Economy

Survival economies: jobs, shops and inflation

Every survival economy has the same failure mode: unlimited money in, nothing taking it out. Selling to a server shop creates money from nothing, and there is no natural cap on how much anyone can sell. If the server has no sinks, the supply only grows, prices climb, and player shops stop being worth using.

The faucets

• Server shops. Unlimited, and the main source.
• Jobs. Paying for mining, farming, building, fishing, hunting. Bounded by time played, which makes it healthier than shop selling.
• Quests, missions and dailies. Fixed payouts, the best-behaved faucet of the lot.
• Voting and crates. Small and steady.
• Mob and boss drops. Sometimes lucrative, usually bounded by content.

The sinks that actually work

Claim block purchases, home slots, teleport fees, repair costs, auction house tax, town upkeep, cosmetic purchases in in-game currency, rank unlocks priced in game money, consumables and boosters. A server with five of these keeps a functioning economy for a whole season. A server with none has a decorative one by week three, and you will notice because the auction house will be full of listings nobody buys.

Jobs systems, specifically

Jobs are the best answer to "my base is finished, now what". They pay for ordinary play rather than requiring a purpose-built farm, which keeps people in the world rather than in an AFK box. The failure mode is one job paying far better than the others, which collapses the whole server into that activity. A well-tuned list has payouts within roughly a factor of two of each other, and caps per hour to stop automation abuse.

How to check an economy in five minutes

1. Note the buy and sell price of one common item in the server shop. The spread is what the economy runs on.
2. List everything you can spend money on that is not an item. Those are your sinks. Fewer than three is a warning.
3. Check the auction house for the cheapest stack of a basic material. Absurdly high means inflation has already happened.
4. Ask how long the season has run and judge the above against it.

Our number one at play.talonmc.net wrote its economy and trading from scratch rather than dropping in a shop plugin, which is the decision that determines whether sinks exist at all.

Next in the survival wiki

• World age, borders and resets on survival servers An old world with a tight border is full, whatever the player count says. How to find out before you join.
• Skills systems on survival servers: mcMMO and the alternatives Skill trees turn ordinary play into permanent progression. What mcMMO does, and what custom systems do differently.
• Survival server ranks: earned, bought, and the difference Ranks are the main thing survival servers sell. The question is whether the same rank is reachable by playing.
• Your first week on a survival server The order that gets you established without losing the base. Claim first, economy second, build last.