Being the madman that I am, I’ve looked into the economy of the server a little bit, and I’ll be producing more of these reports. I’ve based my calculations on what I believe to be the three main shops/traders on the server (Iamthereaper89 at /warp shop, Bislo1 at /warp trade and saraphim7 at /warp market). If you believe that I should include another shop or trader in my next report, please let me know!

Introduction

I have based the value of each shop on four broad categories: Wood, minerals, food and miscellaneous. I have been to each shop individually, and calculated how much one of each material would cost (for example, 32 logs were sold for £x, I would divide x by 32 to get my value). I will analyse each category per shop, as well as each shop overall, and provide my opinion on where the best place out of the three aforementioned shops would be best to shop given the current state of the economy.

Wood

Potentially one of the more interesting things about the price of wood is that only Reaper varies the price, dependent on the type of wood he sells. He deems the most valuable woods to be oak, dark oak and jungle, all of which will cost you £0.203125 per log from /warp shop. He places spruce in the middle, with a value of £0.171875 per log, with birch and acacia being what he deems to be the cheapest woods, each costing £0.15625 per log. I find this interesting personally, as I would expect acacia wood to have a similar, if not higher value than jungle wood, since it is only found in savannah biomes, and the trees themselves are smaller than the jungle trees which have a trunk of four blocks.

Saraphim7 sells each piece of wood for £0.25 per log, making his price above reaper’s for even the most expensive types of wood, though Bislo1’s prices are lower than reaper’s cheapest wood, sold at £0.125 each per log at /warp trade. This leads the highest average value of wood, according to the three shops at £0.192708 per log (for oak, dark oak and jungle) and a lowest average value of £0.177083 (for birch and acacia). This leaves a small percentage difference of 0.73% between the highest and lowest average values for wood, which to me, suggests that the price of wood is, and is likely to remain stable, at about £0.15-£0.20 per log.

Minerals

In this section, I looked at coal, iron, gold, lapis, redstone and diamonds. The results of this section were relatively surprising, as the shop owners very clearly offer different prices for the goods. The most expensive coal is provided by saraphim7 for £0.50 per piece, and the cheapest by reaper, for only £0.078125 per piece. This is a difference of approximately sevenfold, which suggests that there may not be a stable price for minerals on the server, however both Bislo1 and saraphim7 offer the exact same price of £2 per iron ingot on the server, as opposed to reaper’s £7. Saraphim7 and reaper seem to have similar views about the price of gold two, a difference of only £0.50 in each other’s pricing (saraphim7 sells gold ingots for £8, reaper for £8.50).

Perhaps interestingly, average prices on the server seem to suggest that approximately one iron block is worth one diamond, and you could also in theory trade a diamond for fewer than four gold ingots. Bislo1 offers the cheapest prices in terms of minerals, as well as in terms of wood. This may suggest that his sales in those areas are not high, and that he’s trying to drive demand.

Food

Out of the three food items examined, the cheapest would appear to be a potato, though it should be kept in mind that the potatoes considered were not baked, and if the cost of coal were to be taken into account, carrots would be cheaper. Bislo1 makes up here in prices what he’s failed to do in the previous two areas, offering the most expensive overall food prices in terms of carrots, potatoes and bread. Meat was not examined as not all three shops were selling it, and it would therefore be unfair to compare the shops on those prices.

Bislo1’s price for bread is just under double that of reaper’s and saraphim7’s, who both offer bread for £0.30 per loaf, as opposed to Bislo1’s £0.50. Reaper, overall, offers the lowest prices for food, his potatoes costing less than half of those of Bislo1 and saraphim7, at £0.09375 for one potato, as opposed to £0.20 offered by both saraphim7 and Bislo1.

Miscellaneous

I picked two items for this section, one which I would expect to be quite valuable, and one block that I would deem essential on the server. The item I deemed to be the expensive one for this report was the slimeball. Prices for the slime ball were consistent across the board, reaper offering them for £7.50, and both Bislo1 and saraphim7 offering them for £8, leading to an average slimeball price on the server of £7.83333.

The “essential” item used in this report was stone brick, a commonly used block on the server, as it provides the player with the ability to make siege-proof bases. Again, perhaps surprisingly, prices varied very little on this item, a difference of less than £0.55 between the cheapest, offered by reaper at £0.1328125 per block, and the most expensive, offered by Bislo1 at £0.1875 per block.

Conclusion

In order to reach my conclusion as to which I believe is currently the most appropriate shop to use, I have calculated the average of the averages of all of the items, as well as the average price of all the items offered by each shop. If we use the average of averages (£3.00046 per item) as a baseline, it quickly becomes clear whose shop is currently most in-line with the value of the economy today. Reaper average shop price was significantly higher than the average of averages, at £3.86829004 per item, and Bislo1’s was a fair bit lower, resting at £2.279412 per item.

If I were to advise you as to which shop is currently the most economically aligned, I would suggest that you shop at saraphim7’s shop, which offers an average price per item of £2.853676 out of the items looked at. This is 2.049% (to three significant figures) out from the average of averages.

So, I hope you all enjoyed that 🙂 – I know I enjoyed researching and producing it (no, saraphim7 did not pay me to advertise his shop)! I will be producing more of these, and I’m open to any suggestions as to anything I could do to improve!