Guide · Updated 15 Sep 2026
How to run a RedM player economy: shops, auctions, taxes and the weekly checks
Setting up an economy is a weekend. Running one is every week after that: shops that open with enthusiasm and go quiet, a player who corners the pelt trade, a price nobody will pay, money piling up in ledgers with nothing to spend it on. How to build a RedM server economy covers the model and the starting numbers. This guide is the part after launch: how to run player-owned shops and auctions day to day, which settings to reach for when something goes wrong, and the checks worth doing every week. The mechanics described are the ones in Poggy Markets ($99) and the Auction House ($29.99), because those are what we run.
Decide who gets a shop, and how
The first decision shapes everything else. There are two ways into shop ownership in Poggy Markets, and you can use both:
- Storefronts you place. Stand where a store should be and run
/pmherewith a type and a name; it prints a ready-to-paste block forconfig/stores.lua. Mark a storefront as purchasable and players buy it at the FOR SALE prompt. You control exactly where every shop is. - Deeds. A player uses a
shoptokenitem to found a shop where they stand, at least 10 metres from any other. You decide how deeds enter the game: sold at a general store, a job reward, an event prize. The deed's price is your control over how many shops exist.
A character can own two shops by default. Keep it there on a small server; one player with five shops is not a market. For a player who has earned one through roleplay, /pmgiveshop founds a shop at their feet without a deed.
Tax: the setting that keeps shops alive
A player economy's worst problem is not inflation. It is dead shops: a storefront bought in week one, stocked once, and never opened again, holding the best location in town. Tax fixes it without an admin having to judge anyone.
Each shop pays a set amount from its ledger on collection day, monthly or on set days each month. A shop whose ledger cannot cover it is repossessed: it disappears from the map and the owner loses access. Nothing is deleted. Stock, ledger and staff list survive, and /pmunreposhop restores it if the owner comes back and settles up. /pmreposhop does the same by hand, and /pmdelshop removes a shop for good when you are sure.
Set the amount so an active shop covers it from a few days' takings and an abandoned one runs dry within a month or two. Tax is also a money sink, which your economy needs; see the sinks list in the economy guide.
Staff: let owners hire
Owners who can hire stay longer. A shop has three roles: the owner does everything; a manager does everything except change the shop's settings and staff; an employee restocks and takes deposits. The permission table is in the config if you want different roles. A shop with two employees is a shop that opens when the owner is offline, and a job for two more players.
Poggy Markets does not change anyone's job by default, so it never fights your jobs script. If you want shop staff to also hold a framework job, turn on Config.ShopJobs, but only if Poggy Markets is the only thing assigning those jobs. Poggy Multijob (Free) lets a shopkeeper keep their day job too.
Auctions: where prices get discovered
Shops set prices; auctions find out what things are worth. The Auction House ($29.99) runs listings with bids and buyouts, and every setting that matters for an economy is a sink or a brake:
| Setting | Default | What it does to the economy |
|---|---|---|
| Listing deposit | 5, 10, 15 or 20% of the starting price for 2, 8, 24 or 48 hours | Non-refundable. A sink, and it stops junk listings at silly prices. |
| Sales tax | 5% of the sale | A sink on every completed trade. |
| Bid step | $0.50 or 5%, whichever is higher | Stops one-cent bidding wars. |
| Active listings | 20 per player | Stops one player flooding the board. |
| Cancel with bids | Off | A seller cannot pull a listing once someone has bid. |
Winnings, sale money, outbid refunds and returned items go to a mailbox rather than straight into a satchel, so nothing is lost to a full inventory or a disconnect.
Want requests: buy orders
The want-request board is the other half of price discovery. A player posts what they want, how many and at what price, and the money is held in escrow. Other players fill it in full or in part and are paid as they deliver, less an 8% tax; anything unfilled comes back when the request ends. Unfilled requests are the most useful economic data you have: they are a list of what players want and nobody supplies.
The supply catalogue: a price ceiling
The catalogue sells 74 raw goods from six suppliers (lumber, mining, farming, hunting, fishing and crafted goods), at prices that shift a few percent each time it opens, plus a 12% shipping fee. Orders go through processing, transit and delivery over a few minutes per stage. Owners and staff with permission to deposit can have an order delivered straight into their Poggy Markets shop's storage.
