Trading Guide – Archeage Unchained

In Archeage, trading is one of the cornerstones of the economy. It is a way for players to turn farmed goods into gold in a direct manner. While the basics of trading in Archeage are simple enough, it is a long and complex journey to become a master trader. You will not only need to understand how to make trade packs and deliver them but also understand how to maximize the profit of each pack and how to transport them efficiently.

But let’s start with the basics of trading.

The Basics of Trading

Trading revolves around the creation, transportation, and delivering of trade packs. What trade packs you make, where you make them and how you transport them all have an effect on the profit you can make from trading. But first, you need to be able to make a trade pack.

How to Make a Trade Pack

Trade packs are made at Speciality Workstations. These can usually be found near community centers in every region and often in additional locations within the region. Each Speciality Workstation has the ability to create specific trade packs that are native to the region it is in. For example, the Speciality Workbench in Dewstone can produce the following trade packs:

• Dewstone Fine Gilda Speciality
• Dewstone Fine Speciality
• Dewstone Fine Local Speciality (if you have a house in Dewstone)

With a greater variety becoming available as the community development index rises.

Each trade pack requires certain materials and labor points, and some of them require Gilda stars as well. You can see the materials requirements in the Specialty Workbench interface by selecting a trade item.

The materials required are most often materials you get from farming activities, such as flowers, herbs, and fruit, and produce you get from processing these farming materials, such as medicinal powder and orchard puree.

To produce a trade pack you need to have the required materials in your inventory. You will also need some money and usually 50 to 60 labor points. Once you make a trade pack it is placed on your back and you become encumbered by it. Therefore you should not make a trade pack unless you can either store it safely or deliver it.

Delivering Trade Packs

Every trade pack made needs to be delivered to a Speciality Buyer in one of three regions on each continent. For the west, the regions are Solzreed, Two Crown and Cindermore and for the east, the regions are Solis Headland, Ynystere and Villanelle. Once you reach a Speciality Trader he or she will offer to buy your pack for a set price. Note that you do not get the money right away. You get it in the mail about 8 hours after delivering the pack with 2% interest.

How to Determine the Value of a Trade Pack

How much you get for a trade pack depends on a few factors. Such as, how many trade packs have already been delivered to the Speciality Buyer, the distance from the Speciality Buyer to the region the trade pack was originally made, what trade pack you are selling, and how old it is.

The Freshness of a Trade Pack

The age of the trade pack affects the amount of gold offered for it by the Speciality Buyer. There are four different types of trade packs. Luxury, Fine, Commercial, and Preserved. You can see from the table below how time affects the value of these trade packs. Luxury packs sort of need to be delivered right away, while preserved packs can really be delivered within 24 hours without losing much value.

The Base and Final Value of a Trade Pack

Here is a spreadsheet with information on the base value of a trade pack and information on how to calculate the actual value due to the in-game demand percentage. To use it to your full advantage you need to find the demand percentage from the in-game trade info (press SHIFT-O).

1. Find the base value of the trade pack you want to make.
2. Find the demand percentage.
3. Use the following formula: Base price * Demand * Time modifier * Interest (2%).

Example: A trade pack has a base price of 10 gold, the demand is at 113% and you are able to deliver it with a 5% freshness bonus. This means that you end up getting 10 * 1.13 * 1.05 * 1.02 = 12.10 gold for the pack.

How to Know if I Profit From Delivering a Trade Pack

This is the crux of trading. Being able to calculate the cost of a trade pack, how much time and labor it takes and compare it with other activities to maximize profit is what separates an amateur from a master. And until someone makes a handy tool this takes math and spreadsheets.

What I do is set up a spreadsheet where I have the auction house prices of the trade pack materials in one sheet. Then I have the recipes for the trade packs on another sheet where I calculate the cost of each pack. I then compare it with the gold offered for a pack. The difference is the profit (or loss) I make from a single pack. I can then divide that number by the labor and time needed to deliver it and thus see if it is really worth doing.

Transporting Your Trade Pack to a Speciality Buyer

Transporting your trade packs is usually the most time-consuming part of trading in general. Thankfully there are ways for players to both reduce the time needed to transport packs from a specialty workbench to the Speciality Buyer and transport more than one trade pack at a time.

