Board Thread:Bug Reports/@comment-26141035-20150508070239

There are currently multiple traders that appear to be configured wrong in that they allow the creation of nearly limitless funds. I will attempt to explain both below and provide a summary of the changes needed to fix the problem.

Stone Tools:

Currently you can sell stone tools to NPCs that utilize tools of that type (Hobbit Orcharders will buy stone axes for 7 coins). This alone is bad enough, but you can buy the wood for the handles from them for 2/8ths of a coin per tool and the stone can be purchased from a Blue Dwarf Miner (and others) for 3/8ths of a coin per tool. This gives a profit of 6.375 coins per tool produced. This can be resolved by reducing the buy price on stone tools to 1 coin which leaves a profit of 0.375 coins per tool (meaning it isn't worth it unless you take the time to do the gathering yourself).

Iron Values:

A player can currently buy iron for as low as 5 coins/ea from a Dwarf Miner and sell them for as much as 9-10 coins/ea at a Elven Smith (any variant). This produces an almost 100% profit (doubling investment) with the only effort being finding a Dwarven Miner to make the purchase from (a second player can keep the dwarf loaded while you run back and forth repeatedly doubling your money). The simplest solution is to increase the cost of iron while decreasing the buy price so that you can only break even in the best case scenario. In my testing modifying the values up/down (respectively) by 4 almost completely resolves this issue.

There are more than a few other stray problems, but these are what I consider to be the two most serious threats to the in-game economy currently. 