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Shares, Dividends and Bullion

Buying shares in factions and companies, how a price and a dividend are worked out, and the metal market behind it: spot, spread, bars and the vault.

The market, and who issues shares

Two kinds of issuer can sell equity in themselves: factions and companies. They are separate systems with separate books, but they are listed side by side on one market screen, so you shop for both in the same place.

Open it from a Helpdesk terminal, or type /bank and use the Stock Market door. The market is deliberately absent from ATMs, which carry cash operations only. Buying never requires you to type an issuer's name, which is what made retail investing impossible for Bedrock players before the screen existed.

What the market screen gives you

• 21 cards per page, with a filter cycler for All, Factions or Companies, and a sort cycler for market cap, price, yield or name.
• Each card shows the price, the yield per real day, how many shares are available and the size of your own position.
• Company cards additionally show their state and whether the listing is open, because a company can be insolvent in a way a faction cannot, and an owner can close a listing to outsiders.

The detail screen

Clicking a card opens the fundamentals panel: price, fair value, book per share, earnings per share, yield, shares outstanding against total shares, market cap, the issuer's treasury, stability and confidence. Under that sit a buy row and a sell row with presets of 1, 10, 100 and Max, plus a custom entry driven by a plus and minus stepper. Every button shows the live cost of that order, and when you cannot afford it, the exact shortfall.

Elder rank and above get a toggle between acting as yourself and acting for the faction treasury. It defaults to self. Whichever you pick, a share trade made as yourself is charged to your home bank account, not to the terminal you happen to be standing at.

If you prefer typing, /bank stocks carries the same operations: buy, sell, portfolio, buyback, delist, plus --self and --faction on the trade verbs. Listing the market works without a faction; only the operations that genuinely need one are gated.

What a share is worth

An issuer does not name a price and hope. The price is the fair value, derived fresh every time it is read from what the issuer owns and what it earns. There is a stored number recording what the price last was, but nothing prices off it.

Fair value is the larger of two arms, floored at 1 coin:

• Book per share. Net worth divided by total shares.
• The blend. Book weighted, plus earnings per share multiplied by an earnings multiple and weighted. For companies the shipped numbers are a book weight of 0.5 and an earnings multiple of 12.

Net worth is measured differently for each instrument, and both can be checked from the detail card.

A company's own outstanding shares are deliberately not counted as one of its assets. Equity is a claim on the balance sheet, so counting it would make the price depend on itself.

Buying moves the price, and a round trip always loses

The divisor in every valuation is total shares, which no trade moves, while the money paid lands in the issuer's pot. So buying raises the price and selling lowers it. Your order is quoted at the price the issuer will carry after your trade settles, not at the resting price. That is what closes the obvious exploit: buy a block of shares, watch the price rise, sell the same block straight back. Under a resting quote that was a repeatable profit. Under the settled quote, a buy followed by a sell returns less than you paid and a sell followed by a buy costs more than you received, at every order size.

Why a hoarder is worth little

Earning power comes from measured activity, never from the size of the pile. A faction sitting on an enormous treasury with no production, no tax revenue and no bank business has an earnings term of zero, so its blend arm collapses to the book arm and it pays no dividend at all. The number that would flatter it, the treasury balance, is not an input to earnings anywhere.

Dividends: measured, capped and taxed

A dividend is paid out of what the issuer actually earned, and it can never exceed what the issuer actually holds.

The faction pool

The pool is the dividend policy percentage, multiplied by earnings per day, multiplied by the elapsed days since the last run, multiplied by a confidence factor built from the faction's stability and market confidence. The result is capped at the treasury by construction, and the treasury is re-read for every holder as the payout loop drains it. Nothing is minted; every coin paid leaves the issuer.

Earnings per day is a weighted sum of three measured streams, floored at zero:

Two things that look like income are deliberately excluded. Repaid loan principal is your own money coming back, not a profit. The groß of an asset sale, such as metal leaving a bank shelf, is not earnings either, because the shelf was already counted as worth that much. Both were once booked as earnings, and both quietly inflated the dividend and the share price until the routes were inverted to an explicit opt-in list.

Companies

A company's pool is its dividend policy multiplied by earnings per day and elapsed days, capped at what it can withdraw after wages. Wages come first, always. The policy itself is capped at 50 percent.

How it reaches you

• The payout job runs roughly every 10 minutes, but every rate in it is expressed per real day, so the interval does not change what you earn. Downtime is caught up in steps of at most one day, up to a 72 hour limit.
• Small claims accrue as a fractional carry and pay out in whole cents. It never rounds up, and no treasury is debited while your claim is still under a cent, so nothing is burned by waiting.
• If you have no bank account, you are skipped, not charged. The issuer is never debited for a payment it cannot deliver, your carry survives, and opening an account later collects everything that accrued.

