How We Track Auction Prices

We built the auction pages to answer a very normal Minecraft question: what is this item actually selling for right now? Instead of guessing, we run a snapshot job that checks the auction house, cleans the results, and stores a price point for each tracked item.

The important part is this: we do not invent a magic number. We read real auction listings, compare them fairly, and keep the cheapest valid per-item sample from that run.

The short version

• We search the DonutSMP auction API one item at a time.
• We check up to 10 pages and try to collect up to 10 usable listings for that item.
• We skip broken or mismatched listings.
• We convert every good listing into a per-item price.
• We save the cheapest valid sample into price history.

Why per-item price matters

Auction listings come in different sizes. One player might list 64 items, while another lists only 16. If we only compared total prices, the bigger stack would always look more expensive even when it is actually the better deal.

So we divide the total listing price by the item count. That gives us a fair price per item. It is the simplest way to compare apples to apples.

One honest limitation

This system is tuned to find the cheapest valid market sample quickly. That is useful for players who want a realistic buying price, but it also means one unusually cheap listing can pull the tracked value downward for that snapshot.