Wiki / Economy
Shops
The NPC shop tree, the potion counter, and why the buy and sell prices are what they are.
The shop tree
/shop opens the hub, and every NPC in town opens their own counter. Categories cover the usual spread — natural blocks, mining, wood, building, copper, coloured blocks, plants, ocean, utility, decor, materials, food, tools, weapons, armour, transport, dyes, templates and more.
Buy prices are always higher than sell prices, and farmables sell for very little. That is not an oversight: the NPC shop is a convenience, not an income. If you could get rich selling wheat to a villager, nobody would ever trade with each other.
Selling to players is where the money is. See Auction house and Trading.
Town reputation changes your buy prices
Buying in the town is cheaper the better your town reputation is. Selling is unaffected — you always get the base price.
That asymmetry is deliberate. If reputation both reduced what you pay and increased what you earn, one number would be doing two jobs and the economy would be tuned by accident. It is also why the repair and upgrade counter — which is where reputation is earned — is worth using.
The potion counter
The Alchemist sells all nineteen brewable effects, in regular, splash and lingering form, across four pages. There is also a sale page for any potion you bring.
| Form | Relative price |
|---|---|
| Regular | base |
| Splash | about 2.4x base |
| Lingering | about 12x base |
Selling is a quarter of the buy price.
Three things worth knowing:
- Luck is not sold. It is not brewable in vanilla, and it manipulates loot tables, which makes it a different kind of item from the other eighteen.
- Selling checks the potion, not the bottle. A water bottle is not a potion and is worth nothing — the counter tests what is actually in the bottle before paying. A shop that paid for an empty bottle would be a money printer.
- You sell one at a time. The sell button takes a single potion, so there is no way to be paid for sixteen and hand over one.
The two quirks you might notice
Bee nests and coal ore have "negative prices" — buying one pays you. That carries over from the original server, where those entries were inverted on purpose. They were left alone rather than tidied, because the inversion was deliberate and nothing depends on the exact number.
Everything in the shop is money, never coins. See Money and the economy for the split.