The Market

What can be traded

• Gathering resources
• Materials produced at the Laboratory
• Materials dropped while Battling
• Food for your pets
• Equipment, blueprints and catalysts for Your Ship
• Stellar Tokens, which is how free players can reach premium content with credits

Some items can never be listed: starter gear, anomalous items, account-bound items, PvP gear, and items borrowed from your squadron's Armory. A catalyst has to be uninstalled before it can be sold.

Remember

The market is only available on inhabited systems, unless you have the permanent market access perk from the Premium Store, which lets you trade from anywhere.

Buy and sell orders

Resources, materials, pet food and Stellar Tokens are traded through an order book. You do not trade with a specific player: you post the price you are willing to accept, and the market pairs your order with the best matching order on the other side.

You can only have one open order per resource, and that counts buying and selling together: while you have credits waiting to buy gold, you cannot also have gold up for sale.

How an order is matched

• A sell order is matched against the highest buy order at or above your price.
• A buy order is matched against the cheapest sell order at or below your price.
• If two orders share the same price, the oldest one is served first.

The trade always closes at the price of the order that was already on the book, not at the price you typed. Because of that you can end up with a better deal than you asked for, and never a worse one: a seller may be paid more than the price entered, and a buyer may pay less than the offer.

Remember

The Buy and Sell buttons on a row are only a shortcut: they copy that price into the order form. They do not trade with that particular order.

Example

The buy orders for an item are 23M, 22M and 20M. You click Sell on the 20M row, so your sell order is created at 20M. Every buy order at 20M or above qualifies, and the highest one goes first, so you sell at 23M. The 20M order stays open, waiting for the 23M and 22M orders to be filled first.

While the order is open

Buy orders pay the full cost up front and hold it until they are filled; sell orders hold the goods. If your order is only partly filled, the rest stays on the market with the remaining quantity. Cancelling an order returns whatever is left: the unspent credits for a buy order, the unsold goods for a sell order.

There is no fee for placing an order.

Equipment, blueprints and catalysts

These do not use the order book. Each one is posted as its own listing at a fixed price and is bought whole, directly from the listing, so there is no partial filling and no matching involved. The lowest price you can ask is 1 credit.

Everything you have posted lives in My Listings, which is also where you take a listing down. Cancelling gives the item back.

Linking a listing to the chat

From the market tables and from My Listings you can send one of your listings to the chat as a chip showing its icon, its name and the price you are asking. Anyone who clicks the chip gets a popup with the full detail, who is selling it, the price, and a Buy button, without having to go to the market and find the row.

Remember

The price written on the chip is only a label. The purchase always reads the listing again from the server and charges what it really costs, so a chip that shows a price that was never real buys nothing.

Knowing what something is worth

Two different things sit behind the same row, and they answer different questions.

Price history draws one point per hour with the best buy price and the best sell price at that moment. It shows what people were asking and offering, not what anything sold for, and it only goes back 24 hours: anything older is deleted.

Market history lists the recent orders on that resource, buys on one side and sells on the other, each with the price it actually traded at. That is the one to read when you want to know what the market really paid, rather than what somebody hoped to get.

Trades

Trades are the market without credits: you offer one gathering resource and ask for another, one for one, and wait for another player to take it. A trade of 5,000 gold for 5,000 silver is exactly that, 5,000 for 5,000.

• Both sides have to be gathering resources of the same rarity: common for common, rare for rare.
• An offer can go up to 10,000,000 units.
• Your resources are held while the offer is open, the same way a sell order holds its goods.
• Somebody can take part of an offer, and the rest stays up with the remaining quantity.
• Cancelling gives back whatever was not taken.

It is the patient version of the NPC Trader: nothing is lost on the way, but somebody has to want the trade.

The NPC Trader

The NPC Trader swaps one thing for another without a counterparty, at a rate of 100 to 90: you receive 90% of what you hand over. It has two counters.

The two things being swapped have to be different, and on the resources counter they have to share a rarity: a common resource cannot be turned into a rare one.

It is worth using when you are short on one thing and sitting on a surplus of another, since it is instant and does not depend on another player.

TL;DR:

• Sell what you do not need and buy what you do.
• Resources use an order book, gear and catalysts are individual listings bought whole.
• Read the market history for what things really sold for, the price chart only shows the last 24 hours of asking prices.
• Trades swap resource for resource with nothing lost, the NPC Trader costs you 10% but never waits.
• If you can produce it, producing it beats buying it.