Tax

Dividends are income, and are taxed to your own faction at your faction's income rate, with the income tax reduction buff applying. If you have no faction, there is nobody to tax you and you keep the groß. Faction to faction dividends move treasury to treasury and are untaxed.

Buying and selling shares are untaxed. Buying is an exchange of coins for an asset of the same value, so nothing was earned. Sale proceeds return capital you already owned, and taxing them would tax the same coins twice.

Shares are your private property

Your holdings sit in your own player record beside your wallet, your accounts and your savings. They belong to you, not to whatever faction you happen to be in this week.

• Joining, leaving or being kicked from a faction never touches them. There is no confiscation step anywhere in the membership code.
• You may hold shares in a rival faction. That is a feature, not an oversight. Nothing checks who you are aligned with before it lets you buy.
• A closed listing is a freeze, not a seizure. A company owner can restrict new purchases to their own faction. Existing outside holders keep every share and may still sell back at any time, so you are never trapped in a position.

Shares are property, not money. They are never counted in the money supply. What is asserted instead is that shares outstanding always equals the sum of every faction holding plus every player holding, and that total is recounted from scratch at every server boot, because nothing else recounts it the way coins are recounted.

When an issuer goes away

If a faction disbands, its buyback runs first: every holder is paid at the current price, largest holder first, capped by what the treasury can actually cover. Whatever the treasury cannot pay is written off, and shares outstanding is decremented as it goes so the conservation check holds at every instant. Faction holders are notified, and online player holders get a message pointing at /bank stocks.

Where your shares show up

Counting shares in net worth matters for a reason that is easy to miss: without it, a player who converted their balance into equity would look poor, and could shrink their apparent wealth on demand.

The portfolio screen

The Portfolio is the counterpart to the market: what you own rather than what is for sale. Reach it from /bank or from the Account screen at a Helpdesk.

Each position shows the number of shares, the average price you paid, the current value at today's price, the unrealised profit or loss between those two, and the dividends that position has paid you so far. Faction positions and company positions are listed with a subtotal each and a grand total under both, and the list is paginated once it outgrows a page.

Elder rank and above get a second tab showing the faction's own holdings, which are a separate book from yours.

What the wealth board counts

Your ranking wealth on /baltop is your wallet, your bank accounts, your savings, your faction shares, your company shares and your vaulted metal valued at spot. Your net worth is that figure minus your debt, so the ranking number and the solvency number cannot drift apart.

Two things are excluded, and the board says so in its header: physical money notes and loose bullion bars held as items. This is not a judgement about whether they are wealth. An offline player's inventory cannot be read, so any figure including them would be wrong for exactly the players who are not logged in, and the board would reshuffle as people came and went. The vault in the next sections exists to solve that: it is the countable form of the same metal.

Commodities: eleven metals, one world price

Eleven materials are tradable commodities. The set is not a hand-typed list; it is exactly the set of metals the bank already mints separate stock keeping units and separate prices for, which is why it cannot quietly drift out of step with the shelf.

One spot, many spreads

The spot price is server-wide. It is built from a reference value, a discovery term reading what is actually being bought and sold, a monetary term and a hedge term, and it never reads a local price level. So gold is worth the same at every bank on the server. What differs from bank to bank is only the dealer's spread, the margin the owner takes for standing behind the counter.

The card states those two separately, which is the whole point: you see the world price and you see the markup this particular bank is charging on top of it, rather than one blended number you cannot check. The ask is the spot plus the spread, the bid is the spot minus the same spread, and the default spread is 10 percent. A buy followed immediately by a sell therefore costs you exactly twice the spread, and can never be a way to make money.

What moves the spot

• Discovery. Aggregate stock across every bank's shelves against metered trading volume. A quiet market drifts back toward neutral.
• The monetary term. Measured from the money supply against a moving anchor, so metal rises while inflation is accelerating and settles as the anchor catches up. The anchor converges over a 30 day half life, the index over 3 days, and the result is clamped to a band of 0.25 to 8.0.
• The hedge term. Scaled by the sensitivity in the table above, so gold moves roughly seven times as far as copper on the same loss of confidence.
• A circuit breaker. The final index may move at most 8 percent per minute in either direction. This is a limit on rate, not on volume, so a thousand trades inside one minute still buy only one minute of movement. A genuine shock is not suppressed, it is spread over minutes.

