[PeterisP]

You can't have a meaningful economy if significant parts of that economy are 'magical' such as bucketloads of spawned NPCs getting bucketloads of scullcaps out of nowhere.

Expecting a reasonable supply/demand for something that gets spawned without limit, and gets harvested as a side-effect of something people want to do anyway, is like expecting a supply/demand based trade in candy wrappers or banana peels; The obvious economic value for most NPC drops is zero, and artificial price fixing is required to make it something else.

[jghn]

Or, if one sticks to their supply/demand guns the skullcaps become worthless and either are avoided by players as a cheap way to skill up or it becomes a gold sink. Both are useful.

NB that in early UO, skullcaps weren’t a drop, they were mass produced as they were the most cost effective way to build stats and skills. Doubly so if shopkeepers would actually pay for them