Economy

SMP economies: jobs, shops and why prices inflate

An SMP economy lives or dies on sinks. Money enters every time a player sells something to a server shop, which is a faucet with no natural limit. If nothing removes money again, the total supply only grows, prices climb, and within a month player-run shops stop being worth using.

Where money comes from

• Selling to server shops. The main faucet, and the one with unlimited capacity.
• Jobs. Paying players for actions: mining, farming, building, fishing, killing mobs. Popular because it rewards playing rather than grinding one optimal thing.
• Quests and dailies. Fixed payouts for objectives. Good design, because the payout is bounded.
• Voting and crates. Small and reliable.
• Player-to-player trade. Not a faucet at all; it moves money rather than creating it.

Where it is supposed to go

Claim block purchases, land expansion, town upkeep, teleport costs, repair fees, auction house tax, cosmetic purchases with in-game currency, rank unlocks bought with money rather than cash, and consumables. A server with five of those stays healthy for a season. A server with none has a decorative economy by week three.

How to check in five minutes

1. Find the server shop and note the buy and sell price of one common item. The gap is the spread the economy runs on.
2. Look for anything you can spend money on that is not an item. Those are the sinks.
3. Check the auction house for the cheapest listing of a basic material. If it is absurdly high, the economy has already inflated.
4. Ask how long the season has been running, then judge the above against it.

Jobs, specifically

Jobs systems are the best answer to the "what do I do now" problem on a survival server, because they pay for ordinary play rather than requiring a farm. The failure mode is one job paying far better than the rest, which turns the whole server into that activity. A well-tuned jobs list has payouts within a factor of two of each other.

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

Next in the SMP wiki

• SMP PvP: combat versions, crystals and opt-in zones The 1.8 versus 1.9 combat split, why crystal PvP dominates modern SMPs, and what opt-in PvP zones change.
• Your first week on a new SMP A checklist that gets you established without losing your first base, in the order that actually matters.
• Trading on an SMP without getting scammed Most SMPs have no escrow, so the trade structure is the only protection you get. The four safe shapes.
• Nether and End rules on SMP servers Highways, roof rules, End resets and dragon fights. The parts of an SMP that are almost always governed by server-specific rules.