“Prices are just the war, written down in numbers.”
— Fleet Admiral Selene Voss
Credits
The Exchange trades in Credits, a currency of its own. Credits never turn into coins, and coins never buy Credits. Trading opens at commander level 5.
Your first Credits come from ore. Every hub buys minerals, helium-3 and antimatter from a docked fleet's hold. The Bastion Exchange pays more for minerals, and Free Port for helium-3. Chapter VII of the Commander's Licence walks you through it.
The market
Pick a hub's sector on the galaxy map and press OPEN MARKET, or press Market in the row under FACTION while a fleet of yours is docked at a hub. You can buy, sell from your hangar and place orders at any hub from anywhere. Only LOAD, UNLOAD, buying straight into a fleet's hold and selling from it need a fleet docked there.
| Part of the screen | What it holds |
|---|---|
| GOODS, COMPONENTS, CONTRACTS, NEWS, ALLIANCE | The market's five sides. Your Credits are beside them |
| RAW, FACTION, RARE, CONTRABAND | The goods this hub trades, by kind |
| The good you picked | Its 7 DAY PRICE HISTORY, the SELL ORDERS and BUY ORDERS of other commanders, and ALERT |
| BUY, SELL, CARGO | Trade it, or move goods between your hangar and a docked fleet |
| The foot | YOUR ORDERS at every hub, ALERTS, the tax and fee you pay, your licence RANK and LICENCE |
Buying and selling
BUY NOW and SELL NOW trade at once at the market price: other commanders' orders first when they beat the hub, best price first, then the hub for the rest.
Where the goods go and come from. TO on BUY, FROM on SELL and MOVE on CARGO are pulldowns: click one to see every hold and hangar you can use here, each with its units, and pick one. Each starts on the one that holds the good.
| What it does | |
|---|---|
| BUY, TO a docked fleet's hold | Bought and loaded into that fleet in one press, not insured. This is where TO starts when a fleet is docked |
| BUY, TO YOUR HANGAR HERE | Bought into your hangar at this hub. To insure a load, buy here, then LOAD AND INSURE from CARGO |
| SELL, FROM a docked fleet's hold or your hangar | Sold from there |
Your goods are never lost to the market screen: if a hold or hangar reads 0, open the pulldown and the others are listed with what they hold.
A hub's price follows its stock. A hub that holds none of a good pays the top of its band, 30% over the good's price there; a hub at the stock it wants pays that price; one holding twice that or more pays 30% under. A hub charges about 12% more when it sells a good than it pays for it. A big sale is priced at the stock half-way through it, so it fetches a little less a unit than a small one. Hubs make and use goods every 10 minutes, and the prices move as they do.
Sales tax. Every sale pays 4%, to a hub or to another commander alike. From Trader's Licence rank 3 you pay 3.5%, from rank 7 2.5%.
Your own orders
From commander level 15, on an account at least 7 days old, you can place orders for other commanders to take. Pick a good, set YOUR PRICE with − and +, the quantity, and press PLACE ORDER.
| Order | When you place it |
|---|---|
| Sell order | Its goods leave your hangar at once and wait in that hub's book for a buyer |
| Buy order | Its Credits are held at once and wait for a seller. What it buys lands in your hangar there |
| Rule | What it means |
|---|---|
| Open orders | 10 at a time over every hub, 12 from Trader's Licence rank 4, 24 from rank 6 |
| Listing fee | 1% of the order's value, paid when you place it and never refunded |
| The price | Inside the hub's band for that good. An order that would trade at once (the hub or another order already meets it) is refused: use BUY NOW or SELL NOW |
| How long | Up to 14 days. Then what is left comes back: goods to your hangar, Credits to you |
| CANCEL | What the order still holds comes back. The fee does not |
| REPRICE | A new price with no new fee, 5 minutes after the order was placed or last re-priced. Its place in the queue starts again |
| Who trades first | The best price, then the oldest order. Your own orders never trade with each other |
Ore has no orders: hubs alone buy it.
