How to Use Albion Market Data

Every profit calculator, flipping tool, and crafting advisor you use on Albion Codex is reading the same underlying price feed: the Albion Online Data Project, or AODP - plus, increasingly, prices captured by our own players through the Codex Client. This guide explains where those numbers come from, how to tell when a price is stale, what the Codex badge and the violet “Est.” pill mean, and how to turn a wall of buy orders into a craft that actually pays.

Albion Online does not publish its market prices anywhere. The game shows them to you inside the market window and that is it - no stats page on their website, no in-game chart, no way for a tool like this one to read them directly. Sandbox Interactive runs the servers and keeps the pricing data to itself.

The Albion Online Data Project (AODP) is a community-run service that fills that gap. Players around the world install a small background program, and every time one of them walks up to a market window in-game, the program quietly reads the prices off the screen and sends them to a shared database. That database is free, public, and read by every serious Albion tool on the internet.

In plain terms: AODP is the reason any Albion tool can show you live prices at all. The price charts, the flipping sites, the crafting calculators - they all read from the same community feed. Albion Codex is no different. When you open our Market Browser or click into the Crafting Calculator, you are reading numbers that were entered by real players walking past real market stalls, minutes or hours ago.

Because AODP depends on real players walking past market stalls with the client running, the freshness of any given price comes down to traffic. A T4 bag in Martlock has dozens of players checking it every hour and the price you see is almost always current. A T8 niche weapon in Thetford might only update once a day, or once a week, and the number you see on the screen could be from the last patch.

This is the single most important thing a new market user needs to understand. The price is not wrong because the tool is broken. It is old because nobody has opened that exact market tab in-game recently. Every AODP price carries a timestamp, and every serious tool shows it. If you do not check the timestamp you will eventually craft a hundred items at a price that no longer exists.

A good rule of thumb: high-volume items (T4–T6 common gear, refined mats, food staples, tier-4 bags and capes) are reliable within an hour. Mid-volume items (T7 common gear, most potions, city-specialty bonuses) are reliable within a day. Anything T8, niche, or enchanted above .2 should be double-checked in-game before you commit serious silver.

And sometimes you will see a plain dash - “-” - instead of a number. That does not mean the tool is broken. It means nobody has ever sent AODP a snapshot for that exact item, in that exact city, at that exact quality and enchant. Nothing to average, nothing to show. When that happens you have three options: check a different city (the same item in Martlock might have a fresh price), open the market in-game yourself and the dash will usually fill in within the hour, or skip that item for now and pick something with active liquidity. A dash is a question, not a warning.

Every price row in Albion Codex - and in any AODP-powered tool - gives you four things. Learn to read them in this order and you will never get burned by a bad number.

• Sell price minimum. The cheapest active sell order. This is what you pay if you walk up and buy right now. Use it as your material cost when you are pricing a craft.
• Buy price maximum. The highest active buy order. This is what you receive if you want an instant sale instead of listing and waiting. Use it as your sell price when you are pricing a fast-turnover flip.
• City. Prices are per city, not global. The same T6 broadsword can be 40k in Lymhurst (the sword bonus city) and 55k in Thetford. The whole game of flipping and crafting-for-profit lives in that gap.
• Timestamp. The last time a real player sent AODP a snapshot of that exact market tab. If the row says “3 days ago”, treat the number as a rough guide, not a commitment.

The gap between buy price and sell price is the market spread. Crafters live on the sell side because they are producing an item and listing it at or just under the lowest sell order. Flippers live on both sides because they are buying from sell orders in one city and listing into buy orders in another.

Here is the part that matters to you: the profit numbers you see on every calculator in Albion Codex are real numbers, not made-up estimates. When the Crafting Calculator tells you a T6 broadsword nets 18,400 silver, that number was built from live AODP prices for the actual materials, in the actual city you picked, minus the actual marketplace tax and station fee. If the market moves, the number moves with it. Nobody is hand-typing profit averages into a spreadsheet somewhere.

The way it works under the hood is simple. Every economy tool on the site pulls a fresh price from AODP when you load the page, then runs the math on top. The math itself never changes - return rate, tax, station fee, city bonus - but the prices do. That means even when the market is quiet for a few hours you still get a working calculator with the last known price, clearly marked with its timestamp so you can decide whether to trust it.

The tools that touch AODP directly are the Market Browser (live prices across every Royal city), Crafting Calculator (prices flow into every recipe's profit line), Refining Calculator (turns raw materials into refined with real city bonuses applied), Flipper (finds the widest buy/sell spreads between cities), Black Market (compares Royal sell prices against Caerleon Black Market buy orders), and Materials Lookup (a one-screen watchlist for every refined material in every Royal city).

Every one of those tools shows the timestamp of the price it is using. Read the timestamp before you trust the output. That one habit separates players who profit from the market from players who complain that calculators lie.

