Guide: Economy

Entropia's economy is not a system attached to the game. It is the game. Nobody tells you that at the start, and it is the most expensive thing to work out late.

Three ideas carry almost all of it.

Your money is real money

PED converts to and from real currency at a fixed rate. It is not a soft currency that inflates away, and it goes back out as well as in.

That changes how everything feels, and it should. When you fire a shot you are spending money. When you loot, you are getting some of it back. People who struggle here are usually the ones still playing it like a game where resources regenerate.

They do not. You are running a small business with a gun.

Raw value, and why nothing you loot is worthless

Every item has a TT value, short for Trade Terminal value. It is the item's raw value: what the game itself will buy it back for, any time, no haggling, no waiting for a buyer.

For a new player that is the most useful thing in the economy. Nothing you loot is ever worth nothing, and you always have a way to turn a full inventory into PED right now.

It is also the baseline you measure everything else against, which is where the number that matters comes in.

Markup is where the money is

Markup is what another player will pay above raw value.

Sell an item to the terminal and you get its raw value. Sell the same item to a player who wants it and you get the raw value plus whatever they will pay on top. That difference is the only profit in the transaction. Everything else is the same value moving between hands.

This is the idea that separates people who last from people who quit. Two miners can pull identical ore and one of them makes money, because one knew which materials players actually want and the other dropped the lot at a terminal.

So the question to keep asking is not how much you looted. It is whether anyone wants this, or whether the terminal is the best you will do.

Selling to players

Player selling usually means the auction house, and the auction charges the seller a fee.

The habit that avoids it is to sell in meaningful quantities. Let the stack build, then list it. One big lot pays one fee, and twenty small lots pay twenty.

What to do with your first PED

1. Do not buy gear yet. Your starting equipment is genuinely fine, and gear bought before you know what you are doing is money spent on a guess.
2. Find out what carries markup in whatever activity you have picked, before you scale it up.
3. Recycle the junk. Anything you do have that is next to worthless and can’t be sold can be turned into Nanocubes at the TT.
4. Judge on patterns, not sessions. One bad run is a bad run. Change your approach on a trend, never on an evening.
5. Don’t hunt too big. You need to kill enough of them that luck stops being the thing deciding your week.
6. Do not outspend your buffer. If you are selling loot to afford the next box of ammo, the mob is too expensive for you and markup can never catch up.