(3) For the final step, I have a question for you: What is the largest amount of materials you have ever needed for something? For me, that either is the 3DC of iron blocks that is in my 202 tower, the 12 DC of wool combined for my storage and 202, which I had to gather before 1.13, or the 3DC grey concrete needed for my storage. Those numbers aren’t too big, right? The wool might be the biggest number there, and I gathered that by spending 4 hours designing a simple double-res book-on-your-key wool farm, which I quite enjoyed, 4 hours getting the materials for it and making it in survival, and 8 hours listening to an audiobook whilst passively looking at my screen. That’s not too much time, and not too bad of a time either. If all the farms that are build and the materials that are gathered would only be done because someone needs the items, the amount of gathering would massively decrease, and so would the size of the farms. The quantities in which materials are sold and gathered is absurd from any use-driven perspective. There are far more materials in theoretical stock then there are needed, the farms we have are far too large for our needs. With “farms,” here, I also mean to include stuff like mining operations, or villager trading. Instead, we’ve got shops, and people who trade in mass. For a shop, you’re not just paying for the item, you’re paying for the continence of it being in stock, also. The second group, those who buy and sell in mass, usually sell in quantities that seem absurd from the perspective of normal Minecraft. I have, in 1.12, sold ~1oDCs of every colour of wool in one go to one person, totalling 160DC, A full to-skylimit tower made almost entirely out of one colour of wool costed me roughly 9DCs of white. A megamall build, with full residence floors made out of a monochrome wool, 1DC a colour. A map filled with one colour, 5DC. But, why is this? Because we have “serious” players, who will make farms and buy materials in bulk anyway, even though they don’t need them, even though they might never sell them to people who will actually use them. Larger and larger farms are constructed to be able to supply the materials for the construction of larger and larger farms. It’s this cycle, I’d argue, that is at the heart of the EMC economy for vanilla items. The value of a material that follows this cycle, then, is entirely virtual. If the demand would only be people who will actually use it to build, and every single gathered piece is on the market, most prices would come close to nothing. Instead, the value of the materials is calculated, not on the basis of supply and demand, but on the basis of time: The value of a material is roughly calculable by simply taking the amount of time required to get it. People will buy for this price, even if they don’t need the item. Especially the “serious” players, those I’ve met anyway, will just buy an item in bulk if the price is low in terms of time/money, even when they have no need for it. In this way: The trade of vanilla items more closely resembles the trade in real-life stocks, or, to a lesser extent, currency. than in real-life goods. They have value because we think they do. The supply and demand doesn’t dictate the price, it is dictated by the price. There are, of course, materials that don’t undergo this route, materials that cannot, in a meaningful way, be farmed, and are still necessary for projects. Those are far and few in between, though. I own 50DC of mycelium, which isn’t farmable, but, as no one needs it, it exists in abundance. Shulker shells or leaves are examples of materials that I don’t think have fallen to this cycle. Leaves because when you need them, you need a lot, and they cannot be easily gathered; and shulkers because they are literally limited, though I feel like my casual 9 stacks of shells begin to show that that limitedness might virtually come to an end one day. Ultimately, though, the price for most of these materials is determined in the same way: The price is equivalent to the amount of time spent gathering it. If you buy leaves, you don’t really buy leaves, you buy the time needed to gather them. (conclusion) This leaves us with the following: For the value of a vanilla item, the only valuable thing about it is the time it took to gather it. The “serious” players will often trade large quantities of them in a manner not unlike exchange of stocks. This also makes that, for those players, getting the amount of materials needed for a project generally isn’t an issue. “casual” players, however, would want to buy materials for their smaller projects. They will either buy directly from the “serious,” when they ask for an amount in chat, or they will buy from a mall. This mall, as we can now see, is buying two shades of time: One the “mall part” of the price equation, which we previously established was time, and the other the item part, which is also time. The trade is in time, in the sense that both rupees and materials simply are a currency to express time in. Players, then, will buy the materials they need if they find this exchange between currencies (Time in rupees and time in finding shops for time in gathering) a useful one. They do this not necessarily because they will calculatedly benefit, but more because they find the time spend participating in the economy (Getting rupees, finding shops) more meaningful or enjoyable than the time spend gathering in isolation. (Proof of theory) I have proof for all this, too. I talked about pre-1.15 wool trading a lot in the examples, and I would now like to use it as proof of my theory: You see, after I finished those 8 hours of shearing sheep passively on a quickly made farm, I found that I quite enjoyed the process of designing a farm like that, and so I made another one, one with an absolutely crazy output, and Tom and I started passively using that newer, larger one. We made over 3 million rupees selling wool. That is close to 500DC. There is no way all that wool is actually placed. This means people will have to have made 100 map arts, or 53 full-res wool towers to skylimit. I don’t think of it as possible that all those materials got actually used. People just bought them, because they equated a certain amount of time. During all this time, with hundreds of DCs of wool sold, the price people bought it for didn’t drop an inch. And then, automated shearing got announced, and the amount of time that needed to be spent gathering wool in the future was decreased. Immediately, the price started dropping. Jet, only after it actually arrived on EMC, the price of malls selling it dropped, because only then people knew for certain it took less time. There is no way I see this explained via supply and demand. The only thing I can explain this with is the illusion of supply and demand, and goods actually being a currency of time. I will add that at no point I talked with people about this farm. I never explicitly told people that it was wool I bought from newer players that I sold, but I never denied it. The buyers had to think it took a lot of time to gather these materials, so I didn’t say it actually was rather easy to get. I think this is what happened to the beacon market: the price didn’t drop because the supply was greater than the demand, the price dropped because the buyers started to understand the amount of time it takes to build a farm like that, and the output it produces. As more and more people became aware of mass wither skeleton skull farms, the price started dropping. So, where does that leave us? Well, I can finally start answering the question “Is the economy of EMC dying?” But, you might ask, what does it even mean for an economy to die? In real life, in the neoliberal framework at least, it would mean something like: The GDP has gone down, which means the quality of life has gone down. In Minecraft, quality of life, to the extend it is a useful concept at all, isn’t even dependant on the economy. The dying moans of an economy are something else. In Minecraft, something more meaningful happens. We’ve previously established that Minecraft economies are all about time. When there are more people spending time on megamalls, there will be more megamalls, when there are more people making iron farms, and they try to sell it, there will be more iron sold. The amounts people actually *need* for projects is largely insignificant for the trade of most items. This leaves us with a very simple conclusion: A Minecraft economy dies when people stop spending time on it, when people stop trying to sell and buy. It has nothing to do with supply or demand, only with the players willingness to participate. If there are more people trying to sell an item, the economy for that item will be more lively, and it will be sold more frequently. The price usually won’t drop that much, as it’s only another currency of time. Is the economy dying? Well, maybe it is. People are apparently spending less time on it, or so everyone here seems to say, so there is less liveliness, but that’s all. Ultimately, there is no such thing as the death of a Minecraft community, only more and less activity. Anyway, I hope that that is a meaningful contribution to the subject. It’s quite long, I know, but at least I spent some time on it, to make it at least somewhat structured.
