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What's valuable and how valuable are valuable things?

Amaryllis

Amaryllis

Inactive Member
Given that we can make stuff with aether and we've got all sorts of new super materials and we can mine asteroids and colonize/harvest/terraform planets and we've got tons of automation, what resources are still pretty valuable? What resources specific to our setting are pretty valuable? What resources that are highly sought after in our world are worth much less in SARP?

I'm sure it could all be really relative but I'm just wondering if people can come up with some rough scale of value for stuff. How much do we care about gold and water for instance?

My Neko's team of explorers just found platinum on Ake, how valuable might that be?

It'd be nice to have a vertical list from most valued to least or a list divided into classes/ranks.
 
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The Iromakuanhe basically treat most natural resources as rather cheap, except for certain forms of harvested plant matter, like natural hardwoods, nacre and fossilized organic solids with decorative properties. In terms of minerals, only exotics like Veyrinite or other substances with unusual physics-altering properties are of any interest to them.
 
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Among the Poku Saeruo Degonjo, minerals are valuable. The wealth of a Ruoka is literally based on the materials. A starship is valuable because of the materials that it contains. Its one reason that recycling is so big. A ship that is no longer serviceable, is cannibalized, and usable parts used for new ships. The unusable parts are broken down into their components to be reused.
 
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I believe material value would also be dependent on the state of the given nation at any one time. For example, in peacetime, certain metals and gemstones may have a reduced price as reserves begin building. While during wartime, they will naturally go for a higher price due to their use in vessel, or weapon construction.
 
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A thing to recall is that energy-to-matter technology and nodal technology can not fabricate perfectly accurate biological materials, nor can they manufacture volatile compounds, these are things which still need to be produced by skilled labor. Furthermore, advanced materials such as Yamataium, Yarvex, Zesuaium, Structol, Duremium, an assortment of stealth materials are unable to be fabricated without specialized equipment and/or resources.
 
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In spite of free energy, the process of making matter into what you want is so involved that Yamatai is still getting much of its materials from asteroids and mining because it's easier to alter existing matter. Because of this, Yamatai's energy-to-matter technology is not fully harnessed and is used to make stuff like massive diamonds, graphene nanotubes, rods of pure titanium, and other elemental products that can be used by industry, as well as compounds like Durandium and other materials like super plastics, advanced ceramics, and low-friction personal lubricants. For a major example of free materials in Yamatai, the value of gold is largely symbolic because they can basically print it out of aetheric plasma. This is not a unique example but it's not the norm either. The real benefits of energy-to-matter come into play when they're making very rare substances that are not easily found or mined (think of the rare Earth metals in China that manufacturers need to make iPhones).

Overall, energy to matter conversion doesn't really have much effect on the overall economy outside of the industrial sector, and it is directed primarily at making stuff for Ketsurui Zaibatsu product lines and (surprise, surprise) the Star Army of Yamatai.

Valuable items are technology, real food (not algae synth stuff), and--to some extent--wood. Services are labor are valuable and make up a lot of the jobs.

Cheap stuff in Yamatai: Because Yamatai is big and has tons of frontier worlds, land is really cheap right now in Yamatai. Starships and vehicles are surprisingly cheap in Yamatai.

I wish I could say more but it's a really broad question (although really good to ask about the setting).

It makes me wonder if some independent trader character will start a lucrative business selling Yamataian gold to the Hidden Sun Clan.
 
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Sadly such a trader would only make a modest living. Gold from Yamatai would be useful, its value is based on its uses and need. Gold in the clan is useful for some technology purposes, and obviously for shiny stuff. But if a person were to buy a shipload of gold and bring it to World Station, it is value is going to actually drop based on the quantity. A trader is better off bringing manufactured items, crafted things to make money.
 
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Wood tends to have value I think because real wood needs to be grown. I'd assume even if you made wood with an energy to matter converter, it wouldn't look the same as wood grown from a tree, unless you wanted to input every single ring and imperfection in yourself into the programming of the machine.
 
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Nepleslians love to live in splendor. Precious metals and stones are still big. We also have a big market for natural wood, if only because we cut down ALL OF THE TREES on several of our colonized worlds a long, long time ago because, hey, big surprise, Nepleslians hate trees. If we don't have massive empty parking lots, where are we going to sell drugs and have Ron Burgundy-style gang wars? And at the same time, we need wood to make baseball bats to put nails into; it's a real vicious cycle.

So, to be simple, things you would think are valuable on Nepleslia normally are. If you're sitting on a diamond the size of a bean-bag (none of that fake junk either; Nepleslians are naturally greedy enough to smell low-quality replicas), you can still sell it for about what you'd expect.
 
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It would be nice to have a page detailing what each faction considers valuable. The 188604 plot, in particular, would benefit from this. I wonder if interesting new animals would be valued for their furs or maybe purchased to put in some interstellar zoo for space tourists. Maybe there's a group or species that wants to collect genetic material from all around the galaxy to create an ark in case of a galaxy-scale catastrophe and they will pay a hefty sum to some brave explorer.
 
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I will work on getting that info on the wiki for Yamatai soon. *adds to his notes*
 
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