MARKETS: IMPERIAL, FLEA & DIAMOND

QuantumRift has three places to trade: the Imperial Market (sell resources to the Empire), the Flea Market (trade with other players), and the Diamond Market (a timed Empire event just for diamonds). All three — plus the Banker — only work inside the Imperial City.

The Imperial City requirement

Every market is gated to a sphere centered on the Imperial City (default center 0,80,0, radius 100 blocks). You must be physically standing inside that sphere to sell, buy, list, cancel, quick-buy/sell, or claim pending items at any of the three markets. Try it from outside and you’ll get:

“You must be inside the Empire City to use the [X] Market.”

Commands: /market (Imperial), /flea (Flea), /diamond (Diamond)

Permissions: quantumrift.market.use covers both /market and /diamond — the Diamond Market is folded into the Imperial Market’s permission by design. /flea uses quantumrift.flea.use. Admins get quantumrift.market.admin and quantumrift.flea.admin.

Each market has both a modern cursor-based screen and a classic chest-menu version — you’ll automatically get whichever one matches your resource pack setup. The mechanics are identical either way.

1. Imperial Market — sell resources to the Empire

/market is where you sell raw resources — ores, wood, food, mob drops, and more — straight to the Empire, and buy some of them back. Prices float in real time based on supply and demand.

How pricing works

• Every item is quoted per stack of its real max stack size (usually 64, but see the water bucket exception below).
• Sell price = base anchor price × a live multiplier.
• Buy price = sell price × 3.0× markup — buying something back from the Empire always costs three times what selling it pays.
• The live multiplier drifts between 0.5× and 1.5× of the base price. Selling pushes the multiplier down (the more you dump, the less you get per unit); buying pushes it up.
• Big trades “walk” the price. A large sell or buy doesn’t get one flat rate — it slides through the fluctuation band as it executes, so you’re paying (or receiving) the average price across the whole trade. Dumping 1,000 units in one go gets progressively worse pricing as it goes, which naturally discourages market flooding.
• Buy-back window: right after you sell something, you can buy it straight back in the same market session at 1.5× the price you just sold it for — a quick “undo” — but only up to the exact quantity you sold, and the window closes the moment you close the market menu.
• Auto-trim: every 3–20 hours (more often when the Empire’s stockpiles are heavy), prices silently drift back toward normal (1.0×) and the Empire skims 5% off its accumulated stock of each resource (capped at 2,000 units per resource). This happens quietly in the background — no announcement.

Price list

Prices below are the base anchor value per stack (64 items) before the live multiplier is applied. Diamonds and netherite are deliberately not sold here — those only trade at the Diamond Market.

*Water Bucket is special: it’s the one sell-only item on the list — the Empire will buy it but never sell it back — and its 5 cr price is per bucket, not per stack, since buckets don’t actually stack.

Commands

Every sell and buy is logged to your action log and applies instantly. If your inventory is full during a buy, you get a pro-rated credit refund for whatever couldn’t fit.

2. Flea Market — trade with other players

/flea is a real player-driven auction house at the Imperial City, narrated by the Flea Auctioneer NPC. Unlike the Imperial Market, the Empire sets no prices here — buy and sell orders are matched directly against each other.

Listing basics

• Listings last 5 days, then expire automatically. A background sweep checks for expired listings every 60 minutes.
• Listing fee: a percentage of the listing’s value, charged when you list (see rank table below) — not refunded if you cancel, only refunded if the listing expires completely unsold.
• Price range: 0.001 cr to 50,000,000 cr per unit.
• Quantity: 1 to 4,096 items per listing or trade.
• You can only have as many active listings as your rank’s listing slots allow.

Two kinds of orders

• SELL orders take the physical items from you immediately — they sit in escrow until sold, cancelled, or expired (returned to your pending tab).
• BUY orders (bids) don’t take an item — they escrow the full quantity × price in credits right away, so every resting bid is fully backed by real money. Cancelling or re-pricing a bid adjusts or refunds that escrow automatically.

Rank tiers — slots and fees

If you hold multiple rank permissions at once, you get the best of each independently — the most slots available to you and the lowest fee available to you — not just one tier’s full package.

