Shops & Auctions

A chest shop sells to whoever walks past it. The auction house sells to everyone online. Which one you want depends entirely on what you're holding.

Cheap and plentiful goes in a shop. One expensive thing goes in an auction. /market opens a menu with the shop side of it on one screen.

Chest shops

Making one

Three things, in this order:

1. Put down a container where you want the shop. Chests, trapped chests and barrels all work. Make sure you're allowed to build there.
2. Hold the exact amount you want to sell at a time. Sixteen diamonds in hand means the shop trades sixteen diamonds per purchase. The stack in your hand sets the bundle, not the stock.
3. Look at the container and run /shop create <price>.

So sixteen diamonds in hand plus /shop create 25 gets you a shop selling sixteen diamonds for twenty-five Crowns. The sign goes up on its own and the item floats above the chest so people can see what's inside without clicking.

Creating a shop is free, and there's no rent or upkeep afterwards. A shop you forget about costs you nothing except the space. Try it with a stack of dirt and it technically works. Nobody's buying it, but it technically works.

Using one

Left-click the sign or the chest to open the trade window. Right-click the sign to open the control panel, which only works if it's yours. Right-clicking the chest opens the chest normally, so you can restock without going through a menu.

Shops run in two directions. A selling shop hands out what's in the chest and takes the buyer's money. A buying shop does the reverse: it takes items off players and pays them from your balance, which is how you set a standing order for cobble or wheat without haggling with anyone.

What it costs

• 5% of every sale goes to the server as shop tax. It comes out of the seller's side and isn't shown in the trade window, so price with it in mind.
• Changing a price costs 50 Crowns. So just set it right the first time.
• Prices run from 0.01 to 10,000,000, and there's no cap on how many shops you can own.

Running your shops through a business account replaces that 5% with your business's own rate, which starts at 10%.

Finding things

/shop find asks what you're after and searches shops within 45 blocks, returning up to 10 results with a 20-second cooldown. /shop browse opens the server-wide browser, and /shop list shows what you own.

Because the search is short-range, a shop's location is most of its value. A stall nobody walks past is a stall nobody buys from, which is why the busy towns end up with high streets.

Protection and quirks

The chest is locked to you. Nobody else can open it, hoppers and droppers can't pull from it, and explosions won't break it. What that doesn't cover is the ground it sits on, so put your shops inside a town's claimed chunks rather than in the wild.

Two items only count as the same item if they match on enchantments, custom names, lore, custom model data, armour trims, dyed colour, potion contents and durability. A Sharpness V sword and a plain one are two separate shops, and a sword you renamed is a third. Handy when you're selling something specific, annoying when a shop won't accept the thing in your hand.

You can also grant other players access without handing the shop over. Staff can restock, reprice, change the item and read the purchase log. Administrators can do that plus delete it and transfer it. Worth setting up for a town shop so it doesn't go stale the week you take a break.

The auction house

/ah opens it. It also answers to /pa, /pauction, /playerauction and /auctionhouse. Whoever set up the aliases really didn't want you forgetting the command.

Listing

Hold the item you want to sell and run /ah sell <price>, or use the sell button in the menu. You can also list an item for bidding with /ah bid <price>.

Every listing costs 500 Crowns up front, whether it sells or expires. This is the entire fee: the server takes no percentage of the sale price. If you list an item for 40,000 Crowns, you receive 40,000 Crowns when it sells.

The flat fee is intentional. Listing a stack of dirt is usually poor value, while listing an item people actually want makes the fee negligible. As soon as a listing goes up, it is broadcast to the whole server.

Bids work differently from fixed-price listings. Crowns leave a bidder's account as soon as the bid is placed, so nobody can bid with money they have already spent elsewhere. Bids can be withdrawn, and you cannot bid on your own listing.

Slots

You begin with one listing slot. The remaining twenty slots must be purchased through /ahup, which opens the upgrade screen. Each additional slot costs more than the last.

The first upgrades are deliberately affordable: slot 2 costs 1,000 Crowns, and slot 3 costs 4,000 Crowns. Slot 10 costs 81,000 Crowns, and the final slot costs 400,000 Crowns. Buying all twenty-one slots costs a little under 3 million Crowns in total.

That full upgrade path is a completionist goal, not a requirement. Most players are comfortable with around five or six slots.

Expiry and limits

A listing lasts 48 hours. If nobody buys it before then, it does not disappear and it does not return to your inventory automatically. Instead, it moves to your expired listings, where you can collect it. Check that screen occasionally.

You cannot list items while in Creative or in the Nether. Books and quills are not eligible, and neither are items carrying Curse of Binding or Curse of Vanishing I.

There is a five-second cooldown between listings and a five-second cooldown between purchases. You cannot buy your own listing.

The menu is sorted oldest first, so it shows the listings closest to expiring first. When you know what you want, use /ah search <query> to narrow the results.

During an attack

Selling, bidding, cancelling, and collecting through the auction house are blocked while an attack is live. This prevents items from being moved out of a fight through the auction system.

Chest shops are not affected because they use a physical chest rather than a teleport or escape command. See War & Forts.

Official documentation

Chest shops run on QuickShop-Hikari and auctions on PlayerAuctions. Both cover the full command and permission lists, including options we haven't enabled.

Related pages

Money Where the Crowns come from in the first place.

Banking & Trading Accounts, fees, businesses and face-to-face trades.

Towns & Claims Somewhere safe to put a shopfront.