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So I got bored of tracking trades in a spreadsheet or on paper and knocked up a little application to keep score for me. At the moment it works well for me locally but it wouldn't be super difficult to put it online if other players would find it useful. I thought I'd check here and see if there's any interest before potentially wasting time on it.

What it does is allow you to record each trade you make, the good, quantity, and buy price, then record your sell price, and profitability on the deal. It highlights open trades and shows for each commodity data on what you've sold for in the past so you can get a feel for whether the sell price you're seeing is good.



Pretty simple but I've found it helpful for keeping score.

Yeah this is crazy.

I buy bio-material from one station in a system at 387.

I go to another station in the system and see the price to me is 592. Then I realise I forgot to move them from station to ship storage. So I go back to the original station, pick 'em up, haul 'em back, and the price when I arrive is now 478.

This level of variability both between stations in the same system and in time feels entirely random to me and suggests there's no intelligent strategy or reason to find trade routes since they won't be stable for more than 30s anyway.

You probably already realise this but I think this system needs some work.

For a start prices within a system should not have such variability. I just netted a 10K profit shifting electronics from one station to another in the same system.

It seems likely that prices within a system would stabilize unless a massive amount of something arrives. I guess that's possible.

In general it would be interesting to understand a little better how the economic model was actually working. It seems very volatile and a little too random.

Yes, there is simulated supply and demand model that change according to certain rules. Plus the prices adjust back and forth from time to time.

From time to time? Hrmmm...

I recorded the price of polymers in one system as 367/354

I go to the next system where polymers are 285/275

Seeing a quick profit I buy 191 polymers, all that station had, and head straight back. When I arrive the price to me is now 326. Okay I still made 8K but I lost almost 1/3 of the margin on the deal. That's quite a price variation in a pretty short time (I pretty much to flew one system and back again)

Is this the kind of price variability one should expect, and in this time scale?

Is price fluctuation random? Or affected by incoming traders?

m/

I also think topics as these should not exist,
not in these days, where (exagerrated) one post on twitter can decide
on the sucess or doom of a movie or game.

What do you mean here?

m/

It's all down to two things: the press and YouTube. If either works then the game is successful. That is unless of course you have a massive marketing budged in millions.

https://twitter.com/sleepcycles/status/593411253902663680

Seems there is some interest, recommend you reach out. I'm a big fan of SleepCycles play vids and he has at least 10K subscribers so if he started a video series on VE I can't imagine it's going to hurt your Steam numbers.

m/

My apologies, what i meant was "trader with no life and OCD issues"

There is always the possibility to use pen and paper to make notices
The serious trader uses a second screen with a spreadsheet anyways ;P

Apparently I am not a serious trader :-)

m/

Hi Lurler,

Can you explain the meaning of the goods/ore configuration and how they work:

Code Select Expand

<base_quantity_production>100</base_quantity_production>
<base_quantity_neutral>10</base_quantity_neutral>
<base_quantity_consumption>5</base_quantity_consumption>
<production_chance>0.05</production_chance>
<consumption_chance>0.2</consumption_chance>

Happy to add your explanations to the Wiki.

Kind regards,

Matt

Great, thanks. To be honest I could have answered this myself, I've concentrated on the data folder and not really looked at the assets. Sorry for being lazy

Thanks Lurler that's good to hear. I guess I need to start watching prices more carefully now (I was ignoring them in case they were random).

I think those suggestions already made about showing high/low prices are good ones.

It would also be interesting to maybe be able to see the last price recorded on a given station so you could figure out where you'd seen a good price.

Then again I guess something showing which system/station had the most recent high/low price for each good would really help you plan trading properly.

You could actually do this within reason using mods; just create a few variations on the hull you want to do up this way, then use the same description and icon for the ship.  Voila, now the game will spawn different copies of that ship with different stats.  Not wholly randomized, but... pretty close.

Agreed you could. I could script something to generate a few hundred variations of the same hull within limits.

One thing I would really like to see the team add is a way of controlling distribution to make items rare. At the moment I think tech-level is the only factor here.

m/

I've reached out to @SleepCycles. No idea if it will come to anything but he did confirm he likes space sim rpg type games!

Hi loudent, thanks for the info.

In my case I have a quest to obtain a fairly large amount of Serizonite (sp?) ore and so far in this game I've not found one of those asteroids with it. But it's a pretty large galaxy (even if it could be larger :-)) that it will take me a long time to explore!

m/

I've been searching for that really expensive ore for ages and found none.

It occurred to me that it would be great to be able to dispatch mining probes to sample the asteroids in far off systems.

With appropriate caveats about how long it might take, how much of any system one probe might sample, probes breaking down or getting destroyed, etc...