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:

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.

Trading Post: Distant Colonies