Components
The COMPONENTS side trades modules between commanders. It is one market for the whole galaxy: no hub, and nothing to haul. Hubs never buy or sell components.
| Rule | What it means |
|---|---|
| Spare copies only | A module fitted to a ship has to come off first. NONE SPARE says you have none free |
| Mark 1 | Every copy changes hands as Mark 1. Your own stack keeps its Mark. A copy you buy joins your stack of that design at the stack's Mark, or starts one at Mark 1 |
| Buying | Needs the commander level the design needs to be built |
| The price | Between half and four times what the ore it is built from fetches at the hubs |
| Orders | The same as for goods: level 15, 7 days, the same open orders, fee and tax |
| Another faction's design | A copy bought on the market fits your ships but does not open building that design |
The goods of the galaxy
Every hub makes one faction good and sells it cheap, and pays well for one made elsewhere, five homes round the ring. Before stock moves it, a hub's price is 20% under the good's price for what it makes and 25% over for what it wants. Each hub sells only its own two goods: its faction good and its rare good.
| Hub | Makes | Pays well for | Rare good |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free Port Exchange | Salvage Parts | Helium-3, and Hive Resin | Ace Holotapes |
| Bastion Exchange | Ceramite Plate | Phase Processors, and minerals | Commendation Steel |
| Axiom Exchange | Phase Processors | Ceramite Plate | Prototype Lattice Chips |
| Aurelian Ring Exchange | Sunlight Cells | Ghost Transponders | Sunfire Opals |
| Sanctum Exchange | Lance Crystals | Star Charts | Reliquary Glass |
| Pyre Exchange | Warhead Casings | Sealed Intel | Corsair Reserve |
| Caravan Exchange | Drive Coils | Kinetic Slugs | Wayfarer Silks |
| Undercroft Exchange | Ghost Transponders | Sunlight Cells | Null Shards |
| Horizon Exchange | Star Charts | Lance Crystals | Void Pearls |
| Ledger Exchange | Sealed Intel | Warhead Casings | Black Ledgers |
| Bedrock Exchange | Kinetic Slugs | Drive Coils and Salvage Parts | Deep-Vein Geodes |
A hub buys only the goods it deals in: its own, the one it wants, every rare good and ore. Free Port also buys every faction good, at its plain price. The galaxy map's SECTOR tab lists what a hub sells cheap and pays well for.
Rare goods and contraband
Every hub makes a rare good in small amounts, and every hub buys all eleven. A rare good is worth 30% more for every lane jump between the hub that buys it and the hub that made it, up to three times its price. The farther you carry it, the more it pays.
Hive Resin is contraband. Every Tide ship you destroy leaves 3 units in its wreck, and your fleet takes them aboard. Free Port buys it, and border and frontier space allow it. The faction homes do not: no trading, loading or unloading it at their hubs, where its market reads NOT TRADED IN CORE SPACE.
Scans. A fleet that arrives in a faction's home with resin aboard can be scanned: a 15% chance, 0.4% more for every unit, 90% at most. Resin that is found is taken, with a fine of half its value in Credits, never more than you hold. Contraband cannot go under a contract.
The war moves prices
Tide raids, incursions and weekend events take stock out of the hubs near them, so their prices rise; a weekend event touches every hub. A convoy whose cargo is lost is missed at the nearest hub that holds that good.
The NEWS tab lists the last day's news from every hub, and the ticker along the top of the market runs the same. A hub price that moves 15% in a day is news. TODAY AT shows this hub's goods that are above or below their usual price.
Price alerts and Voss's briefing
From Trader's Licence rank 3 you can set price alerts: 5 at a time, 10 from rank 6. Pick a good and press ALERT. A sell alert fires when the hub pays at least your price, a buy alert when it charges at most your price. Each fires once, as the gold PRICE ALERT strip with OPEN MARKET. An alert that never fires ends after 14 days.
MARKET BRIEFING. Fleet Admiral Voss tells you when a hub pays 15% more than a day ago for goods you hold, and the gain is worth at least 20,000 Credits. PLAN ROUTE opens the galaxy map's TRADE RUN tab on that good and hub. She briefs you at most once every 3 hours.
Safeguards
An account younger than 30 days can take at most 25,000 Credits a day from other commanders: what its goods and components fetch in their orders, and what they pay for its sell orders. Past that, a sale goes to the hub at the hub's price, or waits. Sales to hubs are never limited.
The Exchange can close a market for a while, and staff can hold a commander's trading while they look into it. The market says so when it happens. Orders waiting there are kept.
On the website
The website's MARKET page shows every hub's prices, updated every 5 minutes, and a weekly report on the economy.
Starting values. The tax, the fee, the price bands, the levels and every number on this page may change as the market is played.