The Market
The Market is entirely player-driven — there is no NPC market-maker anywhere, and it can never mint resources out of nowhere. Every price on the board was set by a real player, and every accepted trade spawns real freighters that fly real distance.
Posting & Accepting Offers
The Commodities Exchange(once a colony has built one) lets you post a peer-to-peer trade offer: name what you're giving, what you want back, and the resources you're giving are escrowed — physically removed from your stock the instant you post, so every open offer on the board is guaranteed real and deliverable. Anyone can accept an open offer, naming which of their own colonies pays.
Accepted trades don't teleport resources — they spawn two real freighter fleets (goods one way, payment the other), each flying at a fixed freighter speed over the real map distance between the two colonies. Distance genuinely matters, so nearby, active trading partners naturally form regional markets. Market trades mint zero season points — points measure development, and awarding them for a pure transfer would let two colluding accounts pump their rank for free.
The Floating Exchange Index
Prices aren't fixed forever. A live Exchange Indexstrip shows, per resource, how the galaxy's recent trading has priced it: a resource the market keeps paying a premium for reads scarce (its index climbs toward a hard ceiling), while its counterpart reads abundant (its index falls toward a hard floor) — and the legally allowed offer range shifts with them, so a trade ratio rejected yesterday can be perfectly legal today.
If nobody trades at all, the index sits at exact parity — a quiet market behaves exactly as if this system didn't exist. Every offer still has to fall inside a bounded band around fair value no matter how the index drifts, so there's no way to legally construct an absurd “1 ration for 100,000 isotopes” trade — the deliberate anti-alt-feeding lock underneath the whole system.
The Freight Levy
Every shipment leg burns a small percentage of the goods in transit — what you post is exactly what leaves escrow, but what arrives is slightly less. A Trade Port building shaves a little off this fee per level, and the Trade Hub charter shaves more on its own trades.
The fee also does quiet anti-abuse work: any attempt to artificially pump the exchange index (two colluding accounts trading back and forth to move a price) burns real resources on every round trip, so manipulation is expensive by construction, not just capped by a rule.
Escrowed Goods Can Still Be Plundered
One edge worth knowing: resources sitting in an open market offer are still physically warehoused at your colony, and are lootable in a raid exactly like anything else in your stock.
Posting your stockpile as a market offer during an incoming attack does notprotect it — the goods are still at home, still in range of the raid. Use an Emergency Shield, not the order book, when you're under threat.