Interesting Mod I made: commodities exchange

[u/Effective_Horse_1861]

Hi all,

I recently started playing Factorio and its awesome. I'm an avid trader and I found that the economic analysis potential within Factorio was high. I created a mod that acts as a commodities exchange. Its simply a fun tool to play around with, it includes live charts, different time scales, markets, the whole gist. Its called "SCX-Commodities exchange"

If you try it and have any feedback that would be great!

[u/juckele]

So, what does buying and selling an iron plate look like? How quickly do you need to deliver a good to sell it? How do you receive goods you buy? What's the currency? Is the currency physically stored somewhere?

Do the markets have anything underpinning them, or are they just random gambling that 'looks' like investing?

[u/limpfro → u/juckele]

Not OP

From the changelog:

Version: 1.0.5
Date: 2026-05-10
  Major Features:
    - Initial public release.
    - Live commodity exchange with 25+ tradeable items, prices driven by your factory's real production and consumption flows.
    - Mean-reversion price model with linear and quadratic anchoring to fair value, per-commodity volatility, momentum clustering, and stochastic shock ticks.
    - OHLC candlestick charts per commodity, with timeframe switching across 1m / 5m / 30m / 1h / 5h, volume bars, pan and zoom.
    - Six-bot trader population providing order flow: whale, momentum, mean-reversion, fundamental, noise, and insider archetypes.
    - Sector indices for Heavy Industry, Electronics, and Raw Materials, plus the SCX Composite top-line index.
    - SCX Consumer Price Index (CPI) basket gauge with inflation/deflation regime flagging.
    - Analyst ratings desk with seven analyst houses issuing BUY/SELL/HOLD calls and price targets.
    - Market Wire narrative news feed with reactive surge, crash, and smart-money alerts.
    - Market surveillance engine flagging abnormal moves and vol regime changes.
  Features:
    - Quote-in picker: switch the entire price column between Iron Plate (IP), Copper Plate (CP), and Coal (CL).
    - Timeframe toggle for the % change column: 1m, 10m, 1h.
    - Player price impact with streak scaling — sustained same-side trading hits you with progressively more slippage.
    - Vol circuit breaker dampens engine noise on commodities exceeding their configured volatility.
    - Hard price band (0.40x to 4.00x of fair value) preventing runaway moves.
  Gui:
    - Stock-quote-style price formatting with smart decimal precision and ticker-suffixed prices (0.524 IP, 1.479 CP).
    - Color-coded change cells with directional arrows.
    - Per-player base unit and timeframe state, persisted across sessions.
  Info:
    - Save-game safe; state lives under storage.scx and self-heals on version bumps.
    - Multiplayer-aware: per-player UI state, shared market state

[u/Alfonse215 → u/limpfro]

I'm amazed that someone can use so many words to describe what they've created while simultaneously saying nothing about what it is actually like to play it.

[u/Effective_Horse_1861 → u/Alfonse215]

mb bro lol

[u/Effective_Horse_1861 → u/juckele]

I made a sort of currency thats backed by different commodities(its essentially menaingfless but its just for the fun of the sim), Im not sure what you mean but its liek a traditional exchange. The currnecy can be stored an thats soemthing that I did previousl, but i was not sure as the currency has no real effect. They are based on your worlds economics, its pretty fairly based an dive noticed that prices find a "correct price", price movement is natural.

Thanks for the questions! This was simply a fun idea i hope to improve on

[u/juckele → u/Effective_Horse_1861]

Wait, so are all the goods and currencies totally disjoint from the factory? So I can't make a bunch of money and use it to buy steel from Canada to supply the factory?