Markets & Trading
Field Manual
Every credit in your treasury started as ore in the ground. Mining fills your holds, but it’s the market that turns cargo into fleets — and the market is alive. This manual walks you through every way to trade: selling your first cargo, buying supplies, ordering deliveries from Voran, and auctioning ships to other commanders.
Getting Started
All commerce runs through the Voran Interstellar Exchange (VIX). There are three places to trade, and you'll use all of them.
| Market | What It Is | Best For |
|---|---|---|
| VIX Exchange | The galaxy’s live commodity market, traded at any Voran Citadel | Fair live prices, instant settlement, unlimited liquidity |
| Voran Trader | Voran’s merchant service — resources delivered to your base | Bulk buying without hauling |
| VIX Auctions | Player-to-player auctions on the Voran Interstellar Exchange | Ships, fleets, and cargo at prices players set |
Prices rise and fall with what the galaxy’s commanders mine, sell, and hoard. All three markets quote from the same living market, so a resource that’s scarce is scarce everywhere — but each pays and charges differently.
Selling Your First Cargo
The Exchange trades from your ship's hold, not from base storage. Five steps from ore to credits.
Buying Resources
Buying works the same way in reverse — dock, pick, confirm. Credits out, cargo in, instantly.
The Exchange never runs out of stock and never stops buying — Voran stands on the other side of every trade. What you give up for that guaranteed liquidity is the spread: the buy price always sits well above the sell price, so buying and immediately re-selling always loses money.
Reading The Quotes
Every resource carries three numbers. Here's Iron with the market index at 10.
| Quote | Price | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| Exchange sells at (ask) | 16 | You pay 16/unit to buy Iron |
| Market index (fair value) | 10 | Where Iron is trading this hour |
| Exchange pays (bid) | 5 | You receive 5/unit selling Iron |
Prices re-quote once per hour, on the hour. Between ticks, the posted prices hold — what you see is what you get for the whole hour. The screen shows when the current quotes expire.
What The Market Screen Tells You
| Element | How To Use It |
|---|---|
| Trend arrow & 24h change | Where the price has been heading — rising means demand, falling means the galaxy is dumping it |
| Volatility badge | Stable commons (Iron, Gas) drift gently; volatile exotics can swing several percent in an hour |
| Quote timer | When this hour’s prices expire and re-quote |
How Prices Move
The market index for each resource drifts hourly, pushed by what the galaxy does — and you can use it.
Heavy selling drags a price down; heavy buying lifts it. The effect builds while the flow continues and drains away over the following hours once it stops. And prices are banded: no resource can move more than about 30% either side of its long-run value (refined goods hold even tighter bands). Dumping can put a resource on its floor — it can never make it worthless. Cornering can put it on its ceiling — never make it priceless.
Depth matters. High-volume commons barely move under ordinary flow — it takes fleets of coordinated freighters to shift Iron a percent. Thin exotics move on a fraction of that volume.
Large Orders
Slippage: a truly enormous single order — a meaningful fraction of a resource’s hourly depth — fills progressively worse than the posted price, capped at a few percent. The preview shows your true fill price before you commit. Market impact: big flow also moves the next hours’ prices against you. Slippage you pay once; impact you pay on every load that follows.
Daily limit: each commander can trade up to 50,000,000 units per resource per day (buys and sells combined). Far above any normal operation — it exists so no one can lean on a single commodity for days. Voran trader purchases don’t count against it.
Selling Smart — A Worked Routine
Halts
The Voran Trader
Voran's merchant service delivers resources directly to your base — no hauling, no docking. You pay for the convenience.
Voran’s prices are steady. The trader quotes from each resource’s long-run value, not the hourly swing — a resource that crashed this morning still costs its normal price at Voran’s warehouse. You cannot arbitrage a market dip through Voran, and a spike won’t gouge you either.
