The Trading Post is one of the most important building pieces in Manor Lords, with its access to entire markets. You’ll be using this a lot to import any missing materials you need, foods you acquire, or other commodities, weapons, or materials your citizens need. Furthermore, you’ll supplement your imports by exporting your towns specialities, without over-flooding the market to generate an income. Here’s a closer look at the trading post and how to get the most out of it.

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The Trading Post is where you’ll largely be spending your regional wealth and trading for resources you need and want.

Trading Post Explained¶

There are two types of trading posts in Manor Lords.

1. Trading Post
2. Livestock Trading Post

The Trading Post is dedicated to all the major items, materials, food, commodities and military items in the game. Meanwhile, the Livestock Trading Post is dedicated to livestock and pasture animals that you use at various buildings or for producing wool in the case for sheep. If you don’t intend on pasturing animals, then there’s not much need for the livestock trading post, yet the main trading post is absolutely necessary.

For the most part, you’ll be using it for exporting excess goods you’re producing to make regional wealth. You can then use the regional wealth to purchase the other items you need for your settlement. You’re largely looking to fill in gaps you need for approval rating and your marketplace needs. You’re also likely going to need to import Herbs to keep your population healthy. Depending on your settlement specialization, you’re also likely going to need to import Ale, to keep those taverns locked, especially if your settlements fertility is terrible for barley. These are the sorts of things you need to think about with the trading post and how you’ll use it.

You can find the prices of trading post items by the numbers. You’ll often find the sell price is the lower number, and the buying price is the higher number. You can significantly lower the buying price via the Better Deals development, which reduces the buying price of items by 10. If you have a settlement that requires lots of common items, Better Deals is absolutely necessary. The buying price going very low per item makes importing materials for you to convert into better materials or supplement your town needs makes things so much easier to manage.

Trading Post Tips¶

Now that you know the price of imports and exports, you can start planning on how you want to make money. For the most part, you want to trade what your settlement can specialize in. Either through developments or the rich deposits you have access to. Or, whatever spare produce you make. If you want some inspiration, we have a few great ideas to make regional wealth in Manor Lords.

The other tip we have for the trading post is to not oversell and flood the market. If you do so, you’ll greatly nerf the value of the items you sell. Keep that in mind if you’re over relying on making wealth of the same item, as it will come back to haunt you at some point. Diversifying your exports is a solid strategy for making money.

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If you want to increase the efficiency of your trading post, feel free to add a horse to improve trading speeds.

In addition, you also want horses as they help with trading items with more efficiency. Feel free to buy a horse for 30 Regional Wealth, then add them to the trading post via the Advance Tab and press the horse button. You can have up to 2 horses at a time.

The other factor you need to account for is that you need to add many families to work them. You want the families to scale with how many items you want to buy and sell at the post. More workers equals more items they will move from the storehouse and granary at the trading post’s storage facilities. They’ll also move goods you buy too and free up space. The more families you have working the logistics, the better your trading post will be for when you caravans start rolling in. Moreso, these families can setup market stalls for the items they are storing at the workhouse, helping you on the market front and supply.

Creating Trade Routes¶

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You can create trade routes for the items you want to import and export consistently.

When you’re ready to export or import items en-masse, you’re going to need to create trade routes. Trade routes either enable you to set import or export rules for a specific item you want to trade, or the frequency of traders coming to sell or buy a specific item from you. You can set one up by pressing the coin icon button to the right of the item name to set it up.

The price of trade routes largely depends on one of two things:

• Trade Logistics Development
• The value of the market and how many trade routes you already have open.

If you opt for the trade developments, you can get trade routes for 25 wealth each. This is a very powerful buff for early trading, as trade routes can go from 30 regional wealth to 600 regional wealth. As you can imagine, this saves a lot of regional wealth over time. Money that you can use to fund supplies and builds early on. Or, save money to aid other settlements.

Alternatively, you’re going to have to pay lots of money for trade routes for what you want. We highly recommend focusing on what you need to supplement any supply issues you’re having. You can later branch out if you want to when you start getting a more stabilized society under your empire. That way, you can start paying for luxury goods and make an incredibly affluent nation, maintain high approval ratings all the time, and more.