Are they approximated, balanced for game purposes? Or are they meant to mirror IRL prices?
For example the Hi-Point C9 costs $750.0 , whereas irl brand new from hi point would run you $199.0
I understand that some have to be estimated, I just was curious if we had a rule of thumb to follow 
And while we are at it, how to we approximate volume for rigid objects⌠that havent been displacement tested IRL?
Is that the âvalueâ it trades for? cos it kind of makes sense then, a gun is pretty valuble in a zombie apocalyse.
price_postapoclypse is a mess and thereâs no rhyme nor reason to the prices.
You get 1 Merch for selling 1 meat jerky to the Free Merchants broker, and 1 Merch is worth $3.20. So how much meat jerky would you give to an NPC if that NPC was going to give you a gun? If you needed food, how much meat jerky would you want from an NPC before you gave the NPC a gun?
price_postapocalypse is a JSON field, so anyone with a text editor can go through, change it, and submit a Pull Request to make that change part of the game. Iâd love to see some kind of sensible set of values, but even a different of less unreasonable values would be an improvement.
What is it supposed to be conveying? The price someone would pay in barter vs cash?
That is extremely objective and would require a âneeds/wantsâ and vice versa.
Volume thoughâŚreally where did we get the values for object volumes?
Why give the NPC a gun when you can use the gun to take the jerky 
But on a more serious note, you make a good point. Maybe have certain things weighed more for how valuable they are likely to be? I canât remember where but I remember reading something about during social collapse, guns, food, drugs and luxuaries (recreational drugs, tobacco, alcohol coffee etc) tend to be what people care about the most.
Seems like something that should be addressed with NPCs getting fleshed out more
With factions rapidly improving, Iâm hoping that one day we might have a simulated economy. Cuz I swear on my main characterâs map, no one would be buying guns anymore: I flooded the market in exchange for hub01âs sweet sweet tech!
Similarly my faction camp is outputting ridiculous quantities of pemmican, I could make food a none-issue for all the factions I get along with (The Hell Raiders can starve 
).
Honestly, a single properly running farm can provide for hundreds of characters and NPCs, to say nothing of if you expand the farm to encompass your reality bubble and then RPing as farmer John. Then you might even be able to feed a city or two.
Another thing as a general response to this thread, I think the prices of firearms or anything that requires ammo should be a lot less if the trade doesnât come with ammo for it. As the main menu tip says: The best gun in the world is useless without ammo.
laughs in sword bayonet
Sword bayonet is actually pretty good. Then you have a gun and a spear in a back holster.
One thing that could be looked into by the fictional person with more time than common sense would be the price of an item compared to the price of the drops you get from disassembling it.
An âinactive eyebotâ is worth around $100, while the set of rotors you can get from it is worth around $400 on its own. What do people even do with rotors in a post apoc world? Try to build microlite aircraft?
A Cx4 storm with a sword bayonet is one of my favorite weapons in the game, back it up with a RM216 SPIW and you can kill pretty much anything you come across.
Yes, it would be helpful if someone went through and made sure that no item was worth less than than the value of its disassembled components, possibly with some adjustment for the time and difficulty of disassembling it.
What Iâd really like to do - but I have a lot of other projects - is get a list of every item in the game and all the recipes to make it or disassemble it. Then starting with these assumptions:
go through and calculate the craft value based on the recipeâs materials costs and labor requirements, the salvage replacement value based on disassembling the item and selling the components, and the replacement value based on the cost of the cheapest equivalent item.
People would want to trade stuff at higher of salvage or replacement value. Stuff with a craft value higher than the salvage or replacement value wouldnât get made, but you might see if to for sale if it can be salvaged or scavenged.
But again, thatâs a lot of work and anyone who just goes through and fixes obvious discrepancies is doing the game a lot of good.
Iâm 100% planning on making an economy model that NPCs use to set prices, but I have absolutely no idea when Iâm going to be able to get to that.
Until I or someone else can get to that, we need to focus on teaching NPCs to at least evaluate what they do and do not need and use that as a basis for pricing. This wonât be wasted effort since totally isolated NPCs arenât going to be able to tap into the market system anyway.