Every coin in Bestia was dug out of the ground by somebody. The economy is entirely player-driven: players find the gold, mint the money, haul the freight and run the marketplaces, and the world’s prices are whatever they collectively decide those things are worth. This page covers the three systems that carry all of it — the currency, the postal system that moves goods and coin across the map, and the auction houses where most trading actually happens.

Currency link

All currency in the world originates from gold deposits that players discover and mine themselves. Raw gold becomes money only once a master turns it into gold coins with the Minting skill — there is no other tap. Gold coins are the single currency for every trade and transaction, and there are no smaller denominations: everything in the game is priced in whole gold.

Because coins cannot be split, every calculated fee on this page is rounded up to the next whole gold, and a fee that works out below 1 still costs 1.

To give a fresh world something to trade with, NPCs start out holding 10% of the world’s total wealth in gold. Every night this NPC wealth is redistributed equally among all of them. This one mechanic deliberately ignores real-world economic logic; it exists so that coin keeps circulating into player hands through NPC purchases and quest brokers instead of pooling wherever it happened to land.

What a settlement does with its share of that gold — stocking its shops, paying for imports along the roads, and rebuilding what a player knocks down — is covered under Settlements & Townsfolk.

That NPC gold is a closed pool, not a second faucet: whenever an NPC pays a player — a quest reward, a purchase, a world-event payout — the gold must have been earned by some other NPC first. The server-side World Treasury Director owns that pool, budgets every NPC payout against it, and adjusts what NPCs pay and charge as the pool drifts from its 10% target. It is the reason no NPC in the world can conjure money, and the reason prices need no manual intervention to stay sane.

Postal System link

Inspired by World of Warcraft, Bestia has a proper postal system for sending letters, items and gold between players and places. It is also the backbone of the quest system — commission rewards arrive by mail rather than from a quest giver standing around waiting for you.

Unlike the mailbox in most games, this one lives in the world. NPC couriers handle deliveries by default, but players can train and assign their Bestias to run routes instead, and a delivery can be a commission in its own right. If nobody picks up a delivery within its time frame, an NPC courier finishes the job — the parcel still arrives, but the courier’s cut of the delivery fees is lost to whoever might have earned it.

The system is meant to be used constantly, and it is built to be generous rather than punishing: it is how players gather their equipment and move their money without spending an evening walking.

Sending and Receiving link

To send a parcel, interact with a postbox, write your message and pay the listed fee. You then choose a destination postbox. By default only postboxes within 10km are listed — to send further, you need to own a map, which grants access to the game map and reveals the postboxes on it. Maps are drawn with the Cartography master skill and are traded as items like anything else.

Once a parcel has arrived, you can collect it at the destination postbox or at any postbox within 10km of it. Nobody has to stand and wait at one specific box for a package to land.

Postal Fees and Delivery Time link

Cost and travel time follow these formulas:

  freight_fee   = 10 * distance_km * freight_weight_kg
currency_fee  = send_amount * 0.015
delivery_time = 0.1 + distance_km / 30
  

currency_fee is a flat 1.5% of any gold you send. delivery_time is given in hours, which works out to a courier pace of roughly 30 km/h plus about six minutes of handling at each end. Parcels containing only gold or only text skip the wait entirely and arrive instantly.

Insurance link

Deliveries can be insured for an extra fee. If an insured parcel is lost — usually because the courier was killed before finishing the route — a teleportation spell triggers and sends the goods on to their destination by itself. That safety net is deliberately slow: the parcel takes a further 0.5 to 1 days (randomised) to surface in the recipient’s postbox, so insurance can never be abused as a shortcut past normal delivery times.

Auction House link

Trading is where the player-driven economy actually becomes visible. Players build and run their own auction houses, which means they can keep selling while logged off — and it means a well-placed marketplace is a genuine source of income for its owner.

Building an Auction House link

Building an auction house requires the Trade Post Owner master skill, which also caps how many a single master may operate (one at Lv. 1, up to five at Lv. 5). It is an expensive building, so the materials are usually pooled by a group of players or a whole guild. These special rules apply:

• Once an auction house stands, no other auction house may be placed within a 5km radius, and no settlement may hold more than one.
• The owner sets an owner fee of at least 1% on every new listing. The ceiling is granted by their Trade Post Owner level, rising from 5% at Lv. 1 to 25% at Lv. 5.
• The owner fee is charged on top of the listing fees below, and the seller pays it up front. It accumulates inside the auction house and has to be collected in person every so often — an unattended marketplace does not bank its own profits.
• Half of every owner fee collected is passed on to NPCs, the game’s stand-in for taxation. In practice an owner keeps half of the rate they advertise.

How Auctions Work link

Items can be listed either at a fixed price for a direct sale, or as a timed auction:

Both fees are calculated from the price you ask for — the fixed price, or the minimum starting bid of an auction — and never from what the item eventually sells for. Both are also paid up front, out of your own pocket, at the moment you create the listing. Whatever the item then fetches above your asking price is yours to keep in full.

Listing fees are separate from the owner fee, and the two stack. Unlike the owner fee, listing fees are burned - removed from the economy by the server - which is the game’s main brake on inflation.

Worked example: the owner has set a 5% owner fee, and a player lists an item as a 5-day auction (20%) with a minimum starting bid of 1000. Creating that listing costs 25% of 1000 = 250 gold, payable immediately: 200 is burned, 25 goes to the owner’s till and 25 to the NPC pool. If the auction closes at 1800, the seller walks away with the whole 1800.

Charging up front on the asking price is what keeps the marketplace honest. Nobody can paper the boards with hopeful junk priced at a million gold, because the fee for asking is real and it is due before anyone has even looked at the item. Setting a sane starting bid is the cheap move; greed costs gold whether it pays off or not.

If a listing runs out its duration without finding a buyer, the auction house simply posts the item back to you through the postal system — it is never lost, and you do not have to be online for it to find its way home.

The fees, however, are not refunded. You paid for the marketplace’s time and the owner’s floor space, and you got both. That is the honest cost of a listing that asked for too much.

Linking Auction Houses link

Auction houses belonging to different players can be linked using the Trade Agreement master skill, provided every owner involved agrees. Linked houses share their listings, turning a handful of local shops into one broad marketplace and making goods far easier to find - for buyers and sellers alike.

Winning an auction at a linked house leaves the buyer a choice: pay a delivery fee and have the item posted over by the postal system, or travel and fetch it. Unclaimed items are held for up to 10 days. After that the item goes back to the original seller, who keeps the payment — so it is worth remembering where you bought something.