Hello there,

I'm here with an idea that could be implemented, adding a new shop option for the plugin. This one would be the Auction NPC, NPCs connected worldwide that any player can put their own items and the price they are looking for, setting a time too before the bid is closed.

So for example, Alex would put 64wheat for 1golden nugget for 24hrs

Then players would check the auction menu from any auction NPC and if they have the item asked for, they can bid. The highest bidder receives the wheat, the others that participated would get back their items.

So for example, I would see the 64wheat and bid 1golden nugget. after 24hrs I check the Auction NPC again and find that it was closed, someone by the name of Steve bid 2golden nuggets and received the 64wheat. And I receive back the 1golden nugget I bid.

This sounds like an idea for different/new plugin. I am not sure yet if this fits the scope of the Shopkeepers plugin.. this would probably not be able to use the villager trading interface for any aspect of this.

There are also a few aspects that would need to be considered / make this more complicated:

• It will likely make sense to not arbitrarily limit this to one global auction house. And for there to be multiple on-going auctions at the same time.
• This would require the capability of linking different shopkeepers across the world to the same shop instance / auction house in this case: There is already another long pending ticket to implement something like that #1
• This would require storing the items of all the players that participated in the bidding to be able to either later return their items, or let them pick them up again. So far, the Shopkeepers plugins intentionally uses chests in the world to store the items of players. This has the benefit that the items of player are not lost if the plugin is removed, or if there is some bug that wipes all plugin data.
• Automatically returning the items to players can be tricky. At the time the bidding ends the players might be offline or their inventory might not be able to hold the items. Dropping the items is also not an option because the player might currently be afk, in a fight, or in another situation in which it would not be safe to drop the items. I would probably prefer it to have the players pick up the items from the auction house themselves at their own convenience.
• One might not want to store the items of players for arbitrarily long durations. Players should probably be forced to first pick up their items from a previous bidding phase, before they can participate in new biddings. And if the player no longer plays on the server, the items would need to be removed again from storage at some point.
• This would probably require notifications to be sent to all online players, and/or at least the players that are participating in the bidding. Also, if the players were offline when the bidding ended, these notifications would probably need to be stored for them so that they can receive them once they join the server again.

Currently I don't see something like this to be added to Shopkeepers any time soon.