Here is the loop for a simple cross-city play using nothing but AODP prices and the Materials tool. It takes about five minutes and it is one of the safest first trades for a new silver-maker.

1. Open the Materials tool. Filter to T6 refined (steel bars, for example). You get a row per city showing the sell minimum and buy maximum with timestamps.
2. Find the cheapest sell order. Say Martlock is listing T6 steel at 980 silver while Fort Sterling is buying the same bar at 1,180. That is a 200-silver-per-unit spread before tax.
3. Check the timestamps. If both rows are fresh (under an hour old), the spread is real. If Fort Sterling is three days stale, assume the buy order has already been eaten and verify in-game before committing.
4. Apply the market tax. A Premium instant-sell into a buy order loses 4% to tax. That brings 1,180 down to 1,133. Your profit per bar is 153 silver, minus travel risk.
5. Buy the stack, run the route. Load a transport mount, move the bars from Martlock to Fort Sterling using the safest route you know, and instant-sell into the buy order on arrival. A stack of 500 bars nets you roughly 76k silver on a ten-minute route.

None of those numbers came out of thin air. They came out of the same AODP feed that you are reading right now. Once you trust the timestamp and the spread, the rest of the trade is just showing up.

For a deeper dive on the other side of the same coin - moving Royal gear into Caerleon for the Black Market premium - see the Black Market Flipping guide. It uses the exact same price feed, just on a different route and a different risk profile.

The reason you have any market data to read is that players run a lightweight client in the background while they play. Every time one of them opens a market window in-game, the client reads the pricing packets off the network, anonymises them, and forwards them on. If you want niche items and your home city updated more often, the fastest fix is to run a client yourself while you browse your regular markets. It is completely optional and has no effect on your game.

The client to run is the Codex Client - our own free desktop app (Windows, currently in alpha). It does everything a market client does and contributes straight to Albion Codex, so the prices you refresh show up here first. As a bonus it also auto-imports your Destiny Board, so your specs fill in on the site without you typing a thing. One app, both jobs.

The client requires packet-capture privileges because it reads Albion's UDP traffic off your network interface. It never reads your password, your account, or anything outside your Destiny Board and the market windows you open, and it never modifies the game. It is built on the open-source Albion Online Data Project client (MIT).

We also pull from the public Albion Online Data Project network as a backstop, so the site still has prices in cities no Codex player has visited yet - and players on macOS or Linux (the Codex Client is Windows-only for now) keep feeding the site through that public network. Once your client is running, every market tab you open in Albion contributes a fresh price snapshot. Do your normal shopping round - hit every city you care about, open the materials tab, then the armor tab, then the weapons tab - and within a minute the prices here are ones you personally refreshed.

The Codex Client does more than spot prices. While you play, every market window you browse in-game is read off the network and uploaded - and beyond the current sell and buy prices, it also captures market price history, gold prices, and other market signals (like the game's own market-value figure) that feed our estimation engine. That is the feed behind the numbers on this site, alongside the public AODP network.

Why does a second feed matter? Freshness. For every item, city, and quality, Albion Codex serves whichever observed price is newer - AODP or the Codex network. When a Codex-captured price wins, it gets a small teal Codex badge next to it. That badge does not mean the number is special math - it is a real observed price, exactly like an AODP one, just captured more recently by one of our players. Hover the badge and the tooltip tells you how long ago it was captured. The network also acts as a safety net: when AODP itself has an outage, Codex-captured prices keep the site serving instead of going dark.

Contributing is the same five-minute setup as the Destiny Board auto-import, because it is the same app: grab the client from the download page, link it to your free account, and play normally. It only reads your Destiny Board and the market windows you open - nothing else leaves your PC. Every market you browse makes the prices fresher for everyone, including you.

Remember the dash from Part 02 - the item nobody has scanned recently? Albion Codex has a third tier of price for exactly that case: an estimate. When there is no observed price for an exact item, city, and quality, our Price Intelligence engine models one from two directions: what the item would cost to craft (its materials at live prices) and the item's own price history. When those agree, the estimate is solid; when there is little to go on, the engine says so instead of pretending.

That honesty is built into the display. An estimated price is rendered in violet italics with an Est. pill, so it can never be mistaken for an observed gold or teal price, and its tooltip shows a reliability grade: High, Medium, or Low. High is reserved for estimates backed by a tight, stable price history; an estimate leaning mostly on craft cost never rates above Medium. Treat High as “safe to plan around”, Medium as “sanity-check in-game before committing serious silver”, and Low as “better than nothing, worse than a fresh scan”.

Estimates are opt-in. The Market Browser, the crafting calculators, and the Focus Planner all keep them behind a “Show estimates” toggle that is off by default - flip it on when you would rather see a graded guess than a dash. The one exception is the Watch List, where estimates are always on: items you deliberately pinned should never go blank just because nobody scanned them in the last few hours.