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: player shop signs across the October 2013 worlds and the 2014–15 worlds, and 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 commodities; the raw sign text is always shown underneath.
The diamond standard
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.
October 2013 — Leoville spawn
2014–15 — TWiTMART 2.0 (new map & creative world)
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
| Item | Category | Signs | Buy from | Buy typical | Buy up to | Shops paid |
|---|
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.
For the record
Most expensive things for sale
Cheapest per unit
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: 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
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).