More Moolah OXZ

More Moolah 1.1 Market screen, Isinor - poor agricultural system. Note the better balance and gentler gradation of commodity prices and quantities: a bell-curve, with no more outliers.

More Moolah 1.1 Market screen, Qutiri - rich industrial system. Balance is still in evidence.

More Moolah Market

An enhanced and extended Market for the zealous merchanter. 5 (five) new commodities for industrial and agricultural economies; 7 (seven) recast display aliases for the traditional Oolite goods.

Overall goal: a balance between quantity and potential profit.

More variety, more realism, more trade possibilities, more moolah.

Modified Items

The seven core Oolite commodities with changed display names:

• "slaves" are called "Sentient Slaves"
• "furs" are called "Pelts & Furs"
• "firearms" are called "Weapons"
• "narcotics" are called "Herbal Remedies"
• "liquor/wines" are called "Wines & Spirits"
• "food" is called "Food & Grain"
• "textiles" are called "Clothing & Textiles"

New Items

The five newly added commodities:

• "androids" = "Androids & Clones"
• "robots" = "Robots"
• "live_animals" = "Live Animals"
• "leather_goods" = "Leather Goods"
• "medicines" = "Medicines"

Market Catalogue

1. Sentient Slaves

Sentient Slaves, the galaxy's most valued and expensive commodity (and we leave ethical and moral questions to the philosophers), comprise parent-born beings of any species with a capacity for reasoning and emotion. The latter quality alone distinguishes this cargo from the near-sentient commodities Androids, Clones, and Robots. Sentient Slaves are usually more abundantly buyable from the markets of agricultural societies.

2. Androids & Clones

Androids & Clones are the near-sentient (but not legally considered so) products of highly advanced industrial societies. In the case of clones particularly, the connoisseur buyer values them only a little below Sentient Slaves.

3. Robots

Robots are the non-sentient (as adjudjed in recent court cases) neuro-mechanical products of highly industrialized societies. They serve in all sectors and in all walks of life and are everywhere greatly in demand, although from the trader's perspective perhaps not as profitable as Androids or Computers.

4. Luxuries

Luxuries comprise objects and items 'in vogue' and considered connoisseur delicacies, often for their scarcity and novelty. These goods are usually more abundantly available from industrialized societies. By their very ephemeral nature, prices fluctuate and Luxuries are not always as profitable as goods on either side of them in the market scale.

5. Computers

'Computers' is a broad category. Computers comprise the products - be they jumpdrive-modulators, workflow controllers, or console devices - that underlie and drive forward a technologically advanced civilization. It goes without saying that their production and availablity is always high in such societies. A shrewd merchanter, when visiting an industrial station, will snap these goods up first, so necessary are they to less advanced neighbouring systems.

6. Live Animals

Our 'Live Animals' category comprises living, breathing beings legally considered 'non-sentient', sold usually as pets, breeding stock, or cattle for slaughter and consumption. Animals are a special product of agriculture-based societies and extremely needful in industrial systems. Competent merchanters will usually be carrying some Live Animals in their holds.

7. Pelts & Furs

Pelts & Furs consist of the treated skin (with fur), or the fur alone, of Live Animals. Woolen apparel also falls under this category. Especially popular items everywhere the good ground has been covered over by roads and cities and now populated by jaded socialites, more often of the female gender, who crave the allure and cachet.

8. Leather Goods

Leather Goods comprise items made from the treated skin, without fur, of Live Animals. A perennially popular commodity any trader with a modicum of sense will buy without hesitation from an agriculturally-based system. Prices are stable and profits can be high.

9. Weapons

The 'Weapons' category should need no introduction. Firearms, lasers, mines, and missiles cover it generally, though rarer deliverers of ground and space death can be had for a Lave penny in some systems. A very stable commodity, always in demand. Many veteran traders consider a hold half-full with Weapons cases a must.

10. Machines & Vehicles

A reliable commodity to buy, Machinery, product largely of industrialized societies, comprises mechanical devices for all sectors: Farm machinery, production-line machinery, ground vehicles of every shape and colour, skimmers, shuttles, marine craft, aeroplanes. Deep-space vehicles are of course far too massive for a medium-class trader to carry unless s/he tows them, which a few have been known to do; but to hold them is really the province of heavy-traders owning collossal Anacondas and Boas.

11. Medicines

A highly unstable commodity, liable to fluctuate wildly in price on the fickle winds of disease and plague, Medicines - a product of the advanced pharmaceutical industries - will nevertheless be in extreme demand almost everywhere. Some merchanters - particularly Moray Starboat and Medical Boat captains - specialize in them.

