Cargo System Updates
A new way for cargo prices to be updated
The cargo system has been updated!
Buying or selling resources will now raise or lower the planet's price for that resource, respectively. Effectively, this means that the longer you run the same cargo route, the less profitable it gets, and this is even faster if multiple people are running it. On the other hand, while a resource isn't being bought or sold, its price gradually drifts (over about 3 days currently) to its most profitable extreme.
This means there will be a benefit to learning a few routes and keeping an eye on the profits on each, and occasionally switching them up once your current route becomes less profitable than the others. You can also see how a price has been trending over time (and therefore get a sense for cargo activity over time) by doing showplanet resources . (Apologies to screenreader players, this is an ASCII chart and I had no idea how to make it accessible. If you've got suggestions for how to represent chart data in a screenreader-friendly way, let me know!)
We've also updated some commodities to have higher prices. This is meant to be a bit more thematic (spice should cost a lot more than water, for example) but also to make it potentially a little more feasible for future space pirates to steal cargo from freighters and have it be worthwhile.
Planetary credit reserves (the 25,000 credits a planet would use to buy cargo from you) have been eliminated. However, we felt that they served an important function, keeping cargo runners on a planet for a little while to introduce a little risk. Now, buying or selling cargo is an interruptible command like many of our skills, with the delay based on how much cargo you're exchanging.
When buying or selling cargo, you can now use "all" instead of an exact quantity to buy or sell the maximum amount of cargo your ship can handle. You can also use partial resource names, like tib instead of "tibanna gas".
Freeports no longer exempt you from cargo taxes, now only affecting whether a cargo permit is required. Buying or selling contraband does still exempt you from taxes.
We've updated the failure messages for buycontraband and sellcontraband, although there are probably more changes coming here soon so it might be early to update scripts.
If you use a cargo script, you'll want your script to use "all" instead of quantity numbers when buying or selling cargo. You'd just "sellcargo shipName resourceName all", then when that's done, "buycargo shipName resourceName all", then be on your way. Hopefully this simplifies them a bit. Otherwise, they should continue to work as-is.
Buying or selling resources will now raise or lower the planet's price for that resource, respectively. Effectively, this means that the longer you run the same cargo route, the less profitable it gets, and this is even faster if multiple people are running it. On the other hand, while a resource isn't being bought or sold, its price gradually drifts (over about 3 days currently) to its most profitable extreme.
This means there will be a benefit to learning a few routes and keeping an eye on the profits on each, and occasionally switching them up once your current route becomes less profitable than the others. You can also see how a price has been trending over time (and therefore get a sense for cargo activity over time) by doing showplanet resources . (Apologies to screenreader players, this is an ASCII chart and I had no idea how to make it accessible. If you've got suggestions for how to represent chart data in a screenreader-friendly way, let me know!)
We've also updated some commodities to have higher prices. This is meant to be a bit more thematic (spice should cost a lot more than water, for example) but also to make it potentially a little more feasible for future space pirates to steal cargo from freighters and have it be worthwhile.
Planetary credit reserves (the 25,000 credits a planet would use to buy cargo from you) have been eliminated. However, we felt that they served an important function, keeping cargo runners on a planet for a little while to introduce a little risk. Now, buying or selling cargo is an interruptible command like many of our skills, with the delay based on how much cargo you're exchanging.
When buying or selling cargo, you can now use "all" instead of an exact quantity to buy or sell the maximum amount of cargo your ship can handle. You can also use partial resource names, like tib instead of "tibanna gas".
Freeports no longer exempt you from cargo taxes, now only affecting whether a cargo permit is required. Buying or selling contraband does still exempt you from taxes.
We've updated the failure messages for buycontraband and sellcontraband, although there are probably more changes coming here soon so it might be early to update scripts.
If you use a cargo script, you'll want your script to use "all" instead of quantity numbers when buying or selling cargo. You'd just "sellcargo shipName resourceName all", then when that's done, "buycargo shipName resourceName all", then be on your way. Hopefully this simplifies them a bit. Otherwise, they should continue to work as-is.
