Before: Every good had a fixed price at the pier. Fish always cost 6 to buy, always paid 4 to sell. Didn't matter if you had 5 fish or 500.
Now: Prices are alive and tied to what's actually happening in the world.
Every 30 seconds, your game quietly reports to a shared server: "here's how stocked up I am on each good." Everyone playing Brinehaven at that moment does the same. The server looks at all those reports and answers: "collectively, is the world swimming in fish, or starving for it?"
- If players everywhere are overflowing with fish → the market is flooded → fish prices drop. Selling fish gets you less, buying is cheap.
- If everyone's running low on fish → scarcity → prices spike. Selling fish pays well, but buying costs more.
This happens independently for each of the 15 goods. So bread might be expensive (everyone's struggling to bake enough) while wood is cheap (everyone over-built lumberjacks).
The result: Opening the Trading Pier feels like checking commodity prices, not a fixed shop. If you see fish prices spiking, that's a real signal — either you or other players around the world are struggling with supply. If you've been dumping surplus planks and the price tanks, that's your doing affecting the market.
Even when you're playing solo with nobody else online, prices still move based on your own stockpile — scarcity in your warehouse makes goods more expensive to buy, surplus makes them cheaper to sell.