Why can’t I find goods on the market?
Posted in goods, strategyIt often comes as a surprise to new players when the goods they need for a particular factory suddenly disappear from the market. Market shortages are very much a part of Tycoon Online, so it is good to understand how the market works, why shortages happen, and how to react to them.
First, the very basics. The Market is a place in the game where players buy and sell goods. Goods do not “spawn” on the market — they only appear when another player, or the bank, puts them there.
If a player puts his goods directly on the market, they will become available for purchase in 60-90 minutes. (Apparently the imaginary people who run the market are not terribly fast when it comes to processing incoming goods.) If a player sells his goods to the bank, the bank will turn around and put them on the market, with the same 60-90 minute delay. (There is one other way the bank puts goods on the market: when a company goes bankrupt, the contents of its warehouse are placed on the market by the bank.)
The random delay has 1-second precision, meaning goods could appear on the market at any second. This is important to understand when you are trying to purchase goods that are in short supply.
Shortages typically appear when purchasing a good is very lucrative. For example, if wheat has a price of 5 iKr, and flour has a price of 25 iKr, you can expect wheat to be in short supply. It takes two units of wheat to make one unit of flour, so it costs only 10 iKr to buy the raw materials to produce a 25 iKr good. That’s a markup of 15 iKr, or 150%.
So how do you deal with a market shortage? The short answer is to keep clicking. Goods can show up at any time, but when there is a shortage, they will typically be bought up in mere seconds. (Look at the trends pages, specifically “Sales on the market”, and you will see that your goods are in fact being sold on the market, even if you haven’t been able to find them.) Long term, you will probably want to build factories to produce the goods yourself, or get rid of your factories that require hard-to-get materials.
