Trading & Contracts

Trading is the oldest way to get rich on the water, and the principle is simple: every port wants different things. A good that’s produced cheaply in one harbour is in short supply — and dear — a few hours’ sail away. The profit isn’t in the goods; it’s in moving them. The game gives you two ways to deal — buy and sell on the spot, or post a standing contract — and one constant hazard: a loaded trader is a slow, lightly armed prize that other captains would love to take.

Why prices differ from port to port

Each port has its own production and consumption. Some harbours produce a resource locally, so it’s plentiful and cheap there; others consume that same resource heavily, so it’s scarce and commands a high price. Prices aren’t fixed — they drift with supply and demand, falling where goods pile up and rising where they’re wanted. That gap between a cheap source port and an expensive demand port is the entire basis of trade: buy where a good is abundant, carry it to where it’s needed, and pocket the difference. The farther apart the two ports — and the riskier the run — the bigger the gap tends to be.

Buying and selling at the market

Every port has a market (the shop and Admiralty trade screens) where you can buy or sell goods immediately at the going price, all in reals. Anything you buy lands in that port’s warehouse, and anything you sell comes out of it; from there you drag goods into your ship’s hold to carry them. Buying and selling on the spot is instant and simple — you take whatever price the market is offering right now, which moves as you and others trade.

Contracts: buy and sell orders

A contract is a standing order you leave at a port: an offer to buy a good at a price you name, or to sell one, that rests in the market until it’s filled. Instead of taking today’s price, you set your own and wait for the market — other players, and in some cases NPC traders — to meet it. A buy contract says “I’ll pay X for this”; a sell contract says “I’ll let this go for Y.” Open contracts show up against each good in the shop, so you can see what others are bidding and asking, and you collect a filled contract’s goods or money from the port where you placed it. On the peace server you can post a contract at any port; on the Main (war) server they’re limited to free ports and ports where the owning clan has granted contract rights, so where you can trade this way is itself contested.

Finding a profitable run

You don’t have to memorise which port wants what. The in-game Trader Tool lists current market prices for goods across ports and lets you sort by buying price, selling price, and distance — so you can find where a good is cheapest to buy, where it sells highest, and how far apart those ports are. It can also filter the list by a port’s nationality and estimate the travel time of a run, so you can narrow the search to ports you can safely reach and judge how long a route will take before committing to it. That last column matters as much as price: a fat margin across a long, exposed passage can be worse than a thin one on a short, safe hop, once you weigh in the risk of losing the cargo. (The Trader Tool reads the market, not player contracts, so it shows you the baseline, not every private deal on offer.) As a rule of thumb, Neutral and Dutch ports tend to carry extra supply of goods, which makes them reliable, cheap source ports to buy from.

The risk that rides with every cargo

Trading’s reward comes with a matching danger: a fully loaded merchant is slow, weakly armed, and worth a great deal — the most tempting target on the open sea. A trader isn’t slow merely for carrying cargo, though: in the current build you can fill up to roughly 65% of your hold volume before a speed penalty sets in, so light-to-moderate loads keep full speed while a stuffed hold loses the ability to run — see Sailing the Open World for how that threshold works. If you’re sunk or boarded, the cargo and the ship go with you, and in Naval Action that loss is permanent. The same fat margins that make a long run attractive exist because the run is dangerous. Manage that risk: sail trade routes you can defend or escape, keep early runs inside safer waters, and don’t load a hold with more than you can afford to lose.

Trade ships also have one privilege warships lack — they can slip into enemy ports, which opens smuggling and access to goods you couldn’t otherwise reach, at the price of sailing into hostile water. For the ships that do the hauling, see Rates & Classes; for how trading sits among the other ways to earn, see Making Money.