6. Trade Posts

Every island has a trade post, and the price of a good is different at each one. Buy low at one island, sail it somewhere it is scarce, sell high. That run is the trade loop, and it is the most reliable way to turn a voyage into doubloons.

The goods

Twelve commodities trade, in three families:

These are the same resources the rest of the game uses. Nothing here is a separate trade-only currency: what you haul is what you would otherwise be crafting with.

The islands

Ten posts, each with its own prices:

Coffer Cay is the one at the docks. The other nine are out on the water: Azuria, Coralei, Lucaya, Marisol, Ondimar, Palmura, Selvara, Sundari and Verano.

Coffer Cay trades against your account: doubloons and the resources in your stash, with no ship involved. The nine at sea trade against your ship's hold, in a match.

How prices move

Each post prices each good on its own. Buying pushes the price up as you drain the post's stock; selling pushes it down as you flood it. So a big run moves the price against you partway through, and the last unit you sell is worth less than the first.

Prices also drift back toward normal over time. A route everyone has been running flattens out and then slowly recovers, which means the map of profitable runs is never the same two days running. There is no fixed best route to memorise.

Buying and selling at the same post carries a spread, so you cannot make money standing still. You have to move the goods.

Cargo

Your hold has limited space, and each unit of cargo takes one unit of it. Filling the hold with cheap ore is a different bet from filling it with mithril: the ore run is safer per doubloon lost if you sink, the mithril run pays more if you get home.

You can also bring goods from your own stash instead of buying them. Before you sail, Take Cargo lets you load doubloons and any resources you already own onto the ship. Nothing is deducted at that point; the manifest is applied once the match is live.

Getting paid

Cargo profit is settled when you extract, not when you sell. Sail to an extraction portal at your faction's port island and everything aboard comes home with you.

If your ship goes down first, the cargo goes down with it. That is the whole tension of the loop: the run that pays best is the one that keeps you out longest.

When a crew has pooled money into the cargo, the settlement returns each person's stake before anyone takes profit. Nobody loses their principal to a crewmate's good run.

Courier work

The Town Crier at the docks posts delivery jobs: sell a set quantity of a named good at a named island, get paid on top of whatever the sale itself earns.

The board is yours alone and it refills once per day at 16:00 UTC. Ten jobs are posted, you can hold three at a time, and refreshing the screen will not roll you a better one. The board for a given day is fixed the moment it is generated.

Once a job is running, a small tracker on the left of your screen during a match shows what you still owe and where it goes. It only appears if you have taken courier work.