People buying stuff at your business / How to play the market?

[hayate666]

I've recently started playing this game and I'm really enjoying it so far. The game feels like a lot of love went into it and I'm expecting to be playing this for a long time!

I've got a couple of questions about the mechanics that I hope the community here can help answer.

I've started a herbalist business and I noticed that people regularly come up to my herbalist shack and buy balm. That seems to be the only product that ever happens to though. Nobody ever buys herbal tea. Also in my other businesses none of the things are ever sold to passers-by (small carcass, honey, eggs from a farmhouse). Is this intended?

I also managed to drive all the competition out of town through some arson, so I expected to be able to create heavy scarcity on the market. In a way this is true, but there seems to be a strict upper limit at how high the price will go. Even in winter (when I expect to be more disease) the price doesn't seem to be higher than the price during the other seasons.

There also seems to be some invisible traders bringing tea and balm to the market, since there aren't any other producers of it on the map that drive the price down once in a while. If I sell a bunch at the same time it seems to sit in the market place for a pretty long time before it's all sold out and the price recovers.

I tried circumventing this by sending a caravan full of herbal tea off the map. This takes a couple of days so I expected the buyout to be really high on that, but it doesn't seem to have an advantage over hoarding the tea in your own storage and selling it all at once.

[Atorcoppe]

Howdy,

Buildings that sell goods directly only sell goods that are on their list to sell. With the herbalist hut, this is driven by current illnesses of the population and current stock of medicines they've hoarded in their house. Balm is definitely used more.

There is indeed a max price that goods can reach, for both buy and sell.

No invisible traders. There are merchant camps and travelling merchants tho. The travelling merchants don't create goods but rather trade it around the map. So they could technically hoard tea and then sell it later.

The payout from caravans should be higher.

[hayate666]

Thank you for your reply, dev!

Is it possible for the player to add goods to their list to sell? I really like the villagers coming by to buy my products from me directly, it feels more personal than shipping everything to the market.

I'll keep an eye on if caravans sell for more than what I'd get locally. Is it always more or is it possible that selling locally might be more profitable? As far as I can see it isn't possible to estimate what you get from a caravan trip before sending it, right?

[Atorcoppe]

You can buy a trading post for that very purpose.

It in general should be a bit more, but probably not enough.

[hayate666]

I've tried sending caravans a couple of times now and it pays about as much as selling my goods at the best price on the local market. Is this working as intended?

I'd really like to be able to sell stuff from my home or business below the price people would pay for it at the market. Are you thinking of adding that in the future?

[Atorcoppe]

It should be a bit more due to travel time.

There will probably be an option to set prices when selling produced goods from your business at some stage. Selling any other goods with bypassing the market, that's for the trading post.

[titanopteryx]

The military camp often buys herbal tea. Occasionally a house will bulk buy goods. You can sell a single full stack at a time. I don't remember if upgrading the cart increases stack sizes.

In this game some things sell fast and some things sell slow. Firewood sells fast because houses constantly consume it so everyone with a house will buy it. I like to get the trading post and fill it with firewood. The trading post has a upgrade to sell things at a 10% increase. The military camp often buys firewood too. Balm sells fast but not as fast as firewood. Everyone with a house is programmed to keep a supply of balm stored in their house.

The farmhouse doesn't sell eggs because npcs can gather them from coops. The carcass is consumed by a butcher and the honey is consumed by the tavern and I'm pretty sure the npcs working there won't come over to your farmhouse to buy them. They might buy from the trading post, though I haven't tried that. I'll go in game and try that in a bit actually. Herbs at the farmhouse are the worst. The herbalism hut that consumes it also produces it unless that changed since I last used the hut.

Anyway right now the best thing to do with herbal tea is probably sell it in bulk to the military camp.

[hayate666]

I've been selling it to houses that request it or have been shipping it off the map in a large cart. It always pays in the thousands and I'm able to slowly expand the trade.

Balm has really been clogging up the market. I always sell when a market is completely out of stock, but it sits there for a really long time before it gets sold. I've been regulalry shipping that off the map as well.

I wish it was less easy to flood the local market with products. I'm the only herbalist hut on the entire map (after burning down my competition and buying them out) and it's still easy to produce too much.

[titanopteryx]

It's annoying that herbal tea is locked behind access to fruit which only appears in summer I believe. The ways to sell balm is the market, house requests, military camp, caravans, and directly to npcs. I prefer the trading post for that. Producing balm too fast for all of that to consume it is a problem. I discovered that npcs will buy eggs from the trading post when experimenting with farmhouse goods in the trading post. Now I haven't tried this, but have you tried sending more than one caravan to the same location at a time? I'm going to try that with firewood right now.

[hayate666]

I need to give that trading post thing a try!

I've found that I can usually buy fruit for a reasonable price the entire year round, but I also usually buy fruit in bulk in the summer. (Because it's cheaper)

I've sent multiple caravans and it didn't really seem to matter how much were going at the same time or how many I had already sent.

I managed to make a profit with firewood by being the only woodcutter in business on the map and selling my stock when the markets run out of stock. It pays about twice as much for a cartload than it does when I shop it with a caravan.

[titanopteryx]

The trading post comes into play with firewood too. The trading post sells goods at the price in the nearby market. if there's no firewood in it then the price of firewood will be maxed. Also there's a upgrade that increases money gained from a sale by 10%.