Awakening (economy)

The Awakening economy model is based around two types of NPC traders: Merchants and Vendors. It is important to understand the difference between these two, for knowing which wares you can trade and what income you can expect. When learning about the merchants and vendors, the main reference - listing all traded wares and individual NPCs in each kingdom, is a spreadsheet Awakening Merchants & Vendors - which is useful to bookmark and return to now and then when in the market.

Merchants

The merchants model was the first of the two that was developed, and has been developed continuously since about the summer of 2018, and is by now fairly stable and balanced. It's basis is that all wares sold are placed in a global market database. Only bulk wares are traded, i.e. wares that can be placed in a crate. This includes logs, rock shards, crops, planks, bricks, fish, meat etc. Merchants won't trade in crafted wares such as tools, cooked food, furniture etc. All quality levels are traded by merchants, with the exception of lumps, merchants will only trade lumps with a QL of 30 and above - the reason for this is that we had trouble with new players mining out the metal veins in the capital mines and sold to the merchants for money, making it difficult for other new players to get lumps for crafting tools. Merchants won't buy metal ores, only lumps.

The Market

When a player sells bulk wares to a merchant, the wares are removed from the crate or FSB, or the container connected with the merchant, and is removed from Wurm completely. The properties of the wares are then collected and stored in the market database. The market is global, meaning all merchants in all kingdoms access the same wares. To account for logistics, sold wares have a period of a Wurm month (three days and 12 hours in real time) before they become accessible for buying.

Market Decay

All wares in the market database have a decay factor, which is the number of days before a ware will be completely gone due to decay; but also accounts for an invisible market consuming the wares, such as the kingdom population that are not players, and may not be seen visibly but nonetheless are considered to be there. 30 days before the wares are removed from the marked due to decay, the wares will start getting QL loss ticks by a random percentage each tick. When wares lose QL they also go down in price, which means players can buy back wares to a lower price than what they were sold for - which may be advantageous if QL is not a matter, which is often the case with bulk wares; e.g. often the QL of bricks doesn't matter when building a house, and you can always improve the wall instead afterwards.

Pricing

Merchants

Vendors

The vendors model was developed during the spring of 2019, but it was only about half a year later that it was balanced enough to be actually useful, and by the time of writing it is the more popular model among advanced players for making income. Vendor trade in crafted wares, but also gems and some bred animals. Only items with a QL of 30 and above are traded, and there is no market database, but instead the wares are completely destroyed and removed from the game after being sold.

In general, vendors are representatives of the demands of the invisible population of the kingdoms, for example each kingdom have a military which has demands for weapons, animals for the cavalry, food, tools and clothing. The population of the cities have a demand for cooked food, clothing, tools etc. All of these market interests place their vendors in the cities to buy such wares.

Budgets

Each vendor have a yearly budget, and will only buy wares for that amount. When the budget has run out the population demand for such wares have been filled, and the vendor won't buy more of that ware until the new budget the following year. New budgets are made on the the day the Ant on the Starfall of the Saw, at 12:00, which is approximately at the beginning of spring.

When the new budgets are being made, each kingdom will also go through the old budgets and see how much of the demand has been filled, i.e. how hard has the players worked. The more of the old budget that has been completed, the more the kingdom citizens are rewarded with sleep bonus. For each vendor trade that reports 2% or less left of the budget, all citizens are rewarded 5 minutes of sleep bonus, and so if all trades are completed, the maximum amount of sleep bonus that can be awarded is about 3 hours.

To see the current statistics of the vendor budgets, use the command /vendors, which will open a window listing all trades, budgets, reports of how much of the budgets remain, and the name of the vendor for that trade in the kingdom of the player. Players can also check vendors in other kingdoms with /vendors [kingdom].

Export

Players can export wares to other kingdoms, but each kingdom will prioritize its own population at first. Vendors will refuse to buy foreign wares from the start of the new budgets until the day of the Dancer on the Startfall of the Raven, at 12:00, which is approximately by the start of autumn. Players who intend to export to enemy kingdoms will need a kingdom invitation.