Market & Trading

The Market is your primary income loop: convert held resources into Credits. It is a sell venue — you offload surplus production at each resource’s market value. (Buying scarce goods is the job of the Traveling Merchant.) This page covers the price model, what’s sellable, and the automation that sells for you.

Selling resources #

Open the Market panel, pick a sellable resource, choose an amount, and confirm. The sale:

1. Removes the resource from your stockpiles (drawn home-asteroid-first across the empire).
2. Credits your account at the per-unit sell value.
3. Counts toward quest and leaderboard credit totals.

The sell-price model #

sellUnitValue = max(1, round(baseMarketValue × marketSellPrice))
totalCredits  = sellUnitValue × amount

• baseMarketValue is the resource’s market value (see Resource Catalog).
• marketSellPrice is a multiplier, 1.0 by default, raised by a Trade Hub station specialisation.
• The result is rounded and floored at 1 Credit per unit for any sellable resource.

What can be sold #

A resource is sellable only if all of these hold:

Everything else — ores, refined materials, manufactured and assembled goods, Grain, Biomass, Ale, Rare Relics, Exotic Materials — can be sold. For exact per-unit base values, see the Resource Catalog. High-value sellables include Station Parts (200), Optics (120), Servo Motor (150), Composite Armour Plate (200), Exotic Materials (800) and Rare Relics (500).

Conduits are unsellable on the Market. Polymer Conduit and Clay Conduit have a null market value by design, so the Market never trades them — they are exclusively a Traveling Merchant good.

The Trade Lodge & Trader dwarves #

The Trade Lodge is the accommodation for Trader-class dwarves. Traders specialise in the market domain (their class bonus favours selling high and buying low) and, crucially, each Trader assigned to a Trade Lodge powers one auto-sell rule.

Automated Trading (auto-sell) #

The auto-sell engine clears surplus stock for you on a fixed cadence:

• One rule per Trader assigned to a Trade Lodge (the first N rules are active, where N = number of assigned Traders).
• Each rule names a resource and a reserve amount to keep.
• Every 60 seconds, each enabled rule sells everything above its reserve.

Auto-sell efficiency #

Auto-sell pays a fraction of market value, improved by the Automated Trading research node (ga_13):

efficiency = clamp( 0.20 + autoSellEfficiency , 0.20 , 1.00 )

So early auto-sell is a convenience that trades value for hands-off income; fully researched, it sells at full market rate. Manual selling always pays the full sellUnitValue. See Automation & QoL and the Research Tree.

The Trade Hub station #

The Trade Hub is a Sector Station specialisation (unlocked via a Sector Station Lv3 + the Guild Administration node Trade Contracts, ga_03). It boosts the whole sector’s market economy by setting the marketSellPrice multiplier and reducing buy costs:

The marketSellPrice multiplier flows directly into both manual sales and the auto-sell engine, so a maxed Trade Hub raises all selling income in its sector by 60%.

Tips #

• Hold up the chain. A resource is almost always worth more refined than raw — compare Iron (1) to Steel (6) to Components (80). Sell finished goods, not ore, when you can spare the production.
• Keep a reserve. Set auto-sell reserves above what your production chains consume, or you’ll sell inputs you needed.
• Build a Trade Hub before selling at scale — the +30–60% sell bonus pays for itself quickly on high-value goods.

Market behaviour is first-pass: prices are static per session (no dynamic supply/demand yet), and resource buying on the open Market is not part of the current build — scarce goods come from the Traveling Merchant. See Data Tables.