The auction house

Listing an owned car, bidding, settlement, and what the single server scope means.

Auction = {
    Enabled = true,
    OpenKey = Enum.KeyCode.H,
    MinDurationSeconds = 60,
    MaxDurationSeconds = 3600,
    DefaultDurationSeconds = 300,
},

Press H to open the panel. A player lists a car they own with a starting price and a duration, everybody in the server sees it, and the highest bid at the end wins.

Listing

Rule
Must own the car	Issued duty vehicles cannot be listed
One listing per car per seller	A second attempt is refused
Starting price	Floored at zero
Duration	Clamped between `MinDurationSeconds` and `MaxDurationSeconds`

The car stays in the seller's garage while it is listed. They can drive it, sell it back to the dealership, or auction a second car at the same time.

Bidding

Rule
The first bid	Must at least match the starting price
Later bids	Must beat the current bid by at least one
The seller	Cannot bid on their own listing
Affordability	Checked against the live balance when the bid is placed

Bids are not held in escrow

Nothing is deducted when a bid is placed. The money is only taken at settlement, and the balance is checked again then.

So a player can bid on three cars with enough money for one, or bid high and spend the money before the timer runs out. In the second case the sale simply fails and nobody gets anything.

If your economy is tight, keep durations short. Five minutes, the shipped default, leaves little room for it.

Settlement

The timer is checked every two seconds. When a listing expires:

Condition	Outcome
A bidder, both players present, seller still owns it, bidder can pay	The car and the money change hands
Any of those fails	No sale. The seller is told, and keeps the car

There is no partial state. The transfer happens as one step or not at all.

The seller receives the full winning bid. The system takes no cut, which is worth considering: an auction house with no fee is a perfectly efficient way to move money between players, and a small percentage fee is the usual way to drain some of it back out.

Single server

Auctions are per server and live in memory only

Listings are held in one server's memory. Players in other servers cannot see or bid on them. Nothing is written to a DataStore.

A server restart destroys every open listing with no notice to anybody, and a seller who leaves has their listings cancelled immediately, mid-auction, even if somebody has bid.

That makes the feature best suited to games where players gather in one busy server. For a game spread across many small servers, most listings will expire having been seen by nobody.

Buying a locked car second hand

An auction transfers ownership directly and does not consult the vehicle's Permissions. A player who buys a gamepass-locked car at auction owns it outright.

Whether that is a hole depends on what the lock is for. If the lock exists to sell a gamepass, keep those cars out of the auction house by disabling the feature or by giving them a lock that also stops them being useful, such as pad restrictions the buyer cannot reach.

Issued duty vehicles are safe: they are never owned, so they can never be listed.

Turning it off

Auction.Enabled = false refuses listings and bids and stops the panel doing anything. Nothing is stored, so there is nothing left behind.

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