Polymers selling for 8800 Cr/ton

[NecasekO]

So, I just made over 5 million Cr profit hauling one ship full (696 tons) of VERY LOW value, HIGH SUPPLY commodity to a system less than 5 Ly away.

Can anyone explain why polymers, of all things, are selling for roughly 30x their galactic average price?

The system is somewhat unusual, with just one station orbiting a star (no planets at all) at around 9000 Ls distance. Controlling faction was in investment, civil liberty and expansion states. Medium security, Aisling Duval control system.

It seems there is something going on with polymers, I have seen high prices (4k / ton) elsewhere. This is a total outlier, no other commodity has anywhere near the profit margins from what I can tell. Or are there other very common, legal commodities that sell for 8k/ton profit in specific system states?

 

[777Driver]

Selling for 9000+ cr/t in a lot of systems, been like that since the beta went live. You can buy it for 32cr/t

Good profits, but mission haulage still pays way more (in the right area) A nice money maker for starter traders that have too low rep to get the lucrative haulage missions.

Once found a remote system that was selling Thorium at a very good price, it sells for 12,000cr/t. If you get a Thorium haulage mission you are looking at up to 50 million credits, very rare though, haven't seen any thorium trucking missions since the last big update. Gonna take a while for my usual spots to sort themselves out, some are probably destroyed forever after the BGS reset.

 

[SpaceScania]

With the void opal craze it is nice to see other space truckers still plying the trade routes. Thanks for the tip CMDR!

 

[FrogsFriend]

Found something similar with Military Grade Fabrics last week. Not quite as lucrative at approx. 6k profit, buying from a station that produced them for a few hundred and selling them one jump away, at a station that also produced them, but was willing to buy them at 7k or so. Very strange.

 

[PhanttoM]

That's pretty consistent with what Will Flanagan said when people panicked about nerfs during the initial Void Opal rush.

(Added emphasis on relevant part)

Hello Commanders,

We wanted to address some concerns you may have regarding the high value of one of the new mining commodities, Void Opals.

Changes to the Background Simulation, which came with Beyond – Chapter Four, mean that there are now more elements that impact the value of a commodity than there were previously. In the instance at Viktorenko Holdings, these elements have lined up for a limited time in a way that allow the faction to be able to offer high prices on specific commodities.

To confirm, this does mean that, at this time, we are not planning to reduce the value of Void Opals.

In addition to this, the more motherlodes (containing Void Opals) that Commanders encounter and mine from (in a ring), the rarer they will become, driving an emergent and natural rush that will force intrepid miners into new horizons, seeking lucrative mining hotspots before they deplete. Ultimately, with the new mining changes, this is something we want to celebrate!

As we've mentioned previously, the Background Simulation is continually being monitored and we may still need to apply some further fine tuning to ensure that the Simulation is as interesting and dynamic as we intended when making these changes.

In the meantime, go for gold! Happy holidays!

 

[NecasekO]

Thanks for the replies. While helpful, they still don't explain why polymers, and nothing else, sell for such a big profit. Say superconductors (commodity from the same group) at the same demand level sell just slightly above galactic average price.

I can understand the logic of say all food and medicine items selling with good profit at stations in some sort of emergency state (outbreak, alien invasion). I don't see the logic behind one specific, very unremarkable industrial commodity selling for huge profits.

 

[FrogsFriend]

It probably meant to be an occasional boost to trading related to systems in Boom/Investment (a 'motherload' for traders to find if you will) but with around a third of all inhabited systems currently in Boom or Investment it may be far more common than intended at the moment.

 

[Hank]

yes, since the last beta polymers have been very lucrative. I'm in the Pleiades and my home base there will pay ~3500 credits profit for a ton of the stuff. Its been a very nice thing for a poor commander like me. 8k profit per ton (or unit) would be amazing. I don't know why polymers are so much in demand, but I don't care.

GL HF

 

[IndigoWyrd]

Polymers (plastic) are in high demand, to make all the display boxes for all the Void Opals people have been selling.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

Each BGS state has an effect on commodity prices and quantities - here's what they did in 3.2, I don't yet have enough data to re-run it for 3.3 so don't take any of the actual numbers as accurate: https://cdb.sotl.org.uk/effects

In 3.3 if a system has multiple states, the effect of the individual states is multiplied together. It looks in this case that Expansion has a really high multiplier for Polymers, Civil Liberty doesn't do much to them, and Investment helps a bit.

In general (core gems are an exception) the lower the base price of an item, the higher the multipliers are, so Polymers get a really big boost from this state combination, while Superconductors don't.

This means in theory that if you know the BGS state effects you can pick the exactly right good for the route and get a really high profit ... or if you're not sure and want to play it safe, you can just pick one of the ones with a high base price and be guaranteed some profit.

 

[NecasekO]

Thanks for the explanation Ian, that does make sense. That said, do you believe the system works as intended in case of Polymers? I mean making a super common and cheap commodity the most profitable thing to trade by a significant margin in certain states?

 

[Rowander]

I like the theory under the hood of the new expansion. Looks promising for traders once the BGS settles down. I still have nightmares every time I remember the weeks it took me to get my Anaconda trading with a 1.200cr per ton margin each way back in the day...