The Economy
How coins work on Blacklight: your four pots of money, printed cash, the payment cascade, selling, and every route a coin is allowed to take.
Where your money actually sits
Coins do not live in one place. You hold them in up to four separate pots, and several systems care about which pot a coin is in.
| Pot | What it is | Where it is held | Counted in your net worth |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wallet | Loose coins on your person. This is what most sinks charge and what most faucets pay into. | Your player record | Yes |
| Bank account | Deposited money at a bank. You have a home bank; the default one is the Ripe Iron Bank, a full reserve custodian. | Your player record, one file with the wallet | Yes |
| Savings | An interest bearing pot on top of a bank account. Interest is a conserved transfer out of bank equity, never freshly minted money. | Your player record | Yes |
| Notes | Printed cash as real items in your inventory. | Your inventory or any chest | No |
/money shows you all four figures for yourself. Looking up another player shows their wallet only. /baltop ranks by total wealth, meaning wallet plus every account plus savings; faction treasuries are excluded, because a treasury is not a pocket. Where the tax engine reads a "net worth", that is total wealth minus outstanding debt.
The distinction that matters day to day: /pay moves money between accounts, most purchases charge the wallet, and notes are the only pot you can physically hand to someone.
The measured money supply
The server keeps a figure called M, the total amount of money in existence. Most games increment such a counter every time money moves, which means it drifts the moment one code path forgets to report. Blacklight does the opposite: M is recounted, not incremented. On a periodic task (every 5 minutes by default) and on first access, the ledger walks the real balances and adds them up.
What is summed: every wallet, every bank account, every savings pot, every faction treasury and every company account. The admin event account is parked separately rather than folded in, so prize money waiting to be handed out does not read as circulation.
The trade off is honest and worth knowing. A recount cannot drift and cannot be duped, because it reads the same authoritative balances the game charges against. In exchange it is a snapshot: M is only as fresh as the last recount.
Notes sit outside measured M on purpose. Turning wallet money into notes lowers M, redeeming them raises it again, and neither records a mint or a burn. It is mattress money. What is guaranteed is that the round trip is exact to the cent, not that M holds still while your cash is in item form.
On top of the recount, every legal way for coins to move is a named, audited route. There are eleven of them, and each one records what it did.
| Route | What it does | Effect on M |
|---|---|---|
payout | Taxed income into a wallet: job pay, sales, exploration rewards, bounties, votes. | Mint |
grantTreasury | Income straight to a faction treasury with no individual earner, such as the faction income share. | Mint |
charge | A purchase whose base price parks in the admin event account rather than being destroyed. | Neutral, money parks |
burn | A personal sink: buff purchases, forge repair, listing fees, ruin searches, claim costs, NPC upkeep. | Burn |
burnTreasury | The same, paid out of a faction treasury. | Burn |
refund | A conserved reversal of an earlier burn: a search that found nothing, a cancelled teleport, a rolled back hire, an expired bounty. | Re-mint |
chargeToTreasury | Conserved rent from a wallet into a treasury, such as the teleporter owner's share. | Neutral |
saleTransfer | A regional shop sale as one transaction, with the owner faction's cut carved out of the groß exactly once. | Neutral |
marketTransfer | A market board purchase between players. The fee is burned; no faction tax applies. | Neutral minus the fee |
transfer | Account to account with tax. This is what /pay rides on. | Neutral |
transferTreasury | Treasury to treasury, used by faction stock trading. Never taxed, never minted. | Neutral |
Behind all of that sits a tripwire. Any attempt to write a raw balance from a place that is not on the allow list is caught by a caller check on the balance primitives themselves. It can run silently, warn, or refuse outright. Its purpose is to make it impossible for a future feature to quietly mint money by writing a number instead of calling a route.
Physical cash: the four denominations
You can turn account money into printed notes and carry them, store them in a chest, or hand them to another player. There are four denominations.
| Item | Worth | Base material | Role |
|---|---|---|---|
| Note block | 10,000 | Gold block | The large denomination |
| Note ingot | 1,000 | Gold ingot | The middle denomination |
| Note nugget | 100 | Gold nugget | The small denomination |
| Loose coin | The exact remainder | Iron nugget | Carries whatever the three fixed steps cannot express |
Minting. /bank note <amount|all> prints cash, and the ATM has a Notes screen with preset amounts if you would rather click than type. The amount is floored to the cent and broken into the fewest notes possible, with one loose coin carrying the exact remainder. The arithmetic is done in whole cents, so the notes you receive sum to exactly what left your wallet. Nothing is minted and nothing is lost in the conversion.
