The Economy

Coins

TWiTcraft ran on coins. Every player could check their balance with /money, collect a small daily wage from the ATMs at spawn (“Get your 55 Coins daily from the ATM”), sell raw materials to the server's own TWiTMART store, and open a shop of their own by writing [Buy] or [Sell] on a sign in front of a chest. The shop plugin was SignShop, and it never kept a database of its own — every shop is its sign. So the whole economy survives, one sign at a time: 7,262 player shop signs across the October 2013 worlds and the 2014–15 worlds, and 208 server-store signs.

Prices are per unit (a sign selling “64 Cobblestone for $1.50” counts as 0.023 coins a block). A sign whose header the plugin painted blue had stock behind it when the world froze; red means the chest had run dry. The December 2013 snapshot caught the same shops two months on and is only used for the comparison at the bottom. Each shop sign was written by hand, so item names have been tidied into 563 commodities; the raw sign text is always shown underneath.

The diamond standard

In October 2013 a diamond in a Leoville shop typically cost 29.9c, and a shop would give you about 25c for one — a spread every trader on the server knew by heart. TWiTMART, the server store, paid just 2.4c a diamond (10 Diamonds for 24c), which is why nobody sold diamonds to the server. A block of nine went for 135c to 360c. For scale: the ATM paid 55 coins a day, so a diamond was about two-thirds of a day's wage, a diamond block a week's.

The price in conversation

The signs give October 2013; the chat logs give the rest of the year. Reading every line where someone quoted a price for plain diamonds (“$15 per diamond”, “5 diamonds for 75”), the going rate was about 45c in August 2013 and fell to 15c in January 2014 — the new map’s fresh caves and the resource-world resets flooded the market, and shopkeepers said so: “1 Diamond for 15 Coins at The Lake Side Shop. 40 in Stock! Don't go with repin_JC's low grade” — batstarwars1, 2014-01-17 and “if your selling diamonds for 15c your getting robbed” — thornton77, 2014-02-09. The admin put a figure on the whole economy three days after the reset: “fun fact: total server accumulated cash $88615 over 285 accounts” — Console, 2014-01-08.

TWiTMART — the server store

TWiTMART was the admin shop by spawn: [iBuy] and [iSell] signs with an infinite chest behind them. It sold basic blocks for coins and, more importantly, bought raw materials from anyone — which is where most of the server's money came from. The forums argued about it for years: TWiTMART “destroys the goods and causes an inflation”, but “without those two things there is virtually no way for a new player to make money.” In 2014 it came back as TWiTMART 2.0 with a Skull Shop selling decorative heads for 250 to 1,000 coins.

Links: Twit mart buying more (Jun 2012) · Buy more at the Twitmart (Sep 2012) · TWiTMart 2.0 item suggestion thread · TWiTMART Skull Shop.

The price index

One-off items that didn't match a rule are hidden until you pick the “Other” chip. “Buy” columns are what a customer paid at a [Buy] sign, per unit; “shops paid” is the typical [Sell] price a shop offered for your goods. Typical = median.

Where people shopped

Shops clumped together. On the old map: Leoville's downtown plots, the Flea Market (28 numbered lots, “managed & built by Teh_Rage”, with the Ten Flea Market Commandments posted at the gate), the multi-floor Emporium, the Citadel shops under the Skytram, the SGS Shoppes, and Dio's Black Market — “the big black building (you can't miss it)” beside the Flea Market, with its promised casino and high-rise apartments. On the new map the trade moved to a handful of big private stores — SWfan85's Rougaroux Distillery Outlet, x3fox's shop south of Old Leoville, MightyMat321's SkyShop, the HGLCraft Store and Wilmetter's Enchanted Book Store. Where no landmark names a district, the owner is read off the signs standing there.

What people were asking for

The signs say what the shops stocked; the chat logs say what people actually wanted. Of the 400,000 lines of in-game chat SkyerCorp’s IRC logs preserved, 6,596 are someone buying, selling, trading or asking for a thing by name. Over the whole run the most-wanted goods were horse (957), diamond (726), iron (413), armor (378), saddle (370), wood (285), book (256), gold (211). Horses dominate every month the server had them — the summer 2013 craze, and again from the first week of the new map — and saddles, which no shop could craft, were the scarce good of January 2014. Month by month, the eight things most talked about in that way:

Counted from lines that contain a buying/selling/wanting word (sell, buy, trade, need, anyone have, for sale, how much…) and the name of a good. December 2013 is missing from the logs.

For the record

Signs with a sales pitch

Real estate

Not SignShop — just people writing prices on signs. Land, lots and whole buildings were sold by hand, coins paid with /money pay.

Mailboxes, tip jars and a 300-coin heal

SignShop's [DonateHand] sign drops whatever you're holding into the chest behind it, and Leoville turned that into a postal system: 582 of them stand in the world as mailboxes and tip jars, from “Post Box for Abigailsqueak” to “LeonimuZ's Mailbox” to a plain “help out my store!”. Spawn also had a [Repair] sign that fixed any enchanted item for 300 coins and a [Heal] sign that healed you for the same — the closest thing TWiTcraft had to a hospital.

October to December, 2013

The December 2013 snapshot caught 3,530 of October's shop signs still standing. In those two months 59 new shop signs went up and 42 came down; 129 shops that were stocked in October had sold out by December and 44 empty ones had been refilled — the last restocking anyone did on the old map before the reset. Only 5 signs changed their price: 1 oak wood 0.25c → 4.5c; 20 oak leaves 10c → 32c; 1 GoGo juice (swift 8:00) 2c → 5c; 1 diamond 24c → 0.25c; 1 diamond 39c → 0.5c. A shop by spawn dropped its diamond from 39c to half a coin — a closing-down sale, or someone giving up on the map.

How this was made

Every sign in the archived worlds was read out of the region files (73,583 across every world and era). A sign whose first line is [Buy] or [Sell] is a SignShop shop; [iBuy]/[iSell] are the server's infinite-stock TWiTMART signs. The plugin only required a number somewhere on the fourth line (“$X.YZ, X pennies, X cheetoes, or whatever currency you want to call it”, per jesskitten's 2012 how-to), so quantities and item names were parsed from the free text of lines two and three and grouped by hand-written rules; anything that didn't fit a rule is listed under its own name. Shop owners are not recorded anywhere — SignShop kept no database and the server's plugin folder was never released — so ownership is only known where a neighbouring sign says so. Read the arguments: Bearish on the Economy (asim0v, May 2012), Economy ideas/thoughts (Dec 2012), Town Hall (Dec 2012).