The Donkey

The donkey’s only usefulness is to transport you with a trade pack on your back faster than you could do yourself on foot or with a farm cart. It travels at 5,0 m/s so it’s still slow and if you intend to do a lot of trading then you won’t use it for long. Despite this, it’s worth getting one early on as there are a few useful daily trading missions (more on that later) which you might want to do. But if you are aiming for a career in trading you really want to get yourself a farm cart as soon as you can.

The Farm Cart

If you haven’t already started it, then you should definitely begin the Blue Salt Guild Questline. During the course of it, you get a scarecrow farm, your alchemy proficiency goes up to 10.000 and you get the schematics for a Farm Cart among other things.

To start the Blue Salt Brotherhood questline you need to find a Blue Salt agent in Solisa in Halcyona. It’s an NPC with a green leaf floating above its head. You need to do every step of this questline until you get the schematics, but trust me, it is worth it. Or you can buy the schematic for 50 gold from a general merchant if you really don’t want to do the BSB quests. Anyway, once you have your schematic you can follow the steps here to build your first farm cart.

What makes the farm cart so great for trading is the ability to go faster than the donkey and also the fact that it can carry two trade packs in addition to the one you can carry on your back. Thus, tripling your profit each trip. You can also use Eco-Friendly Fuel and Axle Grease to speed up your cart for a short duration. The fuel and grease are expensive but in some cases might be worth using.

Later you can then upgrade your farm cart to a farm wagon.

The Farm Wagon

The Farm wagon is a step up from the farm cart as you get another two slots to place trade packs. With a Farm Wagon, you can transport five trade packs at once. Near the end of the Blue Salt Quest chain, there is a quest that gives you 50 Gilda stars to buy a farm wagon design and supplies you with most of the materials to make one.

Now at this point, you can cough up the money to buy a few archeum logs and sturdy ingots to make four strong wheels. Or you can upgrade your farm cart scroll to the chroma version and from there make a chroma Farm Wagon. You can do this in the carpentry workbench.

First, find the recipe for a Scroll: Farm Cart Chroma, where you change your farm cart to the chroma version. Next, you find the Farm Wagon Chroma which does not require wheels. This is rather odd and might be rectified in later updates, but since the farm wagon quest states that you should have all the materials to make a chroma farm wagon I assume that this is the correct version. Just be aware that this might be a problem for further updates on the farm wagon into a farm hauler, but it shouldn’t be.

Now, if you used the Gilda for something else or sold the materials from that quest you can see the precise material requirements in your folio (press O) by searching for Farm Wagon.

Using a Farm Cart and a Farm Wagon

When using a farm cart and farm wagon you have a few control options. When you mount the transport a few icons appear on your screen. These icons let you speed up the cart by +50% for 8 minutes if you have Eco-Friendly Fuel (T button), speed up the cart by +25% for 4 minutes if you have Axle Grease (U button). Sound the horn (Y button) and most importantly the Owner’s Mark (R button).

The Owner’s Mark makes sure that other players can’t steal your cart while you are making trade packs or delivering them. It’s important to remember to use when you are delivering trade packs. Some players have a habit of stealing your cart while you deliver your first pack. They drive it to a spot where monsters will attack it in the hopes of stealing at least one trade pack for themselves. So always activate your owner’s mark if you have more than one trade pack.

Trading Fertilizers

Once you are familiar with the basics of trading you can start expanding your trade empire by adding fertilizers to the items you trade with or aged larders which will be discussed later.

Fertilizers are trade packs that can only be made in special houses called Tradesman’s Manor. You might be able to get access to a Trademan’s Manor from one of your guild members or family members or even find one with public access. But the only sure way to get access is to build one yourself.

Building a Tradesman’s Manor

To build a Tradesman’s Manor you first need to build a regular manor, which you then upgrade to a Tradesmans’s Manor. To build a manor you first need to buy a manor design in Mirage Isle for 100 Gilda stars. You then need to find a 24×24 spot to place the manor design.

