Shops and Trade

The shops in town are sims. They stand there with a sign over their head, they answer if you talk to them, and what they carry came out of the economy rather than out of nothing.

Reading a store sign

A sign has 29 characters — the client’s limit on a private-store message, not a choice. Everything else about a sign follows from that number.

The default

A shop names its goods, joined with |:

Suede | Iron Ore
Cloth | Leather | Animal Skin
Coarse Bone Powder

A buy shop puts WTB in front:

WTB Coal

When they do not fit

The sign gets shorter, never vaguer with a number. It walks a ladder and takes the first rung that fits:

Rung	Example
1. Name the goods plainly	`Suede
2. Abbreviate to trade shorthand	`SSD
3. Collapse to the category they share	D-grade shots
4. Name what fits, generalise the tail	`Skin
5. Truncate one name (last resort)	only when a single name blows the budget

Rungs combine — an abbreviated list whose tail still overflows generalises that tail.

The one rule a sign never breaks

A + on a store sign means enchant level, and only enchant level. Ever.

That has been true in Lineage 2 for twenty years: +8 beside an item is a sword +8, a helm +3. So a sign never carries a count suffix — not a bare +2, and not the softened +2 more either. A player skimming a crowded street reads the +2 before they read the more.

A player writes etc. A player never writes +2 more.

The shorthand

Rung 2 uses the trade vernacular a real seller types when the sign is cramped:

Item	Sign
Soulshot: D-grade	SSD
Blessed Spiritshot	BSpS
Coarse Bone Powder	CBP

A name the lexicon does not know comes back unchanged, and the next rung generalises it — rather than inventing an abbreviation nobody would recognise.

Talking to a shop

You can private-message a shop. This used to fail:

“i cannot pm a player who is shouting lfg cause i get error ‘Player is in offline mode.’”

— drizzlx, live 2026-08-03

Every sim is deliberately clientless — the same technique that keeps a real offline shop standing after its owner logs out — and the client’s own whisper path refuses anyone without a connection. It does not any more.

“and if u pm a shop they should respond with location description i think, like in talking island near the center.”

— drizzlx, same day

What you see: PM a shop and it tells you where it is standing, in landmarks rather than coordinates.

Everything that is not a message to one of our bodies is handled exactly as the game always handled it. Block lists, silence mode, chat bans and jail are untouched — a chat-banned player whispering a shop gets the refusal they always got.

The shouts you read in town

Four things a sim will say to the region. Each is grounded in something that exists:

You read	What is true behind it
WTS ...	A sell shop holding that stock, in that town
WTB ...	A buy shop that wants it and holds the adena to pay
lfg <zone>, <class> lvl <n>	A party-less hunter naming the zone it is heading to, not the town it is standing in
LF <class or role>	Answered by a free body of that kind in earshot

The chat is descriptive. It reads state that already exists; it mints nothing and moves no ledger. If a shout names a good, searching for that good finds that store.

Casual chatter is weighted by town: a busy hub shouts, a starter village barely does.

Where the goods come from

A sim killing a mob in a field does not carry loot home. Its work raises what that region holds in a ledger. A production graph turns regional stock into goods, a regional plan decides what each region needs, and the shops are where it surfaces.

Nothing is minted from nothing. Prices answer to supply, which means a week away is a market that moved without you.

.crystallize — the third exit for a drop

An unwanted drop has three exits. Vendoring it to an NPC is the bad one. Reselling needs somebody to want that exact item. Crystallizing always works.

Retail gates crystallization behind a Dwarven Artisan’s skill, so here it is a service a dwarf shop sells rather than something you do alone:

1. Target a dwarf craft shop.
2. Type .crystallize to list what you are carrying that can be broken down — this is the dashboard’s Crystallize page.
3. .crystallize <itemObjId> confirm to go through with it.

Target something else and it says so:

[crystallize] target a dwarf craft shop first — only a dwarf with the Crystallize skill can break gear down for you.

What to look out for

You see	Why it’s suspect
A +2 or +2 more on a store sign for something unenchantable	A defect. On a sign, + is an enchant level
A sign that names one item when the shop holds five	Rung 3 should have collapsed it to the shared category
A name cut mid-word	Rung 5 is the last resort — reaching it usually means a rung above it failed
A WTB shout for something the shop will not buy	The shout is meant to be grounded in real demand
An lfg shout naming the town the sim is standing in	The zone slot is the destination, not the location
Player is in offline mode. when you PM a shop	The whisper seam is not installed in that world

Related

Town life · Gear and wealth · Commands

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