Welcome! You just sailed in on a little ship with sails soaring through the sky, and your uncle came out to welcome you.

Now what!?

There are a few things to help orient yourself before you just start hitting things and follow your "uncle's" walk through in getting you started and sending you on your merry way to run errands and maybe secure your first successful trade.

In particular the upper left corner CAN be a bit of a puzzle since there's no real explanation about what any of it means, and leave you with the sense that you are lacking a lot in the important information, such as the amount of fuel your ship still has, what is in your cargohold, how much cargo you can actually carry and that crew that you'll sooner or later have to pay.

If you have a discerning eye, you will notice some things explain themselves, but if you're a bit like me and not that fast to get fixated on a round colorful thingy in your upper left screen, it may take you a while to figure out what that thing is there for.

Maybe you already have figured it out by just looking at the 'lightning bolt' icon in the heart of that circle, but YES that is your fuel gauge. Blue is the fuel and as you fly around the map, will notice how quick it can deplete as you cross distances. And how IMPORTANT it is to keep that from getting drained to nil especially in your starting career, since running out is going to cost you A LOT. You can't get stranded, but you pay some hefty fees should you run out of juice and need to get towed back to the nearest fueling station.

This leads us to the first task of your uncle, which is the suggestion you fuel up. In my experience it's best to ALWAYS top it up completely, but later on in the game when you got a larger fuel tank, you may not want to spend a whole lot in certain places to refuel and settle for only filling up half the amount.

And this is a good thing to remember well, different fueling stations have different prices where it comes for each unit of energy. Early in the game, the only one that's cheap to offer energy per 1 gold is at the starting island. All others in the central region will offer energy for 2 gold a piece and the highest are the stations on the edges of the map at a whopping 5 gold per unit.

Later on you will be able to make new refueling stations on the islands that you bought. Refer to the base section for more details. The importance of these is that it doesn't just offer you the cheap 1 gold per energy, but it will allow your ship with limited range to get to places that would otherwise be impossible to reach. There ARE parts of the map where you will not find any refueling stations anywhere and it can really become a futile and COSTLY effort in finding SOME island to refuel at while you try to get to mission locations that are marked in a place you have not been before.

For your starting vessel with a tank of only 3 units of energy that doesn't seem like much, but there is a ship that has a tank of 500 units (refer to the shipwright section for more information). Also, you start with little enough money and may find yourself limited in how much you can trade to make ends meet, when each refuel costs you 15 gold on top of paying your crew and maintenance.

Just saying.

Next there are the two info screens marked with F and X for quick keys. The F key menu when you're in the 'city screen' holds a list of the buildings that are there and can help you select the building important to you without having to go through the whole screen. Especially useful where it comes to your bases which can hold up to 6 buildings beside the resource island that you bought.

The X menu is your information menu with in the bottom left corner two icons that explain themselves. One is the cargo menu, and the other shows you the crew roster. Next to that is a window that shows your fuel in numbers, how full it is and how much you burn per second. Right next to that is an empty box, which for your starting ship is your only UPGRADE slot. More on that in the Upgrades section.

The crew roster will give you 3 bits of information. The maximum number of crew your ship can carry, the OPTIMAL amount of crew and how much crew is present. You don't NEED optimal crew numbers, but it affects speed.

If you open the cargo menu at the start of your new game should hold 10 lightning orbs designated as batteries already.

BE AWARE that these 10 batteries will be used automatically if you run out of fuel while in flight and recharges your tank by using up 2 batteries. This may seem like a good and convenient thing, but until you unlock some things, these are the only ones you have at your disposal.

Where it comes to your cargo, your starting ship has 4 slots. That means you can only hold 4 different types of cargo, or up to 4 stacks of a certain type of cargo. The size of the stack can range from 5 units to 200 units, depending on the type of cargo. Refer to the goods stack size section for details. It also means that you will have to get rid of some if you want or need a different type of cargo. Or you just have to get a bigger ship.

So, after you took your uncle's request to get a letter to take to another island, it's time to open up your first market trade menu and you'll be seeing a bunch of things that don't have a lot of meaning to you. Such as the income tax and that lower tax option that demands what looks like 3 tickets.

For your first purchase, the tax will not have any meaning. The price of goods when you hover over the value in your current market are the prices you will have to pay. So if that's 5 gold for sand, then you can do the math easily when you get 10 units. It's when you SELL your goods, that the tax starts to rear its ugly head, because even if it may seem that you are selling your goods for a marginally higher price compared to where you bought it, tax is automatically deducted from what you earn. This can lead to moving goods at no profit at all, or worse, at a loss.

