Gaming Commerce

A Commerce Journey — Episode 13 . Real economics, measured against live Hypixel Skyblock Bazaar data. You have an hour. You can farm, run dungeons, or sit at the Bazaar placing orders. Every guide answers this by telling you which one pays the most, which is the wrong shape of answer, because the right one depends on something the guides do not ask about. Opportunity cost is the value of the best thing you did not do. It is the most useful idea in economics and the one people forget fastest, because it never appears as a number anywhere. Nothing subtracts it from your balance. You simply end the evening with less than you could have had, and nothing tells you. 1️⃣ Profit that ignores the alternative Episode 10 touched this and moved on. It deserves the full version. Accounting profit is what you made minus what you spent. If you bought materials for 400,000 and sold the result for 500,000, your accounting profit is 100,000 coins and the number is not in...

A Commerce Journey — Episode 12 . Real economics, measured against live Hypixel Skyblock Bazaar data. Episode 11 was about what happens when you try to buy in size. This one is about what happens when you try to produce in size, and it starts with a question every Skyblock player eventually asks about their island. You have a minion. You put a Super Compactor in it, so instead of raw cobblestone it now spits out enchanted cobblestone. Good trade, obviously. So why not compress again? Turn the enchanted cobblestone into a block of the stuff and carry on up the chain. I assumed the answer was that it keeps working, just a bit less well each time. That is what diminishing returns means. I was wrong about the size of the effect, and wrong about the direction on most of the items I checked. 1️⃣ What one compression is worth The test is simple enough to state. Take a chain of three items where each one is 160 of the one below it. Raw diamond, enchanted diamon...

A Commerce Journey — Episode 11 . Real economics, measured against live Hypixel Skyblock Bazaar data. Economies of scale say that making more of something lowers the cost of each one. Factories, minions, bulk orders. Episode 10 ended on the promise of covering it, so I went to test the buying half: does purchasing in bulk get you a better price on the Bazaar? The answer is no, and the reason is not the one I expected. It is also not the one I published in the first version of this post, which I had to take apart and rebuild after finding a mistake. That part is at the end. 1️⃣ Walking the book When you press instant buy, the game does not charge you one price. It works down a list. The cheapest seller goes first, and when their stock runs out it takes the next cheapest, then the next, until your order is full. The price you pay is the average of everything it took. Enchanted diamond has 1,283,293 units offered for sale in total. The API shows me the che...

A Commerce Journey — Episode 10 . Real economics, measured against live Hypixel Skyblock Bazaar data. Episode 9 was about who controls prices. This one is about what it costs to make the thing being priced, which is where most economics courses start and where I probably should have started too. I was going to write the standard version of this post. Fixed costs, variable costs, a worked example, done. Then I pulled the Bazaar API on 2026-09-04 to get real numbers for the example, and the example turned out to be more interesting than the lesson I had planned around it. Here is the test. Take the simplest craft in Skyblock: 160 raw blocks into one enchanted block. Price it two ways. First as an impatient player, using instant buy for the materials and instant sell for the result. Then as a patient one, placing a buy order for the materials and a sell offer for the result. Same recipe. Same items. Same minute. The same craft, twice The same craft, twice Marg...