Part 1: Why the economy is changing
Over the last few months I’ve added a lot more monitoring to Forged Space. The main reason for that was pretty simple: before making any major decisions about the economy, I wanted to see what was actually going on under the hood.
And some of the numbers have been pretty impressive.
On one recent day, a single captain mined around 400,000 units of ore. In a week you’ve killed close to 17,000 pirates, and we’re seeing more than 250 refining runs a day. Yesterday’s mining alone represented roughly 72 million credits at the game’s existing fixed values.
So you’re mining, fighting, refining and building at some pretty serious volumes now.
What wasn’t healthy was where some of the resources were coming from.
In the same 24-hour period mentioned above, that same captain bought close to 11,000 units of resources from NPC traders. Every single one of those units was effectively created from nothing.
It wasn’t mined. It wasn’t refined. It wasn’t looted. Another captain didn’t sell it.
The game simply created it.
Over three days, nearly 40,000 units entered the economy that way.
That’s the bit I don’t like.
It means the game itself has been deciding what resources are worth and, more importantly, how much of them exist. Blissar, as an example, was worth whatever number I happened to type into the database a year ago. If an NPC fleet trader was selling it whenever you needed some, it didn’t really matter how rare it was supposed to be.
The NPC traders made sense after the reset back in December, when everybody had very little and the economy needed some help getting started.
We’re well past that point now.
Forged Space is producing more than enough resources for the economy to start standing on its own two feet. So with this update, the game stops creating resources for you.
If you want something, you mine it, refine it, loot it, manufacture it, or buy it from another captain who did.
What Blissar is worth will now be decided by how difficult it is to obtain, how much is available and, ultimately, what buyers and sellers are willing to pay for it.
That’s quite a big change to one of the fundamental systems in the game. With our current player numbers, there will almost certainly be areas of the market that feel a little thin at first, and that’s something I’ll be keeping an eye on.
But I’d much rather start building the economy Forged Space actually needs than keep an artificial one running because it’s convenient.
Staff have been testing the new system on DEV over the last week, and it’s now ready to go live.
Part 2: What’s changed
The Galactic Exchange
The Item Database has been Renamed and Supercharged to become the Galactic Exchange, and this is now the main home for player trading. Absorbing both the Galactic Emporium and the G.B.M.
You can open it from anywhere. – That’s an important fact.
Pretty much everything tradeable in Forged Space is listed there: equipment, ships, blueprints, consumables, drones, raw ore, refined materials, planetary goods, commodities and jump fuel.
Each item shows you:
- How many are currently for sale
- How many players are looking to buy
- How many you currently own and could sell
- Of course it also displays the info that the Item Database used to show.
Expand an item, and you’ll get the Buy and Sell options.
When buying, you’ll see every captain currently selling that item, how many they have available and what price they’re asking. You decide who you want to buy from.
When selling, you simply list your items at the price you want. You will be able to see at a glance what others are selling for and the history of that items value.
You can also create a Buy Contract for virtually any item, resource or piece of equipment. Tell the Exchange how many you want and what you’re willing to pay, and another captain can fill the order.
This allows players to do the same with items that they did with the G.B.M – Want a specific Shield Generator and there is none on the market – Create a Buy order for one with what you’re willing to pay.
Your number of available contracts still increases with your Trade Skill, and the existing 5% tax remains. The person creating the listing or contract pays the tax.
Every item also has a Guide Price, and anything that can be manufactured will show a Build Cost, calculated using current Exchange prices.
The Guide price is the Database fall back to the old prices and over time that will be a median. The Real value of items is based on the current last sales tracked by the market.
As trades start taking place, items will also build up their own price history charts.
Those prices come from you now — not from numbers I’ve entered into the database a year ago when we laid down the tracks for Forged Space.
The new My Trades section shows everything you’re currently selling or trying to buy, and each listing can be cancelled from there.
Retired: Galactic Buyers Market & Galactic Emporium
The Galactic Buyers Market and the trading side of the Galactic Emporium have now been retired.
Their jobs are handled by the Galactic Exchange.
Don’t worry about anything you already had listed. Existing listings and contracts haven’t disappeared — you’ll find them under My Trades in the Exchange. They were carried over in to the Galactic Exchange, including escrows.
The Promenade Vendor
The old Market Vendor no longer buys and sells normal resources. This is part of the primary change, no more system directives on values.
It’s now the Encrypted Data Vendor, and it has one job:
Buying encrypted cargo.
