Trade

Trading is an interaction mechanic between player's home island and villages on the world map.

There are three types of offers: quick trade, loans and contracts.

Currently, trading offers and their item ratios are fixed, so any world seed is guaranteed to have all the options necessary. They are also not affected by any starting settings. Though, positions of the villages themselves are randomized at the start. The starting village, which is always revealed to the player, will always have the same trading offers.

A village will display all of it's offers since it's discovery, and increasing your reputation through donations will not reveal any new options. However, reputation still matters, because a message about its insufficiency will pop up upon trying to establish a contract.

Quick Trade

This type of offer is intended for the urgent purchase of a relatively small amount of resources that are important at the current time.

Any type of player-owned ship is not required to perform a quick trade. In order to perform it, only three conditions have to be met:

• The player has to have Trading Dock built.
• The player has to own a resource they trade with, stored in any storage on the island. Direct access by a truck or export settings are not required.
• The player has to have required Unity amount.

Trade is performed instantly, and desired goods magically appear at the Trading Dock, from where they can then be exported via trucks.

With every two trades on the same offer, the trade ratio worsens by some amount. Worse ratio remains present for some time afterwards. This is a demising return mechanic, intended to stop the player from using quick trading for large quantities of resources on a frequent basis.

Quick Trades (Initial trade ratio, version 0.7.8)

Village	Required Reputation	Export		Import		Unity
1	-	Wood	40	Concrete Slab	40	0.5
1	-	Iron	40	Concrete Slab	40	0.5
1	-	Wood	80	Iron Scrap	96	0.5
1	-	Construction Parts	40	Potato	40	0.5
1	-	Construction Parts	80	Copper	80	0.5
1	-	Construction Parts	80	Rubber	80	0.5
1	-	Diesel	120	Coal	160	0.5
1	-	Coal	160	Diesel	80	0.5
2	-	Construction Parts II	20	Diesel	80	0.5
2	-	Rubber	40	Wood	80	0.5
2	-	Construction Parts	40	Coal	120	0.5
2	1	Construction Parts III	40	Glass	80	0.5
2	2	Construction Parts II	20	Chicken	30	0.5
2	-	Steel	80	Iron	200	0.5
3	-	Nothing	-	Nothing	-	-
4	-	Construction Parts III	600	Cargo Ship	1	20
5	1	Diesel	200	Bread	60	0.5
5	1	Coal	40	Sulfur	80	0.5
5	1	Electronics	120	Iron Ore	80	0.5
5	2	Construction Parts III	160	Electronics II	80	0.5
5	2	Construction Parts III	120	Medical Supplies	40	0.5
6	2	Gold	160	Microchips	40	0.5
7	-	Nothing	-	Nothing	-	-
8	1	Electronics	80	Quartz	80	0.5

Note

• Importing Chicken is the only way to get it
• Numbers are halved before building the Captain's Office II aside from the Cargo Ship trade
• Importing Cargo Ships are the only way to get additional ones after repairing all Damaged Cargo Ships.

Loans

Unlike the other kinds of trade, a loan borrows a lump sum of a resource now, in exchange for paying back the exact same resource in the future. Like quick trades, loans always use the Trading Dock. Loans allow obtaining certain manafactured goods, particularly all tiers of Construction Parts, which are otherwise not available via Quick Trade or Contracts.

• A loan can only be obtained for resources you are producing, and the amount you can borrow is proportional to your estimated ability to pay installments, the maximum loan amount would require repayments about 5x your current production.
• You must pay a fee and interest, the interest rate is 8% at the start of the game, and can become as low as 4% with high reputation. The fee is usually about equal to 1 year of interest.
• You can choose a loan duration from 5 to 50 years, a longer loan will have smaller yearly installments, but you would pay much more interest over time.
• At any time you can choose to repay some or all of the principal.
• Trade Reputation is really Credit Rating, it does not interact in any way with Quick Trade or Contracts. It goes up when you pay installments, based on the original size of the loan relative to your economy when the loan was taken out.
• Early payments have no effect on reputation either way, you don't gain reputation for the payment, and reputation gain for future installment payments is not reduced, despite the installments being smaller.
• To maximize trade reputation gain, take a loan equal to half the maximum, you can immediately repay most of it to reduce the size of the installment payments.
• Increased reputation reduces interest rate (from 8% to 4%), fee (from 10% to 4%) and increases volume multiplier (from 1x to 1.8x) and max loans (from 3 to 6).
• You are not forced to repay your loans, you can de-prioritize deliveries to the Trading Dock or even bulldoze it. Naturally this harms your Trade Reputation.

Uses for loans:

• In an emergency if production of a critical resource like diesel collapses, a loan can quickly fill your tanks and keep your factory running while you get production back online.
• To accelerate development, for example taking a large loan of the latest tier of construction parts to quickly build out the newly unlocked infrastructure.
• As an alternative to stockpiles, you could for instance borrow a lot of Bricks and Steel to build a Bridge, by bulldozing and rebuilding the Trading Dock you can even choose where the resources appear.

Contracts

This type of offer is intended for creating a long term supply route of some basic resource. Mechanic is intended to extend player's capabilities in the late game, mitigating the limit of finite ores and some other basic resources on the island and in the World Map finite nodes. Contracts play a decisive role when it comes to allowing a player to infinitely sustain their settlement.

