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 follow how much of each item the Empire is holding: the more it has, the less it pays.

How pricing works

• Every item is quoted per stack of its real max stack size (usually 64; a water bucket is priced per bucket).
• Prices follow the Empire’s stock. The price list below is each item’s normal price: what the Empire pays when it holds its usual stock of the item (20,000). The more it holds, the less it pays, down to ¼ of normal once it holds 40,000 or more (it still buys past that, at ¼). The less it holds, the more it pays, up to 4× normal when it has none at all. Every 10,000 items of stock halves or doubles the price. A few items have their own limits: an Ender Pearl tops out at 3.5×, and a Water Bucket never goes above its normal price.
• Most of the time prices stay close to normal. The extremes are rare: on a normal day an item sells for roughly ¾ to 1⅓ of its normal price (a Water Bucket for ¾ to all of it), and a market that a big sale or buy-out pushed out of that range comes back within a few hours.
• Buy price = sell price × 3.0× markup at every stock level — buying something from the Empire always costs three times what selling it pays right now. The Empire never runs out: when its stock is empty you can still buy, at the 4× price. Most resources are sell-only, though: see the list under the price table.
• Selling adds to the Empire’s stock and lowers the price for everyone; buying takes stock out and raises it. The market menu shows each item’s stock and how its price compares to normal (for example Empire stock 12,345 · 125% of normal price).
• Big trades “walk” the price. A large sell or buy doesn’t get one flat rate — it moves the stock 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 (in the market menu or with /market sell), you can buy it straight back at about 1.5× what the sale paid you — a quick “undo” — but only up to the exact quantity you sold. Each sale stays buyable for 5 minutes on its own clock (selling more later does not extend it), and closing the market menu or logging out ends every open buy-back early. The market menu shows how long each one has left.
• Other traders: the Empire also trades with NPC merchants all day long. They restock items nobody sells and buy up items the Empire has too much of, so prices move a little even when no player trades and an over-sold item recovers over time.
• Market moods: now and then the market takes a liking to an item, or tires of it, and its price drifts well above or below normal for a day or two before settling back. Nobody announces it: watch the prices (/market chart helps) and sell when the mood is on your side.
• Plain goods only. The Imperial Market hands back any stack that has a custom name or enchantments, even if the item is on the price list. The Empire does not buy gear at all: sell armor, weapons and tools to the Blacksmith in the City (cheaply) or on the Flea Market.

Price list

Prices below are each item’s normal price per stack (64 items), at the Empire’s usual stock; the live price is anywhere from ¼ to 4× of it depending on the stock. Diamonds and netherite are deliberately not sold here — those only trade at the Diamond Market.

Per item that is 0.001 cr for bamboo, 0.002 cr for cobblestone, sand or a crop (wheat, carrot, potato, beetroot), 0.005 cr for bread, 0.01 cr for a log, 0.05 cr for an iron ingot and 0.075 cr for a gold ingot. Smelting pays a little more than the raw drop; at normal prices crafting never does (four planks are worth less than the log they came from, a loaf of bread less than its three wheat, paper less than its sugar cane and four arrows less than the flint, stick and feather they take).

Chainmail is no longer traded here. The Blacksmith in the City sells and buys the four chainmail pieces now, along with the rest of the gear. Chainmail still cannot be smelted down into iron nuggets.

Egg and Ender Pearl stack to 16, so their prices are per 16: Egg 0.08 cr and Ender Pearl 1.12 cr, the same per item as Chicken and Blaze Rod.

*Water Bucket is priced per bucket: 0.15 cr, exactly what the bucket’s 3 iron ingots are worth. The Empire keeps the bucket when it buys the water, so the water itself is worth nothing and filling buckets is not a way to make money.

What the Empire still sells. Most of the list is sell-only: the Empire buys it from you but never sells it back, and buy-back is off for it too. That covers every item an Empire mission accepts (so nobody can buy mission items cheap and donate them), plus Deepslate, Gravel and Water Buckets. The only items you can still buy from the Empire are the Birch, Spruce, Jungle, Dark Oak, Mangrove and Cherry logs, Bamboo, Wheat Seeds, Egg, Beetroot, Cod, Bone, Blaze Rod, Ender Pearl and Breeze Rod.

Company goods. The goods the Companies (Companies) buy also sell here, each on its own price curve with the same stock rules. A Fine good sells for 1.5× and a Masterwork good for 2.25× the normal price, and all three qualities share one stock. A Pack, Box or Pallet sells as everything inside it. Sell them in the Sell grid or with /market sell. The Empire sells back only the four raw ores (Raw Silver, Raw Titanium, Raw Tungsten and Raw Platinum), at Standard quality and at twice their market price; every other company good is sold to the Empire only. It also sells the companies’ basic vanilla resources at twice their market price: anvils, bowls, cauldrons, glow berries, gray concrete, grindstones, honey bottles, iron chains, oak doors, oak trapdoors and stonecutters. Buying any of these and delivering it on a contract, or selling it straight back, always costs more than it pays.

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 1,000,000 cr per unit. In the menus, the price field for a new listing or bid opens at what the Imperial Market pays for one of that item right now, so you start from a real price. Items the Empire doesn’t buy (gear, custom items) open at 1 cr for a listing.
• Quantity: 1 to 4,096 items per order, whether it is a listing, a bid, a quick-buy or a quick-sell.
• 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

• The browse has categories next to search and sort, on both the selling and buying side: Collectibles, Weapons, Armor, Tools, Food & Meds, Siege, Company Goods, Blocks and Materials. Company Goods holds the Companies’ goods and their Packs, Boxes and Pallets. Collectibles are the serialized items: crate keys, Crate Key Vouchers, cosmetic and tag vouchers, and rank eggs. They sell one per listing, and vouchers for the same thing share one order book, so a buy order can match any of them. Axes count as weapons. The server’s own siege and defense items (siege tools, cannonballs, batteries, raid pickaxes, defense blocks, traps, sentries) are under Siege, and bandages, stimpacks and antidotes under Food & Meds, whatever they are made of.
• You can browse the Flea Market from anywhere through your PDA (Economy tab, Browse the Flea Market): every item on the book, both sides of each item’s order book, the best ask and bid. It is read-only, even in the City; to trade, visit the Flea Auctioneer in the Imperial City.
• 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 items in flight are rescued into your pending mailbox rather than lost. This is no longer only the Flea: every paid trade on the server now lands here when it cannot be handed to you — an NPC shop sale that fails after taking your goods, a refused Empire donation, a research deposit the Base Core did not consume. You will see a message on your next login telling you something is waiting, and you collect it the same way, with /flea claim at the Auctioneer.
• The other half of the same rule: if credits were taken for something that was never handed over — a purchase, a repair fee, a trim removal — the charge is reversed automatically. It appears in your transaction history as its own entry, right under the charge it undoes. You do not need to report it.

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 cr/diamond.
• 50 or fewer buying-capacity remaining (i.e. the Empire’s near its limit): flat 2 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 200× 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 0.5 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.