Redeeming. Right-click a note to redeem one. Sneak and right-click to redeem the whole stack. The note is destroyed before the wallet is credited, which is what makes it impossible to duplicate. You get an action bar confirmation, on Java and Bedrock alike.
The 10,000 note is built on a gold block, so it would normally be placeable. The interaction is cancelled precisely so it cannot be: a note you accidentally place would be a block in the world and its worth would be gone. A note in a chest is also never relabelled when the chest is opened, so the number written on it always matches what it will pay.
Two limits worth knowing before you press the button:
- A single mint is capped at 45 stacks of notes. If your request would exceed that, it is refused before your wallet is touched. The system never truncates and then debits.
- If the notes do not fit in your inventory, the overflow drops at your feet. It is never destroyed.
Notes of equal worth stack together. Notes of different worth do not, because the worth itself is the stacking discriminator.
The payment cascade
Most purchases charge your wallet. That used to mean a player with 200,000 in the bank and an empty wallet was refused at the till. The payment cascade fixes that without changing what any purchase costs.
The order is account, then wallet, then notes. When you buy something, the cascade first checks whether the total can be covered across all three, then moves whatever is needed into your wallet so the ordinary wallet charge succeeds. This is deliberately built as fund-then-charge rather than as a second payment path: every tax leg, every faction income leg and every ledger entry behaves exactly as it did before, because the actual charge is unchanged.
If any part of it fails, the whole thing unwinds and you are left exactly as you were. Affordability displays, such as the tick or cross on an NPC hire card or a bounty amount, ask the cascade rather than reading your wallet, so what the card promises is what the till will accept.
| Purchase | On the cascade |
|---|---|
/shop, the Admin Event Shop, chunk claim upgrades | Yes |
| Regional shop purchase, market board purchase, market listing fee | Yes |
| Bounty placement, personal buff purchase | Yes |
| Chunk claim (your personal share) and faction treasury deposit | Yes |
| NPC hire, manual NPC upkeep top up, builder materials | Yes |
| Teleporter fee (both legs under one reservation, so you cannot be half charged) | Yes |
| Forge repair and reforge, ruin search, company charter and listing, skill respec | Yes |
/pay | No. It is a bank wire by design and already draws from your account. |
| Automatic hourly NPC upkeep | No. It runs while you are offline, and reading notes out of an inventory needs you present. |
| Anything paid from a faction treasury | No. A treasury has no account and no notes. |
One rough edge is documented rather than hidden: bank commodity, bullion and vault charges are debited from the account directly and do not go through the cascade. If you want to buy metal at a bank counter, the money needs to be in the account.
Selling goods with sneak and right-click
Several goods sell straight out of your hand. Hold the stack, sneak and right-click. The items are removed first and only then is the money paid, which is the same anti duplication ordering the notes use.
The payment goes through the taxed income funnel, never a raw deposit. Two consequences follow. Your faction's tax applies to the sale, and any active income booster multiplies the groß before the tax is quoted, so the faction's cut scales with your boost rather than being calculated separately.
| Good | Default sell value | Gesture |
|---|---|---|
| Hemp leaf | 8 | Sneak and right-click sells the stack |
| Hemp fibre | 20 | Sneak and right-click sells the stack |
| Cannabis bud | 55 | Sneak and right-click sells the stack |
| Cured cannabis | 120 | Sneak and right-click sells the stack; a plain right-click still eats it |
| Rift Shard | 250 | Sneak and right-click sells the stack; a plain right-click consumes one for the combat buff |
| Relic Coin | Config value | Right-click sells the stack |
Two details that catch people out:
- If you have the Rift Hunter ability slotted, sneak and right-click with a Rift Shard triggers the ability instead of the sale. The ability wins, deliberately, and the sale does not also fire. A plain right-click to consume one shard still works; rebind the ability tool if the collision bothers you.
- Relic Coin sales of 10,000 or more are written to the audit log. Nothing is blocked, it is simply recorded.
These hand sales are the fastest route but not the only one. Any item at all can be listed on the market board or in a regional shop, and those carry their own fee structures.