This is not easily done. I managed it by placing a 16×16 house in an empty spot I found. I then waited until the tax maintenance of a couple of properties around me ran out and quickly scooped up the spots with a strategically placed 8×8 farm and another 16×16 farm to take up as much space as possible.

Once I had the necessary space reserved, I went to buy the design. I then demolished all the property I had and placed the 24×24 manor design, this time wasting as little space as possible. Then simply build the manor in the same way you build a regular house. The only difference here is in the amount of materials needed.

Remodeling the Manor Into a Tradesman’s Manor

The next step is to remodel the manor into a Tradesman’s Manor. To do this you need to access the information screen for your manor and press the “Remodel” button. This takes you to the remodel screen where you can see the materials you will need to remodel the manor and the changes to your taxes.

These are:

• 15 x Enchanted Blueprint
• 6 x Building Management Titles
• 60 x Construction Brick Bundles
• 30 x Wooden Beam Bundles
• 30 x Construction Tool Bundles

Now, these materials cost a lot of gold, so you should be absolutely sure this is what you want to remodel your manor into. Once you have collected these materials you then just press the build button and you have yourself a Tradesmans’s Manor.

Crafting Fertilizer Trade Packs

Once you have completed your Tradesman’s Manor you get access to a specialty workbench in the manor where you can craft fertilizer packs. The way you craft, transport and deliver them is the same way as with regular trade packs.

Trading Aged Larders

The final set of trade packs you can create are aged larders. These are in some ways to most bothersome to make but can be the most profitable at the same time.

WARNING: There is a bug in the game that randomly makes larders disappear whenever the server goes offline. This also applies during the weekly maintenance. Players have lost a lot of larders due to this but as a testament to its profitability players continue to produce larders despite it.

Making Aged Larders

There are three types of aged larders, these are:

• Aged Salve – Requires : 30 olives and 20 cultivated ginseng
• Aged Cheese – Requires: 50 milk and 30 lemons
• Aged Honey – Requires: 4 honey and 20 hay bales.

To make an aged larder you first need to have access to a Farmer’s Workshop. You can get that by making it from a 8×8 scarecrow and place it in your house or by making an improved scarecrow garden which you can place somewhere.

In any case, in the farmer’s workshop you will be able to make “Multi-Purpose Aging Larders”. They are expensive to make so be sure to do your trade profit calculations to see if it is really profitable, even at 130% demand. You can also buy them from the auction house, but that will probably cost even more.

Once you have an aging larder you need to place it on a farm you own. This probably needs to be a 16×16 farm as I am not sure if there is room for it on an 8×8.

Once placed you only have 10 minutes to install a larder you want to age so you should already have the materials needed to make it in your inventory. Click on the larder you placed and select the larder you want to install. Once completed you will see a countdown timer for three days start. Yes, the aging process takes three days, after which the larder is ready and you have some time to pick it up.

This goes pretty much the same way as other trade packs. Once the larder is complete you can right-click on it to collect it. Remember that it is a trade pack so you will be encumbered with it. If you have a farm cart or a farm wagon you can use that to transport your larders just like trade packs. Just drive the larder to the specialty buyer you want to sell it to and your done. The money gets sent in the mail as usual.

Inter-Continental Trading

Then there is trading between the continents. You can purchase a trade pack at a Cargo Seller and transport it to the opposite continent. This will reward you with some amount of Onyx Archeum Essence, which is a valuable commodity. In essence, this is a simple thing to do, but there are dangers on the way.

First of all, while on the open sea you are exposed to PvP combat. You can limit that by going on the ferry that travels between cargo trading posts and showing the cargo ship captain a Captain’s Protection item you can buy from an NPC at the trading post. This will make you immune to PvP while on the captain’s ship and should ensure your safe travel to the other continent.

However, there are ways that pirates can snag you off a ship if you’re not careful. I suggest that while in transit you have your character grab onto something like a ladder and hold it until you have reached your destination.

So that’s about it for this Archeage trading guide. I hope you found it useful in your endeavors to become a master trader and feel free to share it with your friends and allies in Archeage. Also, you might like my other Archeage Unchained guides.