12. Herbal Remedies

A good that can vary considerably in price because its outlets are not confined to a single economy, Herbal Remedies might sometimes be what are legally considered 'narcotics', but more often comprise treated or fermented plant-matter from the multitude of systems that export it, quite frequently linked to religious beliefs, but still very popular among industrial sophisticates, who carry them from soirée to soirée extolling their benefits and virtues. Fairly stable in price and worth the experienced trader's consideration.

13. Metals & Alloys

Metals & Alloys, as a product, straddles the poles of agricultural and industrial societies, and consequently their worth is often hard for the average trader to pin down. In demand everywhere - in both industrial and agricultural systems - Metals & Alloys should never be entirely ignored as a barterable item. A usefull 'filler' for any hold.

14. Wines & Spirits

What system would be without its favourite tipple? Some merchantmen have seen queues of buyers forming onstation before their ship even clamps umbilicals and opens its seals. One of the most reliable goods in the galaxy to carry from an agricultural to an industrial planet, and ideal mass-wise for the light-class or neophyte trader.

15. Clothing & Textiles

Clothing & Textiles covers (pun intended) a megaverse of styles, textures, and weights. A staple, like food, clothing requires no recommendation: as a good, it recommends itself - especially to the light-class or neophyte merchanter. And, like food, extremely stable in price, and a guaranteed profit.

16. Food & Grain

The Galaxies must eat. This is food for sentients and fodder for animals - the commodity everyone begins, ends, lives with, and dies without, and every trader has carried it at one time or another, for its price stability, abundant availability, and guaranteed gain.

17. Minerals

The fruit of mining, on any planet in any system at any technological level, this second-cheapest of goods might be worth considering when starting out on a trading career. But beware the unpredictability in price!

18. Radioactives

A waste industrial product, Radioactives, legally adjudged *most hazardous* is for the intrepid (or desperate) trader only. Those starting out have, however, seen success carrying this commodity on their first runs.

Remarks

None of the More Moolah goods are illegal or restricted. (this is a G.E.T.-sanctioned market!)

By default the commodities are sorted by price (descending) on the Market screen. This is to make selection of the more valuable items easier and quicker.

You are advised to start new commanders once More Moolah has been installed. Ghosts from the 'old market', when loading from games saved under the ancien regime, skew and distort the new market considerably for the moment. A solution is in the pipeline.

More Moolah makes an ideal pairing with Merchanter's Zeal (MM + MZ = $$$)

MM is not, and never will be, an integrated part of Elite Trader Meta: they are completely separate domains of work. But the two do play very nicely together!

Download

More Moolah is available in the Mechanics section of Oolite's in-game Expansions Manager, or here:

Download More Moolah 1.3 OXZ

Just drop the OXZ into your Oolite->AddOns folder.

Version History

• 1.3: a further balancing of prices and quantities. Spara's genius 'wipe clean' functions modified slightly to reduce logging errors: a conditional for the main loop, along with try..catch() blocks for the same purpose. Seems to work well - now saving and loading new commanders without errors while preserving the new market balance and eliminating most Oolite 'ghosts' is a total breeze.
• 1.2: MM has been world-scriptized; Alloys re-christened "Metals & Alloys", played with, and somewhat fixed. In the interest of further realism and balance, price and/or quantity has been adjusted for Live Animals, Leather Goods, Food & Grain, Alloys, Minerals, Radioactives, bringing a genuine price-scale 'ladder' climbing from 10 cr to 100 cr (Radioactives-->Sentient Slaves). Fewer Javascript exceptions appear in the log, and saving and loading with a new commander is error-free, apart from those holdovers from the 'old market' which, it seems, will never disappear from saved games (but this is an Oolite bug, and nothing to do with More Moolah).
• 1.1: a further balancing of quantities and prices for fewer extremes and 'outliers'. The market spectrum becomes more of a gentle bell-curve. More realistic prices and quantities for Food & Grain and Clothing & Textiles; Radioactives, as mere waste product, is now the cheapest real commodity, followed by Minerals. Reduced average quantity of very valuable items like Androids & Clones, Robots, and Computers. Pelts & Furs have also been reduced in quantity.
• 1.0: initial public offering.

Quick Facts

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Version	Released	License	Features	Category	Author(s)	Feedback
1.3	2022-12-18	CC BY-NC-SA 4	Enhances Trading	Mechanics OXPs	Reval	[]