How did you decide which commodities to get their prices adjusted? And there's a follow-up question at the bottom. I ask because there are some rather big plot holes in commodities, which spreads out into other things (like mining).
For example - we can mine gold. That's pretty cool.
We can also mine bauxite and sell it for an average price of about 1,000 credits/ton. And that's where tings stop making sense. Let me explain.
Bauxite is refined into aluminium oxide, and you need 1.9-3.6 tons of bauxite to produce 1 ton of aluminum oxide. Aluminium oxide is ~53% aluminium per weight (it's AL2O3), which means we need 3.6 to 6.7 tons of bauxite to produce 1 ton of aluminium. Bear with me.
As an aluminium refinery we have now spent between 3,600 and 6,700 credits to get the raw materials to make one ton of aluminium. We then put this on the market, which has an average price of less than 500 credits per ton, and we're looking at a profit margin of negative 3,100 to 6,200 credits per ton.
But wait - there's more!
We can refine pure gold, but for some reason our shipboard refinery cannot refine pure aluminium.
"But wait!" I hear you say. "Bauxite is the main source of gallium, and gallium is worth a lot of money!" This is true - gallium averages around 6,500 credits per ton. But it only exists in trace amounts in bauxite. Even assuming that this means 10%, you'd need 10 tons of bauxite to get 1 ton of gallium. Se we'd spend 10,000 credits to get 6,500 credits worth of gallium and 3 tons of aluminium worth less than 1,500 credits, netting us a total profit of negative 2,000 credits.
I am sure there are other even worse examples of things that make no sense whatsoever, this is just the one I stumbled upon.
My follow-up question is this - is this something you think needs to be addressed? To my mind, a lot of the imbalances would be smoothed out if the value of commodities reflected the value of the other commodities it's used in (as in the example above).