Real vs Unreal Economy

It's not about the economy actually being real, it is about it seeming real.

Does it matter to you if the economy is real or unreal?

As you may know, I've been working on "fixing" the economy of the game so that trading works again and people don't starve to death in 10 years.I've made some good progress on getting merchants and traders working but it's hard difficult work and there is more to go to make this "real" economy work.For example:Swordsmiths use metal. If metal suddenly becomes unavailable (the player bought it all, goblins killed all the miners, traders can't get past bandits) the swordsmith goes out of business and he starves until he finds another job. He may or may not return to work when metal becomes available. And it is impossible for him to know if the scarcity is temporary or permanent, short time frame or long.By tracking every single bar of metal as it flows around the world it makes the economy fragile to these kinds of hiccups, which is the major problem i'm trying to solve.Two fans recently told me (and i'm sorry I forget your names) about Mount & Blade and how it's economy works. I fired it up for a few minutes and saw they were cheating a lot in their economy. Someone recently mentioned that a town goes into siege and no trader arrives with food within 30 days, it goes into starvation mode. But the traders themselves are just random things that move around the map. Like the ships in Pirates. I would call these two games "unreal" economies.Slime Rancher was on sale yesterday so I decided to get it and try it. I was staring at the "sell" board for the plorts when something clicked in my head, along with the M&B siege example.In slime rancher if you sell certain plots today the price per unit goes down. If you don't for a few day, it rises. I'm sure there are some min numbers in there, like selling 1 pink plort won't affect the price, but selling 100 will. It's crazy simple, but it seems real. In fact, I'm not sure if a player could tell if they worked on the market board for 4 hours or had a PhD intern working on it for 2 years, in the end all you would see is prices go up, prices go down.So that makes me think: maybe it doesn't matter that a town had 100 metal, then a trader took 20 metal on THIS yakka and went to THAT town and now it has +20 metal. Maybe it is enough that at regular intervals a trader goes from one town to another. If it arrives, they both prosper. If it doesn't, they both get some minuses.In both cases, bandits being on the road would affect the economy. I think it would feel the same. One reason I was purusing the "real" economy is I think it gives me some cool stuff for free, but that's like saying a porshe comes with free power windows. It's the initial cost that matters too!So I need an answer to this rather quickly as it affects my work RIGHT NOW:Am I spending too much time making something that doesn't actually matter?