The market
A room where players sell to each other, priced in shards — not in a currency, but in the affinities and intensities the seller asks for. A vest for four kinetic at 3 or better. A smith's notes for nine density, two cold at 5, and a cohesion.
It exists because everything social in this game used to route through a faction. A solo player outside one could reach another living player through the ground and nothing else.
The price
A price is a list of terms, and a term is one of two kinds:
- an essence term names an affinity, a direction, and a floor — "four kinetic at 3 or better". Essence shards carry a signed magnitude, so an ask can be specific about how strong.
- an eco term names an affinity and nothing else. Currency shards are typed but not graded, so there is no intensity to ask for.
Terms are never collapsed. Two kinetic at 5 and one kinetic at 8 is a meaningful request — the same axis twice at different floors — so the list keeps them apart. There is no design limit on how many terms a price may have; the sixteen the schema allows is a guard against a malformed message, not a rule.
Direction is part of the ask. A seller may want cold rather than hot, or diffuse rather than dense. Only caloric and density run both ways: kinetic and cohesion have no negative side anywhere in the game, so asking for one would be asking for something that cannot exist, and the game refuses the listing rather than letting it sit unsellable.
Browsing is affordability-first
Two compound prices cannot be compared at a glance. That is the honest cost of pricing in shards, and the answer is to stop asking buyers to compare them: the market works out what you can pay for, against the shards actually in your pack, and leads with those.
It gives the market something a coin economy cannot have. What you can afford depends on what you have been hunting, so two players standing in the same room see different stock.
Escrow, and the ticket
Listing takes the item out of your pack immediately. Without that a seller could list one vest in four markets, or list something and then wear it.
In its place you get a market ticket — an ordinary item, in your pack, that is the claim on that listing. Present it at the market to cancel the sale and take the goods back, or to collect the proceeds once it sells. No ticket, no claim.
The ticket is a bearer instrument. Whoever holds it holds the claim.
That is the whole solution to the dead-trader problem. A ticket is part of an estate, so killing a trader hands you their claims along with everything else: walk to the market the ticket names and collect. No dead-seller flag, no expiry, and no listing that outlived everybody who could act on it.
Losing it loses the claim. Drop it and somebody can pick your claim up. Destroy it and the goods sit in escrow with nobody able to speak for them — the one case that still orphans a listing, and strictly better than the hole it replaces, which opened on ordinary death.
Buying
The game picks the weakest shards that satisfy each term, so a buyer holding one kinetic-9 and three kinetic-3s never spends the 9 on an ask for 3.
What will leave your pack is shown before you commit, itemised. Spending is irreversible, and all-or-nothing across the whole price: short on the fourth of five terms and nothing at all is spent.
Carry weight is checked before the item moves. A buyer who cannot lift what they just bought must not have paid for it.
The cut
A market that only moves things is a market where shard supply only grows, so a share of every sale is destroyed rather than paid to the seller.
The rate is a tenth, taken across the whole price and rounded down — which means a price below ten shards pays nothing at all. The market taxes volume, not existence, and small trades between new players are untaxed. The cut is visible to both sides before either commits.
Stock is per-market
A listing is visible only in the market it was posted in, and proceeds are collected where the ticket says. Finding a market is worth doing, a well-stocked one becomes a place people travel to, and what is on the shelves varies with how deep in the world it sits.
Listings never expire
A listing stands until it sells or its ticket is redeemed. Nothing is destroyed behind a player's back and nothing is taken because somebody was away.
That is only safe because of the ticket: without it a listing would outlive everyone who could act on it. The two decisions hold each other up.
It is not safe ground
No room in this game gates a fight, and the market is no exception. It is a place people stand still in with a pack full of claims, which is a reason for somebody to start one. That is deliberate — a safe tile invented for trading would become the tile players use for everything except trading.