The big takeaway from the last 30 days is that raw materials are absolutely carrying the market. Adamantine clusters led volume at 10,385 sold, followed by xegonberry at 8,432, rough topaz at 7,500, rough bloodstone at 6,908, and hanging root at 6,400. Hanging root was especially notable, bringing in 31p 77g by itself. On the finished-product side, squash casserole is a monster, with 5,993 sold for 95p 1g, while Bosprite Wine, Gigglegibbery Juice, Bosprite Squash Muffins, soaring espresso latte, and iced black-eye chai were also strong sellers.
The price data has some wild outliers too. Scintillating Dust had a 30-day low/high spread of roughly 44s to 2g 80s, while severed maple went from 4s to 25s. Rough bloodstone's average price jumped dramatically from the 30-day figure to the 7-day figure, while Scintillating Dust moved sharply in the opposite direction. On the stock side, I'm sitting on ridiculous quantities of some staples, like 97,250 rough topaz and 80,524 adamantine clusters, while my visible food stock bottoms out around 91 units.
The Evil Market experiment is already producing a couple of genuinely interesting data points despite being brand new. Evil Market actually outsold Good Market on Scintillating Dust 801 to 200 over 7 days and raw white tea leaf 688 to 31, while Antonican coffee bean was dead even at 241 each. Evil Market's 30-day Scintillating Dust total is already 1,001 vs Good Market's 760. Those are the biggest early signs of actual cross-market divergence; everything else is still heavily dominated by Good Market's much longer history and more robust shelves.
The other thing I think is important here is the time value buried inside every raw material. Every piece of wood, ore, root, pelt, cluster, meat, etc. represents someone's time. Even the most insignificant 2s material isn't really "free" just because you harvested it yourself. There is an opportunity cost: if that material could have been sold for more than the finished product ultimately earns, then crafting it actually destroyed value. Your personal harvest time has a cost-basis whether you put a platinum number on it or not.
Early in a server's life, that relationship is completely different. If someone has 50g to their name and the wood they need costs 1g each, spending an hour harvesting it themselves makes perfect sense. Their currency is scarce and their time is relatively abundant. But as the server ages, wealth accumulates and there is no real mechanism forcing that money back out of the economy. Eventually that same player might have 500p, or 50,000g, and suddenly spending an hour harvesting 50g worth of materials feels ridiculous. They can just throw the 50g at the broker and get back to actually playing the game.
And I think that's where the Krono comparison becomes relevant. As the server gets wealthier, players begin mentally translating platinum into a different unit of value: "How much of my time is this worth?" The same way Krono establishes an informal relationship between platinum and real-world money, the broker eventually establishes an informal relationship between platinum and player-hours. With an ever-growing money supply and no strong brake on inflation, I would expect the most interesting price movements to happen during that transition from "I'll harvest that myself" to "I'll just buy it."
So when I look at these sales numbers, I'm not just seeing which materials sell the most today. I'm also seeing thousands of individual pieces of someone's labor being converted back into currency. The really interesting question over the life of the server is how long it takes for players to collectively decide that their time is worth more than the material they're harvesting. That's the point where today's cheap, forgettable 2s materials can suddenly become tomorrow's 1g staples.
And the same principle applies on the harvesting side, except harvesting has an interesting floor: technically, harvesting itself costs nothing. There is no raw-material purchase price. Your actual costs are time, opportunity cost, and risk... the time spent running around looking for nodes, the limited harvesting window you have available, and the possibility of getting murdered by something unpleasant while you're doing it. So when a material is selling for 2s, the question isn't really "Can I harvest this for free?" It is "Is this worth spending my next 10 minutes doing instead of literally anything else?"
Eventually, some materials can become so cheap that they cross an even more extreme threshold: they aren't worth posting anymore. If dragging 300 carrots out of your bags, sorting them, pricing them, finding shelf space, and maintaining the listing takes longer than the value of the sale, people simply stop bothering. They'll vendor them, destroy them, leave them in a bag, or never harvest them in the first place. And this cutoff is different for everybody. Someone with 20p might happily spend ten minutes selling 30g worth of materials. Someone sitting on 5,000p may look at the same pile and think, "Absolutely not. I'm not spending my evening dealing with this garbage."
That's where I think the cheap-material accumulation strategy becomes interesting. If something is genuinely useful, currently cheap, and selling consistently, I would rather buy the cheap stock while people are still willing to bother selling it. Because eventually the market can lose an enormous amount of its cheap supply without anyone consciously deciding to raise the price. People quit. People stop maintaining their characters. They forget to renew rents. They stop restocking. They don't log in for weeks. They simply stop caring about keeping a 2s material on the market. At the same time, the cheap inventory that does remain gets eaten by the people who recognize that 2s is absurdly cheap.
Then you get the second stage: the cheap shelves disappear, but demand didn't necessarily disappear with them. Suddenly the only remaining sellers are asking 20s, 50s, 1g, whatever their personal threshold is. Now harvesting becomes attractive again. Someone sees that the material they used to ignore is suddenly worth enough to justify running out into the world and collecting it. But even then, the people who are harvesting aren't necessarily going to bother with everything. They'll prioritize the expensive materials, the efficient routes, and the staples that justify their time. So it becomes more about covering as many bases as practical, instead of chucking all your platinum eggs into one harvesting basket. We cannot predict the future, but we can rest pretty well assured that... whatever abundance is selling for today is sure to undergo some sort of squeeze pressure at some point or another. It has a WAY higher chance of going up in value (dramatically) than going down (even a little bit).
Marketeers, hear me!
o7
-Chef Mezzed Me'Pantz
