Trading Post: Distant Colonies

Trading Post

Craft a Trading Post, order goods from six distant specialist colonies, and watch a cargo plane fly the route and airdrop your purchase by parachute.

What it does

• A living market, not a shop. Six colonies — Woodcutters, Desert Traders, Stonemasons, Miners' Guild, Farmers' Collective, Ocean Traders — each hold stock that depletes when you buy and regenerates over time. Prices move against supply: buy a colony down toward its reserve floor and the price climbs; sell into a glut and it falls. Large orders are priced progressively, so you pay more at the margin.
• Deliveries actually arrive. Purchases aren't teleported into your inventory. A freight plane flies a straight pass overhead, releases a parachute crate at the midpoint, and it lands near you as a real block you loot. Big orders split across multiple crates that scatter around you rather than overstuffing one. Once a crate is emptied it removes itself, so it never becomes clutter.
• The plane routes around terrain. Before it spawns, the game samples terrain along eight candidate headings and picks the flattest one, then flies high enough to clear it — including over chunks that aren't loaded yet.
• Colonies trade with each other. In the background, colonies import from one another along hand-authored demand links, and occasionally place a large one-off order for construction materials. Prices are shaped by an economy that runs whether or not you're watching.
• Modpack-friendly by design. The catalog is tag-driven, not a hardcoded item list. Any mod that tags its ingot forge:ingots or its wood minecraft:logs shows up automatically, priced from its own rarity — no per-item configuration needed.
• Editable without recompiling. Pack authors and server owners can add items or reprice existing ones via a datapack — drop a JSON file, no Java required. See the GitHub README for the format.

Getting started

Craft a Trading Post with an emerald, a chest, and any planks:

E

PCP

PPP

Place it, right-click to open the market, and buy something. Emeralds are the currency — sell back into the same market to earn them.

Configuration

config/trading_post-common.toml covers market tuning (regeneration rate, price band, reserve floor/ceiling), the background colony economy, and delivery behavior (flight speed, altitude, terrain clearance, parachute fall time, landing search radius).

Links

Source, issue tracker, and full documentation: //github.com/jordstyer/trading-post" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">https://github.com/jordstyer/trading-post" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">https://github.com/jordstyer/trading-post

License

MIT — free to include in modpacks without asking.