Encrypted Cargo
Encrypted cargo is a new thing. These small Encrypted data chips and can be found in Loot when a Pirate ship is destroyed. Think of them a little like the Dog Tags. They live in a new encrypted section of the Ships Cargo hold.
They cannot be traded with pother players and have a guide price. This value is lowest in the system you found them in. The locals will pay for the safe return, but other factions will pay more. In fact the further from where you picked them up the bigger the price ticket on these.
Any Encrypted Data Vendor will buy them.
The starting value is the item’s Guide Price, but the further you carry that data from the system where you found it, the more valuable it becomes.
You gain 1.5% extra value for every light-year travelled along the route.
Take it into territory controlled by a different faction from the one where you found it and you’ll also receive another 50% bonus.
The Vendor screen shows you the calculation for every piece of encrypted cargo you’re carrying, so you can see exactly what it’s currently worth before selling it.
You could sell something close to where you found it and take the basic value.
Or you can stick it in your hold, carry it halfway across the galaxy and potentially get two or three times as much for it.
Encrypted data recovered from Lawless systems is also considerably more valuable — roughly ten times the value of equivalent data found in safer areas.
So there’s now a genuine choice between taking the easy money or hauling valuable data somewhere much further away.
NPC Trader Ships
NPC trader ships aren’t disappearing, but their purpose is changing.
Hailing one will no longer present you with a pile of game-generated goods to buy and sell.
Instead, you’ll find two new options.
Trade Requests
Each trader will ask for two or three items related to its normal line of business — things such as ore, refined materials, planetary resources or commodities.
If you have what they want, you can deliver it directly from your Commercial Storage while you’re in the trader’s system.
You’ll be paid using the Exchange’s current value for the goods and will also receive Faction Reputation and Trade Experience for completing the request.
You can complete two deliveries per day, plus another delivery for every two levels of your Trade Skill. IE Level 8 Trade will give you Six trades a day.
So higher Trade Skill means more opportunities to do business with the fleets.
Encrypted Data
Trader ships will also buy encrypted cargo in the same way as the Promenade Vendor.
The difference?
Fleet traders pay double.
So if you’re carrying something particularly valuable, finding the right fleet may well be worth the trip.
Part 3: Why this matters for the future
I’ve been developing and running games for over 17 years now, and in that time I’ve watched plenty of games come and go.
I’ve also seen it first-hand with Core-Exiles, where a decision that seemed harmless at the time, or a simple “yeah, that’ll probably be alright” can come back years later and leave you with an enormous glut of items and resources that you simply can’t get back out of the economy.
Once you’ve created that problem, fixing it without hurting the players who have spent years building up their characters is incredibly difficult.
That’s one of the reasons Forged Space was designed differently from the start.
Durability was step one.
Resources should come into the game, resources should be used, equipment should wear out, things should be built, destroyed and replaced.
Resources in. Resources out.
That has always been the goal.
Over the last few months I’ve been doing some very detailed analysis of what is actually happening inside the game, including a fair amount of AI-assisted analysis of the data. The more I’ve looked at it, the clearer it has become that these economy changes aren’t just something I’d like to do.
They’re something Forged Space needs.
Left as it was, I genuinely think we were laying the groundwork for a much shorter lifespan for the game’s economy.
With this system, if there are 100 Mining Lasers sitting on the Galactic Exchange, we know where they came from.
Somebody mined the resources.
Somebody refined them.
Somebody obtained the required materials.
And somebody manufactured those Mining Lasers.
They weren’t magically injected into the economy by an NPC somewhere.
That’s a very important distinction.
We’ve also now removed the artificial lower end of the market. There is still a Guide Price, because the game needs something to work from, especially while the new Exchange builds up its trading history.
But you don’t have to follow it.
If you think the ore you’ve spent your evening mining is worth more, charge more.
If you want a quick sale, charge less.
If somebody is undercutting you and you want to undercut them back — go for it.
If an item becomes scarce, its value should rise. If everyone starts producing it and the Exchange is flooded with them, its value should fall.
That’s an economy.
It might take a little getting used to, and I’m sure we’ll learn a few things along the way. I’ll also be watching the data very closely as the new system beds in.
But these changes aren’t being made just for the sake of changing things.
They’re being made for the long-term health of Forged Space.
I want the things you mine, refine, loot and manufacture to actually matter, and I want an economy that still works years from now rather than one we eventually have to untangle because we ignored the warning signs today.