Declan "Dec" · System Designer

Yes. At the moment, shops sell resources at zero just because that's the default. It's just a tech limitation.

Rick Porter · Design Director

That was never intended. It's just where we landed for the release.

Declan "Dec" · System Designer

They'll end up selling materials that have quality. They won't sell the super high quality stuff, and equally, if you sell good quality to a shop, it'll pay more, but the best deal is probably going to be on the player trade market, because that's where people have the most money.

Rick Porter · Design Director

We'll have a market with multiple quality values. You'll be able to go there and pay more for higher quality and less for lower quality. And the same, vice versa: if you want to sell your own stuff, you'll get more for higher quality and less for lower quality. That's absolutely the design, and we'll get there; we just couldn't get there last release.

Thorsten Leimann · Designer

But what Dec said, and I want to highlight that, is that we really want to have player trading standing out in comparison to trading with NPCs. So we want to make sure that, sure, you will be finding different qualities from NPC traders, but we want to encourage you to actually trade with players there.

Rick Porter · Design Director

And eventually it'll all be tied together. Whenever a player's trading to another player, we'll be tracking that and adding it to the overall simulation. We've talked about having StarSim, the simulation that knows everything that the players are doing, plus all the things that we're expecting the NPCs to do, so that when players are buying stuff for one price, that is reflected in the NPC prices as well.