What things are worth: the base value table
The server ships a table of 1,219 goods with a stored base value. It is the single reference for "what is this item worth" wherever a system needs a number that does not move with player pricing.
| Item | Base value |
|---|---|
| Glass pane | 0.23 |
| Oak planks | 0.55 |
| Stone bricks | 0.88 |
| Oak stairs | 0.91 |
| White carpet | 2.93 |
| Diamond | 100.0 |
These are not shop prices and you cannot sell a diamond for exactly 100 anywhere. The table is a valuation reference, and it is used for:
- What the builder NPC charges you per block of material
- What the Event Shop offers for a consignment
- The consumer price basket the inflation index is measured against
- Appraising what a grave or a destroyed stash was worth
- Measuring real output, so the economy's production figure is inflation independent by construction
A base value of zero means unmeasured, not free. An item missing from the table contributes nothing to the output measure and is skipped by the appraisers rather than treated as worthless. If you notice a good that should clearly be valued and is not, that is a real gap worth reporting.
Handing money to another player
There are two honest ways to move money to another person, and they are deliberately different in cost.
The bank wire
/pay <player> <amount> is an account to account transfer. It draws from your account, not your wallet, so money you are carrying loose has to be deposited first. You must be standing within 6 blocks of a registered ATM or Helpdesk, which is what makes a wire a thing you go somewhere to do. The ATM has a Pay button that hands you the command already typed.
The payer carries the whole cost. You pay the amount plus the bank's flat pay fee plus your own faction's tax, and the recipient receives the full amount with nothing deducted. The fee defaults to 10 coins and is capped at 1,000; it goes to the paying bank's capital, which is how a bank earns from real activity. The tax goes to your faction's treasury, not the recipient's.
If you cannot cover amount plus fee plus tax, the transfer is refused outright and tells you the exact shortfall. There is no partial pay. An offline recipient is supported: their account is credited and they see it next time they check.
Cash in hand
Mint notes with /bank note and hand them over. This is the only fee-free way to give money to another player, and it is untaxed too. There is no distance requirement, no proximity to a bank, and no record of who handed what to whom.
| Route | Fee | Faction tax | Needs a bank nearby | Works while the other player is offline |
|---|---|---|---|---|
/pay | Flat pay fee, 10 by default | Yes, payer's faction | Yes, within 6 blocks | Yes |
| Cash notes | None | None | Only to mint them | No, you have to hand them over |
| Market board | 5 percent, reducible to 1 to 4 percent by buffs, plus a listing fee | None, it is player to player | No | Yes |
| Regional shop | The owner faction's shop tax, capped at 50 percent | Seller side, carved from the groß | No | Yes |
That split is the design, not an oversight. Banking is convenient, auditable and costs a little; cash is free, private and has to be carried.
Earning, spending and where to read next
For a sense of scale: a mid-game player at Expert or Master rank earns roughly 15,000 to 40,000 coins per hour of focused job play. A fresh Apprentice earns about 5,000 to 10,000 per hour. Fixed prices are set against a rough 25,000 per hour reference, so a price tag doubles as a time-to-afford estimate.
| Fixed purchase | Price |
|---|---|
| Chunk reveal token | 1,500 |
| Faction home scroll | 10,000 |
| Particle effect | 12,000 |
| Faction chunk upgrade, tiers 1 to 3 | 15,000 / 35,000 / 70,000 |
| Nametag colour | 25,000 |
| Custom death message | 25,000 |
| Faction rename voucher | 75,000 |
Every one of those labels is generated from the same number the till charges, so the price you read is the price you pay, tax included.
The income booster ladder deserves a word, because it changes direction halfway up. Levels 1 to 5 pay for themselves if you actually play the hours you bought; levels 6 to 10 cost more than they can return and are a prestige sink by design. Level 10 costs roughly 193 percent of what it can earn back.
Much of the banking, taxation and market machinery described here is recent and is marked in the project's own notes as code-written and not yet server-verified. Numbers and behaviour can still shift as it gets exercised on the live server.
- Banking for accounts, savings, loans, ATMs and helpdesks.
- Taxes for how a faction sets flat, progressive or rule-based rates and who they fall on.
- Markets for the market board, regional shops and the fee structures each one carries.
- Boosters for the full ladder and what each effect multiplies.
- Jobs for where the coins come from in the first place, across all 15 professions.