the gluebook
EarningView .md

The Economy

One rule runs the whole economy: nothing in the world is unlimited.

Everything has a bound

Seven materials carry a world ceiling on how much may be held at once, and four sit in fixed pools that only ever empty. Either way there is a number, and you never have to guess it: the game shows you exactly how much is left, live, while you play. See Scarcity and the Cap.

Nobody can vacuum a zone

Gathering is rate limited. One player with endless free time cannot strip a zone bare before you ever see it. The world empties at a pace everyone shares.

gloo

gloo (₲) is the currency of the world, and every new soul wakes into it with a welcome purse of 1,000 gloo. After that, vendors will buy raw materials at a floor price, so anything you gather has a worth the moment you carry it to town. Your work never sells for nothing, once selling is open to you: see Selling needs a licence below.

And every price in the world also reads in real dollars, straight from the live $GLUE price. You always know what a thing is worth in the world and out of it.

The Gloo Exchange

The floor is only the floor. The real market is the Gloo Exchange, in town.

  • It is a real order book. Players set the bids and the asks.
  • Trades happen at the resting price. Cross an order already sitting on the book and you trade at that order's price.
  • Every asset has its own live chart.
  • Rarity is not a label. It is a live reading of how much supply remains in the world. When the Exchange says something is rare, it is rare because the world is actually running out of it.

The trading floor

The Exchange is a real room you walk into, an open floor with no walls. The big board on the wall is for watching. To trade you have to sit down: walk to one of the twelve terminals, press E, and the order book opens. Seats are first come, first served: free means sit, busy means wait. Sit there doing nothing for 90 seconds and the terminal stands you up for the next soul.

There is one way around the room itself. The portable terminal, a ₲10,000,000 tool from Sticky Pomus that also drops in the wild, opens the Exchange from your bag, anywhere in the world. See Tools and Storage.

Placing an order is free. When an order fills, the seller pays a 2% fee, burned, gone from the world for good. The tape prints character names, never wallets.

The Exchange's home tab ends with a last trades strip: the twelve most recent fills anywhere on the floor, any asset, newest first, with what sold, how much, at what price and when. Nobody's name is on it. Click a row and it takes you to that asset's book.

Two kinds of order

You trade two ways.

  • A limit order sets your price and waits. A sell (an ask) escrows your goods, a buy (a bid) escrows your gloo, and it rests on the book until someone crosses it or you cancel. Cancel and the escrow comes straight back.
  • A market order takes the best price on the book right now, fills at once, and stops. It never rests and never uses one of your resting slots. A market buy stops when your gloo runs out; a market sell of a raw material that runs past the last bid falls through to the vendor floor, so you always get something.

You can keep 24 orders resting at once, priced anywhere from 1 to 50,000,000 gloo, up to 999 units each. That 24 is shared with anything you have listed at Sticky Situations, so a wall of cosmetic listings eats into the orders you can keep on the Exchange.

Either way a fill happens at the resting order's price, oldest first, so a large order can fill against several resting orders at their different prices. A limit order that only partly fills leaves the rest resting.

Selling needs a licence

Buying is never gated. Neither is crafting, nor trading face to face, nor buying from a vendor. Selling is, on three surfaces: an ask on the Exchange, a listing at Sticky Situations, and the vendor floor.

To sell on those three you need the trading licence, a nine quest chain from Broker Rook on the Exchange floor. It replaced the old level 15 rule on 15 August 2026. A deposit of 1 SOL at the Bank, counted over the lifetime of the wallet, opens the same three doors without the chain.

The black market player shops and the land sale board are not gated. Neither is a direct trade. The whole chain is on The Trading Licence.

The floor runs around the clock

The Exchange is built to run on a bell, real market hours with an opening auction that clears every resting order at once. For the alpha the bell is off and the floor trades all day and all night. When it switches on, this page will say so.

There is also a market maker built for the floor, an NPC that rests quotes so there is always a price to trade against. It trades from a fixed, audited bankroll, never touches the world's material pools, and only ever sells materials it bought from players first. It is not running on the live world today. Every price you see on the Exchange right now was put there by a player.

Crafting destroys the inputs

Crafting turns raw materials into goods, and the inputs are destroyed in the making. So everything refined is scarcer than what it came from, by construction.

Trade face to face

You do not always need the Exchange. Type /trade @name in chat, or hit the trade icon beside a friend in the social panel, and they get an invite.

An invite has to be accepted before anything opens. The other soul sees who is asking and can say yes or ignore it; until they say yes, nothing appears on their screen and nothing of yours is locked up. A stranger cannot put a window in front of you while you are in the middle of a fight.

Once it is accepted the trade window opens for both of you. Each side puts up gloo and items, both press Accept, and the swap happens at once: both sides move together or neither moves. Change anything and both Accepts re-arm, so nobody can swap the goods out from under a yes.

The rules of a direct trade:

  • You must be in the same room, within about 2 tiles of each other. Walk apart and it aborts.
  • While a trade window is open you stay put. Trading is a thing you stop to do, not something you do while running.
  • Up to 8 stacks and 1,000,000 gloo per side.
  • The window lives 2 minutes, then closes itself.
  • No fee at all. A direct trade is a gift, not a fill, so nothing is burned.

A direct trade moves value only, it never mints. Even person to person, the world's supply is conserved. It is also the one fee free way to hand someone a cosmetic without going through a shop.

gloo, SOL and $GLUE

gloo connects to $GLUE at the Bank in Glueburg. Bring SOL and the Bank buys gloo for you; cash gloo out and it pays SOL back. Every swap carries a 5% fee, and half of that fee is spent buying $GLUE on the open market and burning it, the same buy and burn the track runs. The other half funds the town treasury.

Cash outs are paid only from real reserves, capped at 10 SOL per wallet a day, and the treasury can never pay out more than came in. The live $GLUE price still sets the dollar reading on every surface. This is real money moving on chain, so treat it like it. See The Bank.

The honest note

Scarcity here is a game mechanic, not investment advice. Things run out because that makes a world worth playing in, not because anything is promised to go up. It is a game. Play it like one.