Trade Data

You can always see the prices at the station you’re docked at — you’re standing in it. Seeing prices anywhere ELSE is a service you subscribe to, and there’s exactly one company selling it.

The monopoly

Every trade terminal in the galaxy runs the same commercial software, owned by a single outfit. Their whole business is distance: the further away you want to read a market, the higher the tier you pay for. Dock at any Trade station and the MARKET slot shows what your current interface can see and what the next tier up would cost — the price sheet is the same everywhere, because it’s the same company everywhere.

The reach is measured in starlane hops from wherever you are — the same jumps the autopilot counts when it plots you a route:

• None — no subscription. Only your current system’s markets.
• Local — everything one hop away (the systems your lanes connect to).
• Regional — out several hops, a whole neighbourhood of systems.
• Galaxy — every system the lane network reaches, however far.

A system with no working lane to you — somewhere you can only reach by folding — is off the network entirely. No tier shows its prices; that’s part of why goods from a fold-only system are worth chasing. Nobody can price what nobody can see.

The cracked client

There’s another option, and it isn’t sold by the monopoly. Somewhere shadier you can pick up a pirated trade client — free, and it ignores the range limits completely: it’ll read markets clear across the galaxy. The catch is it’s incomplete. It only ever cracked SOME of the commodity feeds, so half your price rows come up as ??? — you can see far, but not everything.

That’s the real early choice: pay the monopoly for a narrow view that’s complete as far as it reaches, or run the cracked client for a galaxy-wide view full of holes. And running unlicensed software isn’t free of consequence — militia and civilian authorities take a dim view of it if they ever catch you with it installed.

Reading the market slot

At a Trade station the MARKET section lists every station within your tier’s range, nearest first, with the danger tier of its system and how many hops away it is. Under each station are its commodity prices — the same danger-and-supply prices you’d sell into if you hauled your cargo there (see Trading). A pirated feed shows the same layout with the gaps it can’t read blanked out. Use it to decide where a full hold is worth carrying before you burn the fuel to get there.