Trading

A full hold is worth nothing until you’re docked and someone’s buying. Selling is the last step of every mine and every salvage run — the moment the risk you carried actually turns into credits.

Selling at a station

Dock, open the shop slot, and every commodity you’re carrying shows up as its own row: name, quantity, unit price, and the credits it’s worth right here, right now. Sell one stack at a time or hit SELL ALL to empty the hold in one pass. Either way the credits land in your wallet immediately and the cargo’s gone — there’s no partial haggling, no waiting for a buyer.

The port doesn’t stop for you, either. The world keeps running while you’re docked — drones land their deliveries, the station hold ticks up under your DEPOSIT button, and the hauler you just undercut is still inbound. You’re parked inside the station’s shield dome, not frozen in time; press Esc or DEPART and you’re flying again where you left off.

Selling isn’t the only way out of the hold

At any station that keeps a hold of its own, each cargo row carries a DEPOSIT button as well as SELL. Depositing hands the goods over instead of selling them — the same act as one of that station’s own haulers arriving with a load, and the way you feed a refinery its raw material. No credits change hands.

A trade station is the one place that won’t take it. It buys, it doesn’t warehouse. See Refining for what the receiving station does with it after.

Paying to get patched up

The dock sells you something else, too. REPAIR puts hull and armor back, and it is priced by the point: one credit for every point of damage the yard has to undo. Nothing is missing, nothing is charged — the button tells you the bill before you press it, so a scratch costs a rounding error and a bad fight costs real money.

Shields are not on the bill. They come back on their own wherever you are, and no yard is going to charge you for waiting.

Where you dock changes the rate. A shipyard does it for nothing — the yards that build hulls do not nickel you for mending one. A defense platform charges double; the militia is doing you a favour between patrols and it prices like it. Everywhere else is the flat one-for-one.

When you can’t cover it

You get what you can pay for. Hand over a purse that doesn’t cover the whole job and the yard patches as far as your credits reach and stops — armor plate first, then the frame under it, same order a Repair Bot works in. You leave lighter and still dented, which beats leaving dented and broke.

It is never free and it never runs you into debt. Whatever you spent, you bought that many points; the rest is still waiting for you when you can afford it. Limp to a shipyard instead if there’s one in reach — that trip costs fuel and nothing else.

What a station is asking for

Dock anywhere that’s short of something and the panel shows WANTED HERE: what it needs, how much, and what it’ll pay a unit. That’s a standing order, not a mood — it sits there until somebody fills it, so a station that put the call out while every hauler was busy is still asking when you arrive.

Filling one isn’t the same as depositing. A deposit is a gift into their hold; filling an order is a sale at a price the shortage itself set. The scarcer the thing, the better it pays — up to about triple what the same cargo fetches somewhere comfortable.

Which is the real reason to read the chart for trouble. A refinery cut off from its ore, a cluster whose cell works went quiet — those are stations paying over the odds for exactly what they can’t get, and the run nobody else wants to make is the one worth making.

Their own people move goods between themselves for nothing, so you’re not competing with a faction’s internal haulage on price. You’re the one they call when their own supply can’t reach.

An order outranks the corner store at the exporter’s end too. A station sitting on stock somebody has asked for holds its own market runs until the answering hauler has loaded and gone — no dumping the goods at the local exchange out from under a neighbour who posted for them. And a hauler that arrives at the pad to find the stock already sold doesn’t fly the crossing empty; it stands down and the station picks again when there’s something to carry.

Why the same cargo pays differently everywhere

Every commodity has a base worth, but no two stations pay it out the same. Two things skew the price:

• How dangerous the system is. Selling in a system pirates actually patrol pays better than selling in a system that’s never seen a raid — the extra credits are what made hauling it here worth the risk in the first place. Safe systems pay baseline; frontier systems pay more; the deadliest systems pay the most.
• What the station already has. Some stations run a standing markup or markdown on top of the danger skew, station by station — the same hold of Ferrite is never worth chasing the same price twice.

Stack a dangerous system and a hungry station and the same cargo that barely covered fuel back home suddenly pays for the whole run.

Reading the flow on the chart

The galaxy chart has two reads of the same picture. Open the map and press L — or hit the LENS chip on the selection panel — and NAV swaps to ECON. Nothing else moves: the same systems, the same lanes, the same selection you had. Only what the chart is telling you changes.

In ECON, each system’s dot is colored by what its markets are paying:

• Orange — they pay OVER the odds here. Somebody is short of something. This is where a full hold turns into credits.
• Green — cheap. Goods are sitting around and nobody is bidding. This is where you buy, or where you don’t bother selling.
• Plain grey — nothing much either way.

The stronger the color, the steeper the skew, so a starving system reads across the whole chart at a glance instead of needing a table.

Around each dot is a stock arc — how much cargo that system is actually holding, measured against the fullest system you can see. A system burning orange with almost no arc is short and empty: the run worth making. Orange with a fat arc is a system that pays well and is already stocked.

The moving dots on the lanes are shipments in flight — cargo already crossing between two systems, riding the same lane curve a ship flies. The line runs orange where the goods are leaving and purple where they’re arriving, so direction reads without an arrow. Watch them for a minute and you can see who supplies whom — and where a route already has competition.

How far the lens can see

The chart is not a telescope. Every one of those readings comes from your trade-data interface, so it stops exactly where your subscription does (see Trade Data). Systems past your range still chart — they exist, and navigation never cared what you can afford — but they draw dim and undressed: no tint, no arc, no shipments. The footer says it plainly: your tier, and how many systems it currently reaches.

Two consequences worth knowing. A shipment only shows when BOTH its ends are in range — watching cargo leave is market data too. And on the cracked pirated client the crossings still show, but the manifests come up unnamed for every commodity feed it never broke: you can see the hulls moving, not what’s in them.

The math, if you want it

Selling one commodity pays base worth x quantity x station skew, where the station skew is the danger multiplier times whatever local markup that station is running. Sell everything at once and it’s just that sum across your whole hold — there’s no bonus or penalty for bulk, only for where you chose to sell it.