What is the Cartel Market in SWTOR?

The Cartel Market in SWTOR is an in-game store where you spend Cartel Coins to buy in-game items, mostly cosmetic, including armor, mounts, pets, and decorations for your stronghold.

How to Open the Cartel Market

To open the Cartel Market, use the yellow-orange-gold icon of a Cartel Coin on the far right of the main menu and choose Cartel Market. The default keybind to open the Cartel Market is CTRL+M.

You can only open the Cartel Market in-game – there’s no way to see or purchase its items online.

What is available on the Cartel Market?

In general, these types of items are sold on the Cartel Market:

• Armors
• Mounts
• Pets
• Decorations
• Dyes
• Weapons
• Crystals
• Tunings
• Account Unlocks
• Appearances
• Companions

What exact items are available for purchase on the Cartel Market changes frequently. The daily sale may feature an item that is not normally seen for direct-sale on the Cartel Market, and weekly or scheduled sales also often switch-up what is available.

If you search for a Cartel Market item on the Cartel Market, and it’s not showing up, that means you’ll either need to wait for it to re-appear on the Cartel Market, or you’ll need to find a different way to get it.

What are Cartel Coins?

Cartel Coins are a type of currency in Star Wars: The Old Republic.

Unlike all other types of currency in the game, you can buy Cartel Coins directly with real-world dollars at swtor.com/buy, and you also get 500 Cartel Coins each month included as part of your monthly rewards if you subscribe to the game.

In addition, there are also ways to earn Cartel Coins for free.

1. Adding a Security Key to you account gets you 100 free Cartel Coins per month.
2. Cartel Coin Achievements
3. Galactic Seasons

You can see how many Cartel Coins you have in the bottom-left of the Cartel Market.

Where else can you get Cartel Market items?

You can also buy a large majority of Cartel Market items with Credits from other players on the GTN, the player-run market. What is available on the GTN, and how much it costs, is fully decided by the player base and your server’s economy.

Credits are the main in-game currency earned from questing, dropped from almost every enemy, and used by most vendors across the game. Unlike Cartel Coins, they are earned by players, and can not be directly purchased for real-world dollars. This means almost every Cartel Market item can be “earned” – you just need to earn enough credits to buy it from other players.

Smart players will always look up the cost of an item in credits before spending Cartel Coins on the Cartel Market, as items can often be quite affordable on the GTN compared to their Cartel Coin cost. You may also wish to purchase items with Credits instead of Cartel Coins so that you can save your Cartel Coins for other purchase that only accept Cartel Coins, for example Collection Unlocks, or to save up for rare Cartel Market items that are prohibitively expensive on the GTN.

Collections

The Collections system is a way of unlocking Cartel Market items across your entire account, for all your characters on every server. Any Cartel Market armor set, mount, emote, color crystal, weapon, pet, toy, title, cartel companion or flair can be unlocked through collections. Items from the Cartel Market are easy to identify by the small Cartel Coin symbol on the bottom left of their item icon. The only items that can not be unlocked through collections that have this symbol on them are dyes – the only way to get multiple copies of a dye is by buying them individually.

SWTOR Collections Guide

Cartel Market Sales

Keep your eyes open for Cartel Market sales when you are online, because you can sometimes find some really good deals. There are two main sales you should check.

The first is the daily sale. It is a random item on ale for a random percentage off, that only lasts 24-hours. We do not know the schedule for daily sales.

The second is the sale tab. The sale tab has the currently-on-sale items. I recommend going to the On Sale tab and sorting by price, as you can sometimes find items up to 90% off! Sometimes the developers announce these sales, other times they are a surprise, and sometimes they announce the sale but not the exact items or prices.

What should you buy with your Cartel Coins?

In general, buy any cosmetic items that look fun or cool to you! Players often use their Cartel Coins to get armors, or mounts, or dyes, or color crystals… the main thing you can purchase with them is fun cosmetic items. There’s no right or wrong item to buy if you like the way it looks.

Account Unlocks for Free-to-Play

Star Wars: The Old Republic offers two main ways to play – Free-to-Play and Subscribed (and technically Preferred, which is similar to Free-to-Play, but with a few more perks).

Free-to-play players have restrictions attached to their account, as the free-to-play version of the game is like a giant demo of the full game. However some of these restrictions can be removed by purchasing items from the Cartel Market. I do not recommend purchasing Cartel Coins to purchase these items, and only really recommend purchasing them if you have earned Cartel Coins other ways and would like to play as a former subscriber.

The most well-known and most expensive is [Artifact Equipment Authorization] at 1,300 Cartel Coins. This allow you to earn and equip purple and gold-bordered gear, usually considered the best in the game. This item is not needed for subscribers, who while subscribed, have the unlock for free. However, if you are not subscribed, there is no real need to purchase this item, as you very likely won’t be running any difficult content where you would need that type of gear.

Others, like Cargo Hold access, become automatically and permanently available the first time you subscribe, and stay even after you unsubscribe and become a Preferred player.

An unlock to access Companion Appearances can be purchased for 320 CC per character or 720 CC for the entire account. Subscribers already have this.

Free-to-play and preferred players can not choose to hide their helmets or masks. The unlock for free-to-play and preferred players costs 280 CC per character or 750 CC per account. Alternatively, the player can choose not to wear a helmet at all for easier content, to wear a helmet or mask they like the look of, or wear smaller headpiece like a circlet.

Section X is a weird unlock, it unlocks one specific area of a planet that subscribers get for free. It also gives access to the HK-55 companion quest.

The species unlocks are also a bit all over the place. Visit the Species Guide for more info.

Lastly, there are a lot of minor unlocks available for purchase. Some can instead be bought with Credits, which is usually recommended when available, like for extra outfit slots.

Cartel Market Items

There are literally thousands of different Cartel Market items added to the game from over the years.

• Cartel Market Armors
• Cartel Market Dyes
• Cartel Market Weapons
• Cartel Market Mounts
• Cartel Market Pets
• Cartel Market Crystals
• Cartel Market Flairs (top section)
• Cartel Market Companions (Cartel Market section)
• Cartel Market Companion Customizations (sorted by Companion)
• Cartel Market Toys (sorted by type)
• Cartel Market Tunings (sorted by weapon type)
• Cartel Market Emotes (sorted by type)
• Cartel Market Species (sorted by species)

Is the Cartel Market the only way to get cool items?

NO! There are many other items you can earn in-game! It’s one of the main reasons I started these huge databases cataloging what’s in-game – to show off how many non-Cartel Market items there are to collect and pursue.

• Armor
• Decorations
• Weapons
• Mounts
• Pets
• Crystals
• Dyes
• Flairs
• Companions
• Customizations
• Toys
• Emotes