Market
Players buy from and sell to each other without meeting: the seller lists and leaves, the buyer pays later. Beside them, the Exchange posts trades of its own.
| Room | Rare, one tile like every other room |
| Where to stand | The market floor; a doorway is outside and refused |
| Stock | Per market; proceeds are collected where the ticket says |
| Combat | Allowed, as in every room (PvP) |
Prices
A price is a list of up to sixteen terms, never combined: two kinetic at 5 and one kinetic at 8 stay two terms.
| Term | Names | Paid with |
|---|---|---|
| Essence | An affinity, a direction, a minimum strength | Essence shards |
| Chit | An affinity only | Chits (Items) |
| Goods | An item and a count; the Exchange's listings only | Plain items of that kind |
Direction is part of the term (cold or hot, diffuse or dense). Only caloric and density run both ways; a listing asking for negative kinetic or cohesion is refused.
Buying
The listing view orders items by what the shards you carry can pay for, and shows how many shards would be spent, across how many stacks, and how many the market destroys, before you confirm.
| Rule | |
|---|---|
| Reversal | None |
| Payment | All or nothing across the whole price |
| Shards spent | The weakest that satisfy each term |
| Carry capacity | Checked first; a buyer who cannot lift it does not pay |
| Payment | Drawn from at most 64 of your shard and chit stacks; more is refused as a shortfall |
Selling
Listing takes the item out of your inventory and gives you a market ticket in its place. Listings never expire; one stands until it sells or its ticket is redeemed. A market shows only its 100 newest listings; older ones are still for sale but hidden until newer ones go.
Market tickets
A ticket is the only claim on a listing, and it belongs to whoever holds it, not to the seller. Redeeming it at the market it names retrieves the item or collects the payment, and consumes it.
| Event | Result |
|---|---|
| Ticket dropped | Whoever picks it up can collect |
| Holder killed | Passes to the killer with the rest of the inventory |
| Ticket destroyed | Nobody can claim the goods |
Collecting
Collection pays the actual shards the buyer spent, which can be heavy (twelve essence shards weigh close to 5 kg). If your carry capacity cannot take all of it, the collection is refused and the ticket kept.
The cut
A tenth of every sale, across the whole price and rounded down, is destroyed rather than paid; a price under ten shards pays none. The buyer sees it before confirming. See Reference: Costs. A trade with the Exchange has no cut: everything it asks for is destroyed.
The Exchange
Every 15 minutes the market reads what each sector visited in the last day is short of and has too much of, and puts up to 3 trades on each of its markets, listed by The Exchange. Each offers one find the sector's storage rooms lack and asks for goods the sector holds too many of.
| Rule | |
|---|---|
| Offer | A find the sector lacks: under the target the storage rooms aim for (Stash), and not yet paid out today |
| Price | One kind of goods lying in the sector at more than twice its target, and at least as common a find as the offer; as many as the offer is rarer, at most 16 |
| Never a price | Essence shards, whose worth is their affinity, and pattern books |
| Paying | Only plain items: nothing forged, socketed or holding anything; all of it is destroyed and paid to nobody |
| A sale | Counts as one of the sector's room finds, so the rooms and the Exchange share one day's share |
| Withdrawn | After 6 hours, or once that find lies in the sector at twice its target |
| Ticket | None you can hold; only the Exchange takes a trade down |
The goods are measured where they lie (storage rooms, the ground, the market), not in packs, so a trade drains the world rather than emptying the sector: somebody still has to take the goods out of the rooms. An Exchange trade counts toward what lies at its market while it stands. Example at the origin: a flask pattern book for 2 Binding Salt; a Cloth Cap for 13.