Path of Idle Market and Sanctum: what to buy, merge and convert

The most useful thing in either building is the Market’s vault. It sells legendary, set and unique equipment for runestones instead of gold, it opens at Market level 8, and refreshing it is free once you have bought anything at all. That is a far more reliable way to get a specific quality of item than opening chests.

Note that two things are called Vault in English. The Market’s vault sells equipment. The Warehouse has a tab with the same name and that one is storage.

The Market vault

The vault stocks 6 items, or 9 once all three slot upgrades are bought. Prices are paid in runestones of the quality your Market level has reached, in one family only: weapons and jewellery take attack runestones, armour takes defense runestones.

The pool weights individual pieces rather than qualities, which produces these odds:

Mythic only appears after you buy the mythic vault upgrade and reach chapter 10, and each piece carries a tenth of the weight the others do. A mythic item also costs three times as many runestones as anything else on the shelf.

The free refresh is the part to exploit. Buying the cheapest item on the shelf rerolls every slot, including the ones you did not buy. Runestones are taken from your bag only, so anything sitting in the warehouse does not count toward a price.

Buying and selling ordinary goods

The goods shelf holds 6 to 10 items at base, and 18 to 22 once six upgrades are bought. Its item level band is set by Market level, and Market level waits on a Stele tier of the same number: level 1 sells items at levels 1 to 4, level 5 sells 20 to 24, and it climbs in fives from there.

Buy prices run at six times the item’s trade value, then multiply by a per item roll between 80% and 119%. So the same item can cost meaningfully more or less depending on the roll, and there is no way to see a better price except to refresh.

Five upgrades cut buy prices by a combined 50%, and four raise sell prices by a combined 60%. Selling a forged item refunds 40% of what you spent forging it, which softens the cost of a mistake but does not remove it.

Chest odds for comparison are in the farming guide. The Market page has the full price tables, and gear quality covers which sell rates apply to which quality.

Orders

Orders unlock at Market level 4 and run for 100 stages. Each stage asks for a number of items at a minimum equipment level and a set of qualities, rising from 4 Fine items at level 1 in stage 1 to 6 Legendary, Set or Unique items at level 100 in stage 100.

Each completed stage pays three things: 5 Abyssal Scales, one Blood Crystal, and one of gold, blood or bone weighted 100 to 60 to 20 with 20% variance.

Both fixed rewards matter more than the resource does. Abyssal Scales are otherwise stuck at a flat campaign drop rate, so 500 of them across 100 stages is the largest supply increase available. Blood Crystals reroll a Godsworn’s attribute growth, which the Prison otherwise limits through the Conviction meter.

You get 2 free order refreshes, rising to 5 with three upgrades. Paid refreshes cost a Gazing Eye, the same curio Explore uses to relocate treasure islands.

One order upgrade is worth skipping. The node that widens the order reward range costs 2,700 bone and has no effect in the current build.

Sanctum: merging chests

The Sanctum merges small chests into bigger ones. Two recipes exist for equipment chests:

The chest level that comes out is capped by Sanctum level, which waits on a Stele tier of the same number. Sanctum level 10 caps merges at chest level 10, and only Sanctum 20 reaches chest level 20.

Five upgrades cut merge prices by a combined 50%, and five more raise the lucky outcome weight by a combined 75%, which is what makes the 8% and 3% upgrade rolls meaningfully more common.

Merge prices scale with chest level: a Common Chest merge costs 100 gold at chest level 1 and 2,680 at level 20; a Fine Chest merge costs 300 and 8,050.

Rune pouches merge too, three at a time: Common to Fine for 500 gold, then Fine to Rare, Rare to Legendary and Legendary to Mythic for 3,000 each. The first three carry a 5% chance to skip a quality, and three Legendary pouches always produce a Mythic.

Sanctum: converting and omens

Conversion turns chests into resources on a fixed mapping: Common Chests to gold, Fine Chests to blood, Rare Chests to bone. Yield scales with chest level, from 100 gold, 50 blood or 10 bone at chest level 1 up to 6,000, 3,000 or 600 at level 20.

Three upgrades raise conversion output by 45%. Three more give a free runestone chance up to 30%, and every 50 chests converted pays a rune pair regardless.

Curio merges exist as well, each costing 10,000 gold. Six Resonance Crystals become a Blood Crystal, which rerolls a Godsworn’s attribute growth. Six Void Stars become a Dark Star, which removes the last Inspire mastery from a Godsworn. Six Faith Skulls become a Crystallized Skull, which rerolls a Godsworn’s Mutated Skill. All three recipes have to be unlocked through Sanctum upgrades first.

Omens are a separate unlockable that spends resources on specific chests, with two upgrades cutting the price by a combined 30%. The Sanctum page lists what each omen can produce.

What to actually do

Push Market level and Sanctum level with the same urgency as Workshop level, because all three are gated by the same Stele tiers and all three cap something you will hit.

Get to Market level 8 for the vault, then use the free refresh aggressively. Buying one cheap item to reroll six or nine slots is the best runestone to gear conversion in the game.

Merge Common Chests you cannot open fast enough rather than hoarding them, since chest level is fixed at drop time and low chests only get less useful.

Convert Rare Chests to bone only when bone is genuinely the wall, because Rare Chests are also your best set piece source at 2.30% per chest.

Run orders continuously once they unlock. The scales and Blood Crystals alone justify it, and the item requirements are usually things you were going to have anyway.