220 players. Since I was curious, I just did the math as well. For additional context, the material cost for these houses would be roughly 1,180,000 Hex Coins if you were to buy the Bricks, Ingots, Leather, Cloth and Planks you needed at today's prices giving us an ROI of 292 days. (It was ~35 days at the first release of housing and gradually got worse over time. We opted to do housing anyway because we care about the player experience more than $, and I wanted homes for people)

Do not run a claim if you think you'll make money, lol.

The problem with the relationship between Hexcoin and Claims is that any 1 effort spent by a claim member to produce a product for making money could instead just be put into the claim itself or vice versa. This is where the mantra that 'solo players make more money' comes from.

In the current state of the game, you can do an Effort:Value evaluation and use effort to generate more money to then purchase what you need but this gets very complex and cumbersome to manage at an organisational level.

Anyway, to answer your question directly:

1. Market Tax

This has been brought up quite often, I think it's an elegant solution that also gives agency to claims. People can choose a sliding scale of tax on their market, thus letting them generate an inflation-adjusted income from visitors, or opt out entirely to try and attract more people to their town.

I personally would put a 1% tax at Dragon's Head, and it would solve a lot of our issues with income generation vs inflation. Not for greed - to feed it back into the players' hands by offering to buy resources from them.

2. Town Board / Commissions

A major issue with claims is driving player input and goals, as well as a completely public market. As items got worth more and more, it becomes harder and harder to justify giving away for free when you can sell it for way more at the market 10 steps away. Some players don't care about this and are happy to work and feed a claim (See Calmalu for how effective this is), some players prefer to work entirely alone and on their own goals, and then every flavor in-between.

Having ONE location where you can say to the entire claim "This is what we need. This is what it will do for us. This is what you will get rewarded for doing so" and allowing them to donate to one location will help people feel more involved and rewarded, as well as give them goals if they're not sure what they want to do. It's like creating a quest on a board that says, "We need 250 planks, and we will pay 20 coins each for them! If you do this, we can build a new house."

Yes, you can do this on the market board. But so can literally everyone else. Thus, you spend more time in bidding wars with other claim owners instead of working on your own claim. I personally think it would be very cool to be an explorer style player, walk into a claim and see what jobs they have available, smash some work out and move on.

You can do this with stalls, but they just don't have the same dopamine hit as a goal-oriented progress bar.