Auction House & Player Economy

Everything you can verify on Rookery Isles about the in-game Auction House, the gold/silver/copper economy, what is auctionable, and why trade packs are not.

Table of Contents

• The Two Economies on Rookery Isles
• Gold, Silver, and Copper
• How the Auction House Works
• What You Can Sell on the Auction House
• What You Cannot Sell on the Auction House
• Fees, Listings, and Charges
• Vendor Prices and Refunds
• Pricing Your Goods
• Where the Economy's Money Comes From
• Common Mistakes
• On Rookery Isles

The Two Economies on Rookery Isles

Rookery Isles runs two completely separate currency systems, and conflating them is the single most common new-player confusion. Keep them apart:

The Auction House (AH) is part of the in-game economy. It deals exclusively in gold, silver, and copper. The website Credit shop is a separate, real-money, closed-loop store: Credits never become gold, gold never becomes Credits, and nothing on the Auction House is priced or paid in Credits. This guide covers only the in-game gold economy and the Auction House. For anything Credit-related, see the website store, not the AH.

Gold, Silver, and Copper

The in-game economy uses a three-tier coin system. Every price you enter in any in-game money field (Auction House listings, mail attachments, player trades) is entered as a gold / silver / copper triplet, and the game converts internally to copper:

All item values stored in the database are recorded in copper, the base unit. For example, the item table lists Iron Ore (item 8022) at a base value of 20 copper, an Iron Ingot (item 8318) at 30 copper, and a Quality Certificate (item 4747) at 5,000 copper, which is 50 silver. When a number in this article is written as raw copper, divide by 100 for silver and by 10,000 for gold.

Practical note: when you list on the Auction House or attach coin to mail, you type the amount into separate gold, silver, and copper boxes. You never type a raw copper figure like "50000." You type 5 gold, or 50 silver, depending on the box. Money is always entered in gold/silver/copper, never as raw copper.

How the Auction House Works

The Auction House is a server-wide marketplace where players list items for other players to buy. You interact with it at an auctioneer, the in-game NPC and interaction point. In the server data this interaction is defined by the doodad_func_auction_uis table (the auctioneer interface), and a separate doodad_func_siege_auctions entry handles siege-scroll auctions. The bulk of AH behavior (the live listing board, search, bidding, and timers) is handled by the client and game server at runtime rather than being stored as static rows, so some exact runtime numbers cannot be read from the database and are flagged below.

What is verifiable about how the AH is structured:

• Items carry a three-level auction category tree. Every listable item has an auction_a_category_id, auction_b_category_id, and auction_c_category_id. These map to the browse categories you click through on the AH window (top level, sub-category, and leaf). An item with auction_a_category_id = 0 has no place in the category tree and therefore cannot be listed.
• The AH is server-wide. It is a single shared marketplace, not a per-zone board.
• You sell to other players. Unlike a vendor (which buys your goods at a fixed refund value), the AH lists your item at a price you set and waits for another player to buy it.

What You Can Sell on the Auction House

Most tradeable goods are auctionable. Of 30,810 items in the database, 21,535 carry a non-zero auction_a_category_id, meaning roughly two-thirds of all items can be listed on the Auction House. This includes the staples of the crafting and gathering economy:

(Source: items. The base value shown is the vendor price field, not a market price. The actual AH selling price is whatever players will pay.)

The big winners on the Auction House are processed crafting materials (ingots, lumber, fabric, leather, stone brick), finished gear, gathered raw materials, gemming and regrade reagents, and consumables. If you gather or craft it, you can almost certainly list it. For what to gather and craft, see the crafting guide, the mining guide, the logging guide, and the metalwork and smithing guides.

What You Cannot Sell on the Auction House

The hard, verifiable exception is trade packs (specialty items, category 133). These are the regional specialty goods you craft at a zone's Specialty Workbench and physically carry to a destination to sell. Of the 347 category-133 items, only 5 carry an auction category, so 342 of 347 specialty packs cannot be listed on the Auction House at all.

The five category-133 items that unusually do carry an auction category (and therefore appear listable) are:

(Source: items WHERE category_id=133 AND auction_a_category_id != 0.)

For everything else in the Specialty category, the rule is simple and absolute: a trade pack is carried on your back and turned in to a specialty trader at its destination zone. You do not flip it on the Auction House. This is the key contrast between the two halves of the commerce economy: ordinary goods move through the AH, while trade packs move physically across the map. The full mechanics of crafting, carrying, routing, and selling packs (including which routes pay the most) are covered in trade packs and commerce.

Why this matters: any guide, in this wiki or elsewhere, that tells you to "flip trade packs on the Auction House for gold" is wrong on this server. The pack's auction category fields are zero, so the listing option does not exist. Pack profit comes from carrying the pack to a distant, high-value destination and turning it in, not from an AH sale.

Fees, Listings, and Charges

This is the area where the database is deliberately sparse, because most of it is enforced by the game server at runtime. Be careful with numbers here.

