Chapter 06 · The MarketFM 93-07

The Market

Money in Knox County is an item you can drop, steal, and tax. The stall is a prop. The shop is a ledger Net Control keeps.

// FROM THE FILES — NET CONTROL COMMERCE

Handshake deals got people killed on 29 before the Network had a name. A crate on a porch said twelve when the other man saw zero. We do not do crates. You stock, the books take it. They buy, the books hand them a fresh item. The till is a number the street never sees.

Why the crate is a lie

A box you can loot is how a county’s money dies: mid-deal theft, two people counting different piles, a porch that says full when it is empty. RZSN vendors do not hold items. When you stock, Net Control takes the real thing out of your pack and writes a line. When someone buys, a fresh item is issued into theirs. The till is private. The tax is not.

Operator’s note Default currency is cash — the bills the county already used. Hosts may point the till at anything they can count: shells, a scrip, a rumour. Prices are whole numbers. If you cannot count it on your fingers in tens, it is not a legal price.

Opening a stall

Be a member with vendor / build rights inside a settlement.
Craft a Vendor Kit (planks, nails, sheet, pen).
Right-click → Place Vendor Stall… Green/red preview, same as a claim. Name it.
Open Manage Vendor. Add sell listings (you are selling) and buy listings (you will pay for incoming goods). Stock, unstock, set price, fund the till, withdraw the till — including withdraw-all, so you never have to type the balance.

Removing a stall requires the stock and till already empty. Disbanding a settlement refuses while vendors remain. This is on purpose.

Shopping

Stand close. Open Shop. Each row is honest: item, stock, price, and the tax you will actually pay on the whole order — floored on the order, not faked per unit. The status line while a command is in flight says Working, not silence.

If the button is dead	It means
Need vendor owner	You are not the stall’s owner. Stock and till are not a community chest.
Need build rights	The claim does not consider you staff.
No funds / no stock	The books counted. You or the ledger came up short. Nothing moved.

Tax

A cut of every trade inside a settlement is skimmed into the settlement treasury, not the stall till — how much is this county’s standing order. Owners withdraw from the treasury in the settlement window. Haggler and Silver Tongue lower your personal vendor tax. Easy Mark raises it. Commerce skill is the long game: the more you know what things are worth, the less the Network keeps.

Appraise is on the inventory context menu. It tells you the best offer currently listed, or that nobody is buying. It is a newspaper, not a promise.

Caution NPC traders are real vendor records. They appear inside existing settlements; on a world with no claims, no trader arrives. Standing with a faction moves their prices. Shooting the shopkeeper closes the shop.

A market that is also a town

The winning stall is not the one with the rarest gun. It is the one that buys scrap, sells ammo, and is still stocked at 3 a.m. because an Ammunition Technician lives upstairs. Pair a Shopkeeper with a Scrapper and a Gunsmith and you have a reason for strangers to cross your border without raiding it.

Supply contracts (Chapter 07) are the other half of this sentence: a settlement posts demand at a premium, and everyone who sells into the depot shares the pool. Your stall is the everyday. The contract is the harvest.