Selling metal back

A bank may buy metal from you if its owner has enabled sells, and each bank has a daily buyback budget, 100,000 coins by default. Every possible refusal, meaning no account, no price, the owner's toggle, the budget, the bank's solvency and whether you actually hold the items, is checked before the first item is taken. On the way through, your items are removed first and the account is credited second, so a failure cannot leave you paid for metal you still hold. Proceeds are untaxed: selling an asset returns capital you already owned.

Bullion: bars that remember where they came from

Bullion is metal in stamped, denominated form. Six families exist: gold, diamond, emerald, netherite, iron and copper. You buy bars from a bank's shelf, or you bring your own metal to the assay desk and have it stamped.

Every bar carries, in its item data, the number of units it is worth, its base metal, the bank that issued it, the day it was minted, a batch serial and, when the metal had one, its origin region. Bars come in denominations of 1, 8, 16, 32 and 64 units, and each denomination button buys one bar.

Minting your own metal

The assay desk consumes raw metal and hands back bars whose units sum to exactly what was taken. There is no yield roll, no loss and no bonus. What you pay for is the service: an assay fee of 2 percent, with a floor of 50 coins, charged to your account and scaled by your zone's price level the same way every other bank fee is. The fee goes to the bank's capital rather than being burned.

Metal from two different regions produces two batches, never one blended batch. Blending would let you upgrade cheap metal's provenance for free, and the whole point of the stamp is that it cannot be laundered. The bank's own shelf is not touched by a stamping: the metal never became the bank's, it was only relabelled.

Stacking, and the cost of provenance

A bar's serial is constant across a batch of issuing bank, mint day and region. Bars of the same region from the same bank on the same day stack normally. Bars from different regions do not stack, and that is the feature rather than a bug: a Sakura bar must not merge into a Volcanic one. The cost is real and worth knowing before you go prospecting in four biomes: you will carry four stacks of gold bars where you used to carry one.

A bar minted before regions existed carries no region at all, redeems at its units for ever, and still stacks with new plain bars. Nothing you already hold was split or bricked by the change.

Redeeming

Right-click a bar to redeem one; sneak and right-click to redeem the whole stack. Redeeming is item for item with no coins involved and no minting anywhere, so minting metal and immediately redeeming it leaves the money supply exactly as it was. You get back the good the bar records, carrying a stamp byte for byte identical to freshly mined metal of that region, so the two stack together.

Goods, their own markets, and the vault

Metal is not priced by material alone. A good is the combination of the base material, the alloy definition if it is an alloy, and the ore region profile if it carries one. Plain gold, gold from the Sakura Grove, an Ancient Composite ingot and a regional Ancient Composite ingot are four different goods, and the bank treats them as four different things.

Each stored row carries its own description with it, which is what stops a good quietly changing meaning if the underlying region is retuned later. Buying, selling, stocking a shelf and using the vault all read the same identity, so provenance survives every one of those steps.

Thin markets, and the blend line

Hundreds of shallow markets would be easy to push around, so a variant does not price entirely on its own thin volume straight away. Its price blends between its base material's market and its own, weighted by how much the variant itself has traded, reaching full independence at 128 units per day of two-sided volume. One-sided volume does not count, because otherwise you could earn a variant its own market by trading with yourself in one direction. The card tells you which side of that blend the number you are looking at came from, so a price that is really the base metal's price does not present itself as a discovered one.

The vault

The vault is the bank's metal store for you, counted in units, never coins. Depositing and withdrawing move no money at all; the money supply does not see a vault operation. There is no daily storage fee.

What the vault buys you is that your metal becomes countable. Loose bars in your inventory are excluded from the wealth board because an offline player's chest cannot be read; vaulted metal is counted, valued at each good's own price. Everything is per good, so the vault knows the difference between your Sakura gold and your plain gold and never hands you back the wrong one.

When a bank has to take metal from you, it takes the cheapest good first by default, so it never reaches for your scarce metal just because it happened to sit further left in your inventory. A good with no price sorts last, never first: cheapest must not come to mean "the one we cannot value".

How current this page is

The investment side of the bank is among the newest work on the server. Large parts of it, including the per-good markets, the earnings rewrite behind dividends, the metal vault and the regional bullion stamp, are written and reviewed but have not yet been verified on a running server. Numbers on this page are read out of the shipped behaviour rather than out of a play session.

Two consequences you may notice in practice:

• Prices and yields are derived when they are read, so two people looking at the same card a minute apart can legitimately see different numbers. The screens repaint live rather than showing you a stale figure.
• Where a screen quotes a price for an order, that quote is the one the trade will settle at. If a label and a charge ever disagree, that is a defect worth reporting rather than an intended fee.

Server addresses: Java at blacklight-network.de, Bedrock at blacklight-network.de on port 19132. The server runs Paper 26.1.2.