The Exchange: auctions, orders and rare pieces

The Exchange is where survivors trade with each other. You set the price. Open it from your field kit (M › Exchange) anywhere, or by looking at one of its terminals: Haven, Paleto Hold, the Eye, the Port (the Rust Kings' board: raider country, so mind what you carry away) and the Colony on Mars. From anywhere you can browse, buy, bid, post orders, list and manage your listings. The goods themselves change hands at a terminal.

Three ways to trade

• Buy it now: list a stack or a single piece at a price per unit, for 12, 24 or 48 hours. Buyers can take part of a stack; the price per unit holds.
• Timed auction: set an opening bid, and a hidden reserve if you want one, for 2 to 24 hours. Each bid must beat the last by 5% (at least 2 scrip). A bid in the last two minutes adds two minutes, up to half an hour in all, so sniping doesn't work. Your bid is held when you place it; if someone outbids you it goes straight back to your Exchange wallet. Under the reserve, nobody wins and the goods go home. An auction with bids can't be pulled.
• Buy orders: post "want 50 rounds at 3 each" and the whole sum is held up front. Anyone can fill all or part of it from their pack; what's left when it ends, or when you cancel it, goes to your wallet. Named and numbered pieces never fill an order by accident.

Handing goods over

• Listing at a terminal takes the goods into the Exchange's keeping there and then, and the listing is live at once.
• Listing from your field kit saves the listing as awaiting drop-off. Nothing leaves your pack and no fee is paid yet. Take the goods to any terminal within 24 hours, look at it and choose Hand in listed goods (or Hand in on My Exchange while you stand there): the fee is paid, the goods go in, and the listing goes live for the hours you chose. It has to be the same goods you listed: the same gun, not another of the model. A drop-off you never hand in lapses and costs nothing; you can also withdraw it.
• Filling someone's buy order and collecting what you bought also happen at a terminal.

Staff can switch on Auto-delivery for the whole server. Then listing takes the goods from your pack wherever you are, nothing waits for the runners, and what you buy goes straight into your pockets once it has cleared the 5-minute check (into your collection box if it won't fit). The Exchange window shows Auto-delivery at the top when it's on.

Fees, and where your money goes

Listing costs 2% of the asking price (at least 5, at most 250 scrip), and it isn't refunded. When something sells, the Exchange keeps 6% of the first 2,000 scrip and 8% of anything above. Your takings, outbid bids and unfilled orders land in your Exchange wallet, even while you're offline. The wallet pays for your next buy first, and it comes out as scrip at any terminal.

The going rate

Every item page shows the going rate: the median price per unit of the last 40 honest sales in 30 days, a 30-day chart with the daily low and high, the week's volume and what traders pay. With fewer than 5 sales, the going rate is what traders value it at. When you list, a gauge shows how your price compares. Over 3 times the going rate, the Exchange warns you it will probably sit. It refuses under a tenth of the going rate or far above it (25 times for ordinary goods, up to 100 times for one-of-a-kind pieces), because those look like laundering or a gift to someone, and staff look at anything past 10 times. Traders slowly follow a price that holds for a week: at most 3% an hour, and never past half or double their base price.

Collecting, clearing and couriers

• Everything you buy goes to your collection box, not your pockets, and you collect it at a terminal. It clears the Exchange in 5 minutes first (a check against laundering, even with Auto-delivery on).
• Goods are real: bought at one terminal from a seller who listed at another, the Exchange's runners carry it over. That's about 20 minutes between Haven and Paleto, and about 2 hours to or from Mars. Choose where it's delivered when you buy. Send here re-routes a delivery to the terminal you're at.
• In the last minute before a server restart the Exchange closes its books: nothing is listed, bought or bid on until the lights come back. An auction that would have ended while the server was down gets 10 more minutes after it's back.

Rarity

Rarity is mostly the piece itself, not the item: its condition, where it came from, how few exist. Rare pieces turn up in Blackzones and the most dangerous places: red airdrops, helicopter crashes, bunkers, Blackmere lockers, and the military crates and lockers inside a boss's ground or a region the dead have overrun. Never in houses, shops or cars, never near a safe zone. Only a handful enter the whole world each day, and a spot that has given one won't give another for a week. It shows as a color, a word and up to five pips, on the Exchange, on the shelf of the container you found it in, and in your inventory.

• Common and Uncommon: ordinary pieces.
• Rare: a rare variant or a numbered limited run. Factory-sealed goods (no dents, no expiry), new in the box tools and gear, military issue guns from an arms room (85 to 100% condition; these also turn up in military crates and police armories), a custom finish that shows on the weapon, and a match-grade barrel (8% less recoil kick and sway: the only handling perk any rare piece has).
• Exceptional: engraved pieces, kitted rifles, small runs.
• One of a kind: named pieces. Each exists once in the whole world, only turns up in its own armory or lair, and only turns up again after the one copy is gone.
• Limited runs come from the world: 50 Last Lights radios for the crews who get the power back on after a blackout, and numbered trophies for whoever does the most to bring down certain bosses and legendary animals. Each carries its number: "#12 of 50".

Serial numbers and where a gun came from

Every gun has a serial, stamped the way its maker would, and a provenance: where it was found ("Blackmere armory, Fort Zancudo", "Police issue, the sheriff's office in Paleto", "Civilian, pre-collapse"). Search the Exchange by provenance as well as by name.

• A gun from a living faction's armory (Blackmere, the Rust Kings, Haven, Tidewater) is traceable: its owners know the serial. Offer it to their trader or their people, and they won't buy it back. They'll take it home. Hand it back and they trust you for it, like returned cargo.
• If you're the one who carried it out of their armory, they know that too: showing it to them costs you, and handing it back earns you nothing.
• Police and National Guard guns from before the collapse, and civilian guns, have no owner left to trace them.

Filing a serial off

With a metal file (some traders sell them, and they turn up in toolboxes), look at a workbench or an armory bench and choose File off a serial. Twenty seconds at the vice and the number is gone for good. A filed gun can't be traced, but it's worth 40 to 60% less (how much is settled when you file it), Haven's counters and the Eye won't buy it, and the Exchange marks it Serial filed off. Black-market dealers still take them, at the lower value and their usual cut. A file lasts about ten guns.

Star an item to put it on your Watchlist and the Exchange tells you when one is listed at or under your price, and on Discord too if you tick it and your Discord is linked. Big sales, the day's top trades and price movers are posted in #market-prices. See also Traders, supply runs and trust and Factions.