Item worth
More actions
The item worth system is a server-side pricing engine that estimates the market value of every Minecraft item and displays the estimate as a tooltip line when a player hovers an item in any inventory. The system deployed on 2026-05-28.
Overview
Item worth combines four data sources to produce a single per-item estimate:
- The admin shop floor price, set by the server in admin shop.
- The simulated market's maximum bid price (the sim shop).
- Real player-to-player trade medians, drawn from ChestShop transaction logs.
- The cost of crafting the item from priced ingredients (recipe-cost).
The engine blends whichever sources are available for a given item into a single market estimate. When no direct source exists, the engine falls back to a category median (for example, all wood-family items share a category) and, as a last resort, a global median.
Tooltip display
When a player hovers an item, two lines appear at the bottom of the tooltip:
Admin Sell: $X Market Est: $Y
The Admin Sell line reports the price the admin shop pays the player when the player sells the item to the shop. For items the server does not buy, the line reads not bought.
The Market Est line reports the engine's best estimate of the item's player-to-player market value. The estimate is annotated with a confidence indicator:
| Tag | Meaning |
|---|---|
| (no tag) | Derived from admin shop and sim shop data; medium confidence |
(7d median) |
Derived from real player trades in the past seven days; high confidence |
(recipe) |
Computed as the sum of ingredient costs; high confidence for stable recipes |
(rough) |
Derived from a category or global median; low confidence |
The Market Est value reflects the engine's best guess at what a fair player-to-player price would be. It is not a guarantee of price discovery.
Coverage
The engine maintains worth values for every item that has an in-game item form. Items without a direct admin-shop price are still priced through recipe inference or category median, so hovering any item in inventory will produce a tooltip.
As of 2026-05-28 the engine maintains 1,859 priced items: 471 from direct admin shop or sim shop data, 235 from recipe inference, and 1,153 from category-median fallback.
Recipe inference
For items not directly priced, the engine attempts to derive a price from the item's crafting recipe. The bucket, for example, is priced at three times the iron ingot's worth. Wood-family items follow a deterministic pattern: oak planks cost one-quarter of an oak log, an oak slab costs half a plank, and an oak door costs two planks.
The engine supports multi-step recipe convergence. The price of a bookshelf, for example, is derived from the price of a book, which is derived from the price of paper, which is derived from the price of sugar cane (an admin-priced material).
What the tooltip is not
The displayed value is an estimate, not a binding price. Sellers may price items above or below the estimate at their discretion. The admin shop pays its listed floor price and not the Market Est; that figure is shown only for reference.
The estimate does not include sentimental or aesthetic value. Enchanted items, named items, and items with custom NBT may carry higher player-market value than the engine reports.
Tracking inflation
The engine is wired to apply two adjustment multipliers when their data sources activate:
- Inflation multiplier: a server-wide adjustment derived from the monetary policy engine. The multiplier remains at 1.0 until the policy engine exits its bootstrap period (approximately 2026-06-05).
- Scarcity multiplier: a per-material adjustment based on the cumulative extraction count for ores in mineable worlds (resource world, nether, end). The multiplier remains at 1.0 until extraction passes 10 percent of the theoretical worldgen budget for that material.
Both multipliers operate as no-ops while their source systems are still ramping up, and will begin scaling worth values automatically once those systems go active.