Setting up a contract is much more demanding, than performing a quick trade. A player is required to have a Cargo Depot (2) (or a wider version), a dedicated Cargo Ship, while also paying fixed Unity fee per month of usage, per ship travelled, and per establishment of the contract. Therefore, it is not recommended to use contracts until there is a stable and sufficient Unity income present.

A contract can be established through either a cargo module's interface itself (see Loose Module (S) or better analogs), or through a dedicated trading interface (found on the bottom panel of the game UI).

The following table is a list of all the contract offers with cargo ship with size 8 currently available. With a smaller cargo ship, it also downscales the amount of imported/exported items and Unity per ship. Take note, that exact numbers may change, and game version should be taken into consideration here.

Contracts (with a Cargo Ship having 8 modules, version 0.8.0)

Village	Required Reputation	Export		Import		Unity
						per month	per ship	at establish
1	-	Nothing	-	Nothing	-	-	-	-
2	2	Cement	1309	Coal	7200	0.2	7.9	12
2	2	Household Goods	1800	Coal	7200	0.2	7.2	12
2	2	Rubber	6000	Wood	3000	0.2	3.3	12
2	3	Household Appliances	933	Wood	8400	0.2	9.3	12
2	2	Lab Equipment II	2400	Copper Ore	6400	0.2	8.3	12
2	?	Vehicle Parts II	1120	Imported Goods	8400	0.1	6.7	?
2	?	Diamond	763	Imported Goods	8400	0.1	6.7	6
2	?	Fertilizer II	7200	Wheat	2400	0.3	2.4	18
2	?	Fertilizer II	6000	Sugar Cane	3000	0.3	3.0	18
2	?	Wood	2400	Corn	7200	0.3	7.2	18
2	?	Snack	3333	Corn	6000	0.3	6.0	18
2	?	Sausage	3600	Wheat	5760	0.2	5.7	12
2	?	Meat	1800	Vegetables	7200	0.2	7.2	12
2	?	Consumer Electronics	1440	Chicken Carcass	7200	0.2	7.2	12
3	1	Food Pack	1200	Ammonia	7200	0.2	7.2	12
3	1	Food Pack	1309	Crude Oil	7200	0.2	7.2	12
3	2	Vehicle Parts II	300	Crude Oil	8400	0.2	8.4	12
3	3	Gold	442	Crude Oil	8400	0.3	12.6	18
3	3	Consumer Electronics	227	Crude Oil	8400	0.3	12.6	18
3	?	Composite Core	56	Fuel Gas	8400	0.3	6.7	18
3	2	Dirt	3000	Fuel Gas	6000	0.2	6.0	12
3	2	Rock	7200	Fuel Gas	1800	0.2	1.8	18
4	1	Iron Ore	4800	Limestone	4800	0.3	3.8	18
4	?	Iron Ore	4800	Bauxite	4800	0.3	3.8	18
4	1	Iron Ore	4800	Copper Ore	4800	0.3	3.8	18
4	1	Copper Ore	4800	Iron Ore	4800	0.3	3.8	18
5	2	Construction Parts II	840	Limestone	8400	0.2	10.1	12
5	2	Vehicle Parts II	600	Iron Ore	8400	0.3	9.3	18
5	2	Household Appliances	1200	Copper Ore	7800	0.3	10.1	18
5	2	Slag	5400	Waste	3600	0.3	7.2	18
5	3	Slag	6000	Sour Water	2400	0.4	4.8	24
5	3	Slag	6000	Sludge	2400	0.4	4.8	24
6	3	Diesel	8400	Gold	672	0.3	1.0	24
6	2	Coal	3000	Quartz	6000	0.3	7.2	18
6	2	Vehicle Parts II	646	Quartz	8400	0.3	10.1	18
6	?	Gold	646	Bauxite	8400	0.2	8.4	12
6	?	Household Appliances	1120	Bauxite	8400	0.3	8.4	18
6	?	Construction Parts IV	98	Bauxite	8400	0.4	8.4	24
6	?	Composite Core	152	Bauxite	8400	0.4	8.4	24
6	?	Composite Core	182	Limestone	8400	0.3	8.4	18
6	2	Sulfur	2400	Sludge	7200	0.1	7.2	6
6	2	Sulfur	4800	Coal	4800	0.2	4.8	12
6	2	Manufactured Sand	6000	Dirt	3000	0.1	3.0	6
7	1	Food Pack	3600	Uranium Ore	5400	0.3	5.4	18
7	2	Gold	2057	Uranium Ore	7200	0.4	8.6	24
7	2	Iron Ore	4800	Uranium Ore	4800	0.4	5.8	24
7	3	Lab Equipment IV	1440	Uranium Ore	7200	0.4	5.4	24
8	1	Server	91	Iron Ore	8400	0.3	10.1	18
8	?	Medical Supplies III	1200	Copper Ore	7800	0.2	9.4	12
8	2	Lab Equipment III	1050	Coal	8400	0.2	10.1	12
8	2	Vehicle Parts III	155	Coal	8400	0.2	6.3	12
8	2	Solar Cell	1120	Quartz	8400	0.3	10.1	18
8	?	Consumer Electronics	336	Quartz	8400	0.3	10.1	18
8	3	Server	93	Gold Ore	8400	0.3	10.1	18
8	?	Server	93	Titanium Ore	8400	0.4	10.1	24
8	?	Construction Parts IV	110	Titanium Ore	8400	0.4	10.1	24