Trade & Wealth

Trade is how a settlement pays for everything it can't produce, but it punishes breadth. Sell two or three goods heavily rather than six or seven lightly — a trading post spread across many goods becomes hopelessly inefficient, and every new export route costs coin to open, with the price climbing the more routes you already run.

Process before you sell. Raw resources are worth a fraction of their finished form — ore sells for roughly a third of what the tools made from it fetch, so exporting raw ore is barely worth the trip. The same logic makes sidearms a better use of iron than mail armour, since they cost half the slabs for a comparable price.

Importing food is how treasuries die, with one exception: wheat bought cheaply, baked into bread and sold on is genuinely profitable. Imports are for one-off needs — stone for a church, iron for an armoury — not monthly survival.

Bartering through pack stations sidesteps trade posts entirely, but it has no send limits, so never barter anything critical. Honey, wax, pelts and hides are safe because running them to zero costs you nothing; food is not, because an empty stock is a starving town.

Open the trade calculator