API

The API portion of the Market system is used to hook all of the subsequent mechanics such as but not limited to the Cults system, Nations system, and the Quests system.

The Market API acts as an intermediary between consumer and provider plugins on the server, by allowing them to easily hook together using our API.

Provider plugins are those which offer a service within the server. Example providers would be something such as LuckPerms (permissions), TheNewEconomy (economy), and VentureChat (chat). Consumer plugins are those which utilize a provider plugin, such as JobsReborn (economy consumer).

Why not use [insert name here] economy plugin?

There are various economy APIs already on the market such as Vault and, recently, Treasury (which we have been influenced heavily by) however these APIs are designed for wide use by the public. Therefore they are designed to fill a wide range of general purposes without any specialization for more niche or specific specialized use cases such as those that may arise with the nature of something like this project.

Vault served as (and currently still serving as) the leading Economy API for more than a decade now. However, that plugin hasn’t been updated for the past several years besides simple maintenance updates and introduces no new features. It provides no support for something such as multiple currencies (i.e. John has 9 coins and 4 tokens), transactional history, more verbose economy responses (Vault simply states that a transaction has failed without providing a reason as to why it failed), or even transaction events.

Treasury is a more recent API that hit the market at the start of 2022 and is (at the time of writing this page) currently going through a massive rewrite that has resulted in it being mostly unusable in its current state. However, it addresses a lot of the issues with Vault that were listed above. Our API is modeled heavily after Treasury which is reflected in the proposed hierarchy.

Gringotts, although not marketted as a standalone Economy API, does have functionality to act as one. It is the first (and iirc only) publically available plugin to use the concept of physical items translated into currency. We can use their repository as reference when building our system as their system is proven to work.

HyperConomy is the last plugin on this list that provides a decent API and infact already had a way of creating per-region markets as well as dynamic price changing. Our system is modeled similar to theirs in that aspect but HyperConomy suffered from countless bugs, was abandoned by its developers, and wasn’t very user or server operator friendly. That being said, the concept was great and we can learn a lot from them and their shortcomings. You can consider our Market system as an upgraded, more refined version of HyperConomy.

Integration

The main benefit of creating an Economy API from scratch is complete control over what goes into it. The goal of the API is to integrate seamlessly with projects such as Nodes for example.