Selling and buying
Other players are the only source of gear somebody else made. A market is where you reach them.
Finding one
Markets are rare rooms, and what is for sale in one is not for sale anywhere else. You have to be standing on the market's floor — a doorway is not inside, and the game will tell you so rather than silently doing nothing.
Buying something
Browse first. The list leads with what you can actually afford, worked out against the shards in your pack right now — so do not read the prices and try to do the arithmetic yourself. Two players standing next to each other see different things they can buy, because you can afford what you have been hunting.
When you pick something, you are shown exactly which shards would leave your pack before anything happens. Read it. Spending cannot be undone, and it is all-or-nothing: if you are short on any part of the price, nothing is spent.
The game always spends your weakest satisfying shards. If a seller asks for kinetic at 3 or better and you carry a 9 and three 3s, it spends a 3.
Selling something
Name what you want for it: an affinity, a direction, and how strong. "Four kinetic at 3 or better." You can ask for several different things at once, and you can ask for the same affinity twice at different strengths.
Only caloric and density have two directions — hot or cold, dense or diffuse. Kinetic and cohesion only run one way, so there is nothing to choose.
The item leaves your pack the moment you list it. In its place you get a market ticket.
The ticket is the whole thing
The ticket is your only claim on what you listed. Present it at that market to take the goods back, or to collect what they sold for.
Whoever holds the ticket holds the claim. Not whoever listed the item — the name on a listing is decoration. So:
- Lose the ticket and you have lost the claim. Drop it and somebody else can pick it up and collect.
- Die holding it and your killer gets it, along with everything else you were carrying. They can walk to the market it names and take your goods.
- Destroy it and the goods are stranded. Nobody can claim them, ever.
The flip side is that this works for you too. Kill a trader and you inherit their claims — a ticket is loot with directions on it, pointing at goods sitting somewhere you have not been.
Collecting what you sold
You collect the actual shards the buyer paid, not a converted total. That can be heavy: twelve essence shards is nearly five kilos. If you cannot carry the lot, the collection is refused whole and your ticket is not spent — come back lighter.
A share of every sale is destroyed rather than paid to you. It is a tenth, rounded down, so anything under ten shards costs you nothing at all. You see the figure before you list, and the buyer sees it before they pay.
Two warnings
A market is not safe ground. Nothing about the room stops a fight. It is a place where people stand still, reading, with packs full of tickets.
Carrying several tickets means carrying several claims into every fight you have on the way home. A trader running a dozen listings is carrying a dozen reasons for somebody to kill them.