Trading — Sailing Era
Sailing Era shows you a price but never explains where it comes from. Once you know how the markets are wired, setting up a route that reliably profits stops being guesswork. Here’s the short version.
How a sale price is built
What a good sells for at a port comes from three things multiplied together:
- The culture’s baseline — A good’s “true” value in a cultural zone. Ordinary goods (square icon borders) carry the same baseline the world over — Silver is ~2,000 everywhere. Specialty goods (fancy borders) swing hard by culture: Tobacco is worth ~1,300 where it’s grown but ~5,600 in the Mediterranean cultures that prize it. This gap is where the money is.
- This month’s price index — A per-port, per-good multiplier that drifts each month. You read it from a port’s Market Survey — and once you hold a Guild there, you can scout that survey remotely from the map, which is half the reason to plant a Guild.
- The “sold here” discount — Any port that stocks a good prices it about 10% under its culture baseline — that’s why Silver costs ~1,800 where you buy it. That built-in 10% is the discount you carry away.
Never sell a good back to a port that already stocks it — there’s an ~80% penalty. There’s almost never a reason to.
Prices are set by culture, not by port
The world’s ports are grouped into a couple dozen cultural economic zones, and every port in a zone pays the same baseline — so “where should I sell this?” is really “which culture values it most?” Pick the culture, and any port in it is a fine place to unload; reach breaks the tie.
The Top routes tool groups its picks by zone for exactly this reason, and every Port page shows which culture it belongs to.
Two zones that break the rule
- Marseilles sits in the French zone but pays Italian prices for a few luxuries — Soap, Chamomile, Brandy and Velvet — so it’s a quietly strong market for those.
- Reykjavik (Edge of the World DLC) pays full Northern-Europe price on everything rather than the usual sold-here discount, bar a couple of local minerals. Handy to know before you haul goods that far north.
Distance & the trade-guild fleet
Once you have a Guild with trade routes, you can set an automated fleet to run a route between connected ports over and over — selling on arrival or banking the goods at the dock for later. How long a run takes scales with how far apart the two zones are.
Early on, before you build the Charting Office, you can only open a route to a port about a month away — so your first passive income comes from a strong, short hop into a neighbouring culture. The Charting Office opens the rest of the map.
Buy low, sell high — the whole game
Find a nearby zone whose baseline for one of your port’s goods is much higher than at home. That spread, minus the sailing, is your margin. The best routes run both ways: the destination also sells something cheap you can haul back.
Even a port with no specialties of its own can pay off purely on the return leg — carry out your cheapest good to keep the loss tiny, and make the trip on what you bring home. A handful of well-chosen loops anywhere in the world turns into steady income.
These mechanics were worked out and generously documented by Jathby Dredas in the “Guild Trading” guide — retold here in our own words, with permission.