That gives your economy something it badly needs: a ceiling. Nobody pays a shop far more than the catalogue price plus shipping, so a player who corners a good can only push its price so far. Price the catalogue above what players can gather for, and gathering stays worth doing.
Moving prices, carefully
Poggy Markets has an optional supply-and-demand module. It is off by default, and it should stay off until you know what normal looks like on your server.
When it is on, every tracked item carries a multiplier that starts at 1.0. Players selling an item to shops push it down; players buying push it up; left alone, it recovers slowly toward normal, and an item nobody has sold for a day drifts above it. Items in the same market move each other, so dumping one kind of pelt softens every pelt. The defaults are deliberately slow: roughly 65 pelts to halve a price, which is a busy evening rather than one player with a full satchel. Prices are clamped between a fifth of their config value and nearly double, and a small fee on each trade means buying and selling the same item back to back always loses a little, so nobody farms a price tick.
Start with one market, pelts or fish, and watch it for a week. If players complain a price has crashed, that usually means one person is farming that item, and the price is doing its job.
The exchange module builds on it: a commodities desk where players take positions on those markets and settle in cash against the live price. It suits a server with players who enjoy speculation. Short selling is off by default because a short can lose more than it staked.
Quiet servers: simulated customers
Below about ten regular players, a shop can go days without a customer, and an owner who never sells anything stops logging in. The optional ghost buyer module simulates a trickle of custom: every seven to twelve hours, per shop, an unseen customer may buy a few visible items. The defaults are stingy and hard to farm. A shop needs at least 10 units in stock, items over $25 are never bought, an item needs at least 3 units to qualify, and no single sale is worth more than $50. The money goes to the shop's ledger, so the owner still has to visit, and owners are not told which sales were simulated. Turn the numbers down as your player count grows, and off once real customers are enough.
The weekly checks
| Look at | Where | What it tells you |
|---|---|---|
| Every shop's ledger | /pmshops | Ledgers that only grow mean money with nothing to spend on. Add a sink or raise the tax. |
| Best sellers and dead lines | The shop dashboard: takings, best sellers by volume and revenue, low stock, transaction history | What players actually buy. Supply for it; stop rewarding what nobody wants. |
| Unfilled want requests | The Auction House board | Shortages. A job or activity that produces those goods will be busy. |
| Repossessions | Shops missing from the map | A lot at once means tax is too high for your player count. |
| Crashed prices | The exchange charts, if the exchange is on | A floor-price item is being farmed. Check who and how. |
Change one number at a time and give it a week. Economies respond slowly, and two changes at once make it impossible to tell which one worked.
When something goes wrong
- Money piles up and prices climb
- More money is entering than leaving. Raise shop tax or move it to a weekly schedule, lengthen auction listings' deposits, and check your NPC buyers are not paying top price for raw goods.
- One player owns the trade in a good
- Keep the two-shop limit, sell more deeds, and let the supply catalogue cap the price. Competition fixes it faster than a rule.
- Shops open and die within a week
- Deeds are too cheap. Make owning a shop a goal worth weeks of play, and let tax clear the abandoned ones.
- Nobody uses the auction house
- Deposits may be too high for your prices. Try the short listing at a lower percentage, and post a few want requests yourself to show the board works.
- Someone found an exploit
- The obvious ones are closed: the server owns every price, capacity is checked before money moves, ledgers are debited before payouts, and owners cannot trade with their own shops. If you find another, bring the transaction history to support.
What you need
Poggy Markets ($99) for player-owned shops, tax, staff, dashboards and the optional pricing, exchange and ghost buyer modules. The Auction House ($29.99) for auctions, want requests and the supply catalogue, with delivery straight into Poggy Markets shops. Both run on VORP Core, RSG Core and QBCore RedM through the free Poggy Core (Free), with oxmysql as the only other requirement, and both create their own database tables. Both are included in All Access at $12.99 a month, if you would rather try the whole system before buying; subscriptions vs buying outright does the maths.
Activities that produce goods give the economy something to trade: Poggy Fishing ($69.99) lands 32 species with weights and rarity, exactly the kind of variable-value good a player market prices well.