Trading commands

Good to know

• Your PDA can never be listed on the Flea Market — every sell path checks and refuses it.
• Rank eggs (one-time rank-upgrade items) can’t be listed in stacks larger than 1, since only one serial per stack would ever be redeemable — this stops a scam where a buyer thinks they’re getting multiple usable eggs.
• Fills always land in your pending/mailbox tab (/flea claim) — never straight into your inventory — which is exactly what lets a sale complete while you’re offline.
• If you disconnect mid-trade, the market rescues any items in flight into your pending mailbox rather than losing them.

3. Diamond Market — timed Empire diamond trading

/diamond is a separate, event-based market just for diamonds. Unlike the Imperial Market, it isn’t always open — the Empire only trades diamonds during periodic openings.

Unlocking it

The Diamond Market stays locked until the server’s overall Empire tier reaches Tier 6. Before that, /diamond status just reports it as locked and no trading works.

How openings work

• A new opening starts randomly 18–36 hours after the previous one closes.
• Each opening runs 3–6 hours before automatically closing — or it can close early if stock runs out, or an admin ends it manually with /diamond admin end.
• Each opening stocks a random 300–400 diamonds.
• Openings are announced server-wide (when broadcasting is on, which it is by default): a gold chat message, an on-screen title, and a bell sound for everyone online. There’s also an optional Discord announcement that can be enabled separately.

Two-sided stock

An opening tracks two independent numbers, both shown by /diamond status:

• Buying capacity — how many more diamonds the Empire will still accept from sellers. Only sells reduce this; the opening closes once it hits zero.
• Selling reserve — how many diamonds the Empire has available to sell to buyers. It starts equal to the opening’s stock, grows as players sell diamonds in, and shrinks as players buy them out — it can actually exceed the starting stock if a lot of selling happens.

/diamond status shows both clearly, e.g. “buying X/Y more at [price]/diamond; selling Z at [price]/diamond.”

Pricing during an opening

Selling price follows a curve between two flat zones:

• Under 50 diamonds sold into the opening so far: flat 1.5 cr/diamond.
• 50 or fewer buying-capacity remaining (i.e. the Empire’s near its limit): flat 5 cr/diamond.
• In between, price rises smoothly along a logarithmic curve — the earliest sellers get the worst price, and sellers get paid more as the Empire’s appetite nears exhaustion.

Buying diamonds costs the current curve price × a 3.0× markup, further multiplied by a scarcity premium that climbs from 1.0× up to 2.0× as the sell-side reserve gets drained — so buying out the reserve gets progressively more expensive, and a large purchase pays the walked average across the whole drain rather than one flat rate. Together, the markup and scarcity premium guarantee buying is always pricier than selling, so there’s no way to sell in and immediately buy back for a profit.

Outside an opening

When no opening is live, the Empire doesn’t buy diamonds at all by default — selling is refused with “no opening” — and buying is always refused outside an opening (“Diamonds are only buyable during openings”).

The bandit fence — always-on, but a bad deal

Even with no Empire opening active, you can always sell diamonds to the bandit fence, an NPC shop line, at a much worse price:

• Price slides linearly from 0.6 cr/diamond (empty fence) down to a floor of 0.05 cr/diamond once the fence’s stock reaches 1,000 diamonds.
• Selling a large batch pays the exact average across that slide, not a flat top rate.
• Every 48–72 hours, the fence randomly clears 20–40% of its stock, letting prices recover somewhat.
• The fence exists so diamonds are never completely unsellable — just heavily discounted whenever the Empire market is closed.

Commands

A few things true across all three markets

• Every credit amount is precise to 3 decimal places (0.001 cr) — nothing gets rounded to whole credits.
• Every trade — Imperial buys/sells/buy-backs, Diamond buys/sells, Flea listings/fills/cancellations — is logged.
• If a sell can’t find enough items, or a buy can’t fit in your inventory, the trade fills partially and refunds the difference in credits — you never lose value to a silent failure.
• The Diamond Market lives administratively under the same quantumrift.market.* permissions as the Imperial Market — think of it as the Empire’s diamond counter, a sibling of the Imperial Market, even though its timed-opening mechanics work very differently from the Imperial Market’s always-on trading.