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Economy & Items

Arx's money economy is small and deliberately unattractive. The interesting currency in this game is access, not gold.

Pricing

buyPrice  = basePrice × shopMultiplier × (durability / maxDurability)
sellValue = (buyPrice / 3) × count × (1 + Intuition × 0.005)

Three things fall out of that:

  1. A flat 3× spread. Selling loot back is always a bad deal, so hauling is discouraged by arithmetic rather than by an inventory cap or a weight rule.
  2. Durability is a live price curve, not a repair chore. A half-worn sword is worth half as much, on both sides of the counter. Wear is continuous value leakage rather than a cliff.
  3. Intuition is the only economic skill. 100 points recovers +50% on sales — meaningful only if you were going to sell a lot, which the 3× spread already discourages. A soft trap for a first-time build.

Identification

An item's stats are hidden until ObjectKnowledge + Mind ≥ item's identify_value. Identification is checked in bulk against your inventory and equipment whenever the relevant panel is opened, so it silently re-evaluates as you level.

Design consequence: information is a stat purchase, and it is a Mind purchase. A warrior build literally cannot read his own loot. This is the same overload problem as everywhere else — see Character Build.

Sinks and sources

  • Sources: floor loot, chests, quest rewards, selling. No respawning income, no farming loop.
  • Sinks: potions, lockpicks (consumed on failure), food, arrows, gear, a small number of quest purchases.
  • The economy is therefore finite and drainable in one direction. Arx is not balanced around a gold curve; gold is a lubricant for a small number of gated purchases.

Lockpicking as an economic act

Failing a lock damages your picks and costs you nothing else — so lockpicking is money converted into access at a skill-dependent exchange rate. Mecanism − lockpickability + 20 percent per 3-second attempt, auto-fail below the lock's rating, and locks rated 100 are absolute. See Character Build for the full formula.

Touchpoints

  • → Simulation & Interaction: every item is a physical object first and an inventory entry second; food is consumed by an actual eating verb
  • → Combat: equipment supplies most early damage and all of the absorb the character sheet does not
  • → Magic & Runes: runes are found items, making the spell list part of the loot economy
  • → World & Level Structure: shops cluster in the city, so selling costs travel time through a world with no fast travel

What breaks if you remove it

Very little. Strip gold entirely and replace shop purchases with found items and the game barely notices — good evidence that the money layer is vestigial genre furniture rather than a designed pressure.