What is verifiable in the data:

• auction_charge: nearly every item (30,730 of 30,810) has auction_charge = 0. A small set carries a flat charge: 79 items at 100 copper and a single item at 500 copper. This is a per-item listing-related charge field, and for the overwhelming majority of goods it reads zero in the static data.
• auction_charge_default: 30,801 items are flagged 1 and 9 are flagged 0. This is a boolean-style default flag rather than a percentage.

What is not in the database and therefore must be hedged:

• The Auction House listing-fee percentage, the sale tax taken on a completed sale, and the listing durations (the choices for how long your item stays listed) are not stored as static rows in this build's database. They are applied by the game server at runtime. Any specific percentage you see quoted for AH fees or sale tax is community-reported, not server-confirmed. Do not budget around an exact fee figure; check the live AH window in-game, which shows the deposit and projected fee before you confirm a listing.

Practical approach: before you confirm any listing, the AH window itself shows the listing deposit (the fee you pay up front to post) and the cut taken on sale. Read those numbers off the live window, because they are the authoritative source on this server, not any wiki figure.

Vendor Prices and Refunds

Separate from the player-to-player Auction House, NPC vendors buy your goods at a fixed value. Two database fields govern this:

• price: the item's base vendor value, in copper. This is what the merchant economy "thinks" the item is worth and what the trade-pack route-profit math is built on.
• refund: the copper you actually get back if you sell the item to a vendor (or the buyback value).
• sellable: whether the item can be sold to a vendor at all (1 = yes).

Examples (Source: items):

Notice that for raw and processed materials the vendor refund (often just 10 copper) is far below the base price. Vendoring crafting materials is almost always a bad deal. The Auction House, where another player pays a real market price, is where these goods make money. The Quality Certificate is the exception: it refunds the full 5,000 copper it costs, because it is a pack-crafting reagent rather than a market commodity.

Pricing Your Goods

Because the AH price is set by players, the database cannot tell you what an item "should" sell for. It can only tell you the floor and the relationships. Use these principles:

• Step 1. Treat the vendor refund value as your absolute floor. If the AH would net you less than the vendor refund after fees, sell to the vendor instead.
• Step 2. Check the live AH for the current going rate. Other players' listings are the real market. Undercut the lowest competitive listing slightly if you want a fast sale, or match it if supply is thin.
• Step 3. Factor in the listing deposit and sale cut shown on the AH window. Your profit is the sale price minus that deposit and cut, not the full sticker price.
• Step 4. Sell processed goods, not raw. An Iron Ingot (base 30 copper) is worth more than the ore that made it (Iron Ore, base 20 copper), and processing adds labor value that buyers will pay for. The same holds across the crafting chains in metalwork and smithing, tailoring and leatherwork, and carpentry and masonry.
• Step 5. Watch your stack sizes. Listing a single ore is rarely worth the deposit. List in stacks that match how buyers actually consume the material.

Where the Economy's Money Comes From

Gold enters and circulates through the player economy from several sources. Understanding them tells you what is worth your time:

The two pillars are the Auction House (for crafted and gathered goods) and trade packs (for the Commerce vocation). They are complementary, not interchangeable: the AH moves stackable commodities and finished gear, while trade-pack running moves high-value regional goods across the map for a turn-in payout. For the full Commerce and Larceny breakdown, including route values and the per-zone Specialty Workbenches, read trade packs and commerce. To build the labor and proficiency base that feeds both, see labor and proficiency.

Common Mistakes

• Trying to list a trade pack on the AH. It will not appear as listable. Carry it and turn it in. (342 of 347 specialty items have no auction category.)
• Confusing Credits with gold. Credits are website real-money currency for the cash shop. They are never used on the Auction House. Gold/silver/copper is the only AH currency.
• Entering money as raw copper. You enter gold, silver, and copper in separate boxes. There is no raw-copper input.
• Vendoring crafting materials. Vendor refund is usually a tiny fraction of market value. Use the AH.
• Budgeting around an exact AH fee percentage. The fee and sale tax are runtime values not stored in the static data. Read the live AH window, which is authoritative on this server.

On Rookery Isles

Rookery Isles runs the ArcheAge 3.0 (Revelation) build (AAEmu 3.0.3.0 NL0bP fork, game schema aaemu_game_3030, client dated 2017-03-15). This is not the Erenor patch, which came later in 3.5. A few server-specific points for the economy:

• Trade packs are confirmed not auctionable on this build. The category-133 specialty items carry zero auction categories (with five named exceptions: items 20110 to 20114). Treat the pack economy as physical-delivery only.
• Auction House fee, tax, and listing-duration numbers are not stored in this build's database. They are applied at runtime. This wiki will not quote a specific AH fee percentage, because it cannot be verified from the data; any such figure elsewhere is community-reported, not server-confirmed. Always read the deposit and cut shown on the live AH window before confirming.
• The Credit shop is a separate, closed-loop, real-money system on the website and has no interaction with the in-game gold economy or the Auction House. Do not expect to convert between them.

See also

• The Marketplace (Credit Cash Shop)
• trade packs and commerce
• currencies and vendors
• crafting guide
• labor and proficiency
• gear progression
• world atlas
• new player guide