Unpriced materials are valued from their recipe
When a material has never traded, the game no longer guesses a flat price for it. It now works the cost out from the material's own production recipe, so builder quotes and government buyout offers reflect what a thing actually takes to make.
Most materials in the world are industrial intermediates that citizens never buy at retail, so many of them have no trades, no market index and no reference price. Until now anything in that position was valued at a flat figure — the same number for a pane of glass, a sheet of aluminium and a delivery van.
That figure was wrong in both directions at once. It valued silicon at well over ten times what it costs to make, and a delivery van at a fraction of it. Worse, the relative values it produced came from recipe yields rather than from cost, so a material whose recipe turns a few units of input into many looked cheap purely because of the recipe's shape.
The game now rolls the recipe graph up from the extraction tier — mines, wells, farms, quarries — and derives a cost for every material that something produces, then marks it up. Where a real market exists, the market still decides; this only changes what happens when nothing has ever traded.
You will see it in the "extra supplies" line of a construction quote, in what a builder pays for its own fuel and tool wear, and in the materials estimate behind a government buyout offer.