Voran Pickup Service
Voran's logistics run both directions: the same freighter fleet that delivers your purchases will come collect resources you want to sell — no cargo ship, no flight to a citadel. It's the sell-from-home option, and you pay for it in price, not fees.
When pickup is worth it: your base is deep in the frontier and a round trip to a citadel costs hours of freighter time; your haulers are committed elsewhere and the stockpile is clogging storage; or the space between you and the nearest citadel is contested — Voran’s freighters take the risk instead of your hulls.
Ships too: Voran sells hulls from its catalog at a premium over construction cost and buys ships back at roughly half their build value.
Selling At Auction
VIX Auctions is the auction house: commanders selling ships, outfitted fleets, cargo bundles, and scan reports to each other at player-set prices.
Creating A Listing
Pricing Your Listing
Every listing shows a market value: what your goods are worth at today’s prices — the construction cost of every ship in the bundle plus the current market value of any cargo aboard. It’s computed live, so the same bundle is worth more on a day its cargo is scarce. That number is your reference, not your price: you set the actual starting bid anywhere from a quarter of market value up to five times it.
Cargo has a natural trading range. The Exchange pays the bid and charges the ask, with a wide gap between. Price your cargo inside that gap and both sides win: say Titanium Alloy sits at bid 121 / ask 363 — list it around 200–250 and the buyer saves ~100/unit versus the Exchange while you earn ~100/unit more than dumping it. That gap is why the auction house exists. Cargo listed below the Exchange bid is you donating credits; cargo above the Exchange ask only sells to someone who can’t reach a citadel.
Ships are worth more than their parts. Market value counts the hull at construction cost, but a fitted, leveled, or hard-to-build ship saves the buyer research, queue time, and hauling — rare hulls routinely clear well above their number. Start near market value; let bidding find the premium. Scarcity overrides everything: a resource pinned at the top of its band, or one the galaxy has stopped mining, can clear multiples of its market value at auction — the Exchange’s posted prices are capped by its band; an auction isn’t.
Fees & Rules
| Rule | Value |
|---|---|
| Listing fee | 2% of starting bid, up front, non-refundable |
| Broker fee | 5% of final sale |
| Active listings per commander | 3 – unlimited, by account tier |
| Maximum duration | 24 hours |
| Cancellation | 10% penalty, 15-min lockout |
| Unsold listings | Reclaim or relist within 24 hours |
| Won goods | Claim within 48 hours |
When it sells, the sale price lands in your treasury minus the 5% broker fee; if it doesn’t, reclaim or relist within 24 hours. Remember the fees when pricing — a listing at bare market value nets you roughly 93% of it. Changing your mind costs a 10% cancellation penalty, and listings are locked for the first 15 minutes — list deliberately.
Buying At Auction
Every listing shows its market value — compare the asking price against it, then sanity-check against the Exchange.
For cargo, anything below the Exchange’s ask saves you money versus buying from Voran; the closer to the Exchange’s bid, the better the deal. For ships, remember what the number leaves out — fittings, levels, and the build time you’re skipping. A ship at 1.5× market value can still be a bargain if you’d wait days to build it yourself.
Quick Reference
Where to go for what you're trying to do.
| I Want To… | Do This |
|---|---|
| Turn today’s mining into credits | Dock at a Voran Citadel, sell from the hold |
| Get the most from a big stockpile | Check trend → split over days → refine first where possible |
| Buy supplies without hauling | Voran trader — delivered to your base, premium price |
| Sell without leaving my base | Voran pickup — freighter collects, paid on pickup, discounted price |
| Buy supplies cheap | VIX Exchange — buy at the live price |
| Sell a ship or fleet | List it on VIX Auctions |
| Profit from a price spike | Sell on the Exchange — the spike is real there; Voran won’t honor it |
| Know if a price is good | Check the 24h trend and where it sits in its band |
Trading Doctrine
The market rewards patience, punishes panic, and pays the commander who refines. Fly safe — and sell high.