published on August 10, 2026 in devlog
In this week's devlog Michi talks about the dynamic market maker rollout and base establishment fees, and shares a first draft of the shipping route feature.
Michi (molp)
I have written a lot about inflation and dynamic market makers over the last few weeks, and this week it was finally time to let them loose. All market makers that are based on a closed bracket, meaning they have a standing ask and bid order, are now adjusted dynamically based on the price development of the last 10 days. I described the concept in more detail in devlog #538, if you're interested in finding out more. So far we haven't encountered any major problems — there was just a small rounding error. Usually the price band of a broker gets adjusted when the market maker order changes. In some cases this adjustment was rounded in the wrong direction, and until we fixed it, it wasn't possible to match the market maker order because the price band was a cent lower or higher than the ask or bid order.
Currently, a group of players is using government motions to set the base establishment fee to its maximum (10 million currency units for planets in non-faction space) to effectively create "private" planets, making it very hard for regular players to found new bases. The base establishment fee was once introduced to compensate players, or groups of players, for their effort in building up infrastructure and workforce populations on new planets. It was not meant to be a means to lock out other players entirely. From what we have gathered so far, this group is trying to do exactly that. We are monitoring the situation and might reduce the maximum of 10 million to a lower value.
Besides the elevated amount of community work I have done this week, I also looked into a new feature: shipping routes. It has been on our roadmap for a long time and there is also a game design concept for it. Over the course of the last few days I built a first prototype of the UI. The routes and their waypoints and steps are already stored on the server, but they lack detail, and the steps are not executed yet. I still felt like sharing what I have so far, in order to spark a discussion about the feature and get early feedback.
As always, we'd love to hear what you think: join us on Discord or the forums!
Happy trading!