There are two ways to bring down income tax by a %. The first is the two upgrades for each individual market. For 3 tickets and 6 tickets, you can get a 30% reduction of the % of the local tax. So, if the income tax is 20% it takes 30% off the 20, and not make it -10% (because that'd be broken and really silly). The other way is through your personal development to add another total 50% reduction in income taxes. Refer to the skills and perks section for more on that.

Other things to be aware of is that markets will renew themselves on specific days, which is what those 5 colored panes are about (see the time section). That the market has not just a limited amount of goods, but also a limited amount of funds to buy for goods, and that with each trade a bar will fill up dependent on the size of the transaction. You WANT that to happen, because your local market will have MORE goods and MORE money to buy things from you. Which really becomes helpful later on when you also get more value out of your goods by reducing income taxes.

The sad part is that markets only develop themselves locally and not globally.

One last thing to remember is that while prices WILL NOT CHANGE, the local market will only buy and sell the goods that it has.

When you open up the actual menu to trade, you will also see in the bottom right the goods with a number of coins behind them. These refer to how cheap or expensive they are and they are universal for the ENTIRE map. 1 coin is dirt cheap and 5 coins is insanely expensive. Furthermore it will show the day for new stock and on the bottom the income tax you pay when selling.

And armed with all this, you are finally ready to go forth and multiply! Your net worth, that is.

If you don't like point and clicking with your mouse, you CAN use T followed by E to quickly get out of the 'city screen' and enter the travel map of the world.

The whole thing is simple and comprehensive enough, but not everything may be all too clear or be relevant to you when you go on your maiden voyage. (Kind of weird, since you supposedly came sailing TO the island on that ship, but let's leave it at that.)

Movement across the map can be achieved in 3 ways.

1. ASWD to manually fly the ship
   
2. Point & click anywhere on the map.
   
3. From a locations overview list select. (more on that later)

And be mindful that you have enough energy to be able to move, or you will get to see a towing window when you run out that will be costly. There is a minimum charge for this, further influenced by the size of ship and your wealth. So the more money you have the more that's going to hurt. In order to get towed, just click on the window and watch your ship get moved across the map. Other things to be mindful off with that is that time will move and if you get dragged through a storm, it will slow you down. (I had it happen to me before, but if someone wants to contest me on that, by all means.)

As an additional thing to remember for when you do get in the later games mechanics, when you were to run out of energy when you have your own Recharge Stations, the towing will take you to the nearest TOWN with a Recharge Station and ignore any nearby stations that you have. (credit ChaosFred)

It's also worth to note that if you happen to run out of energy just when you are in the vicinity of an island with a recharge station, you can just enter the island and get a full or partial recharge (whichever is financially more comfortable in the situation).

Moving on! While your map is still completely obscured first time you go out, this will not be evident from the start, but the map isn't just some static depiction of the world with locations. It has random hazards and benefits that will not immediately appear. So unless you want to wildly race straight into a hazard while you go your merry way, you may want to WAIT a moment for them to appear.

One particular strategy to not get caught by hazards, since they do have a tendency to spawn straight in your way to any islands you intend to go to and you DON'T want to maneuver all the way around them, is to go back to the island you're visiting and then get back out.

Okay, so there really is only ONE hazard and that's the lightning storm. It will not destroy or damage your ship, but it will slow you down, and worse is that while you are slowed down, the rate of consumption remains the same. If you remember from the introduction, energy is consumed per second, not by distance. This will also apply when you use the fast forward button that will appear below the time dial when you are wanting to wait for time to pass by because you are waiting for a restock or something else.

The other three are benefits in their own way. The gust of wind will give your ship a brief speed boost. Good to make more distance with less energy spent. The other two are field of floating crates and a bunch of speckles that are referred to as salvage.

The floating crates allow you to get goods for free, BUT you will need the crane upgrade to do so. Until you pick one up, these are NOT of any interest to you.

The salvage is for fixing your upgrades. In particular the 'collection' upgrades. Whether the crane, or any of the tools to harvest from islands, using them will make the green bar reduce. Fields of salvage are the way get them back up, so you will have to remember you can't harvest indefinitely.

In both cases E is your quick key to clearing the fields, and while you are busy hauling in cargo or salvage, you will NOT lose energy OR time. What will happen is that when one of them disappears something new will span in the vicinity. Which can be storms that block your way back to fuel. The same will apply when you spend a certain amount of time flying across the map, so if you are making a long haul, you may want to take manual control or limit the distances you travel.

Once you've visited a few places with markets, the next thing of interest and your GO-TO guide to financial success, is the icon with the scales. This will open up a window with ALL the markets you have found and offers a comprehensive list of the day of their restock, their distance to your current position and which goods they have and whether they are cheap or expensive. Clicking on any of the vertical categories will reorganize the markets in an orderly fashion to be able to quickly tell where you get the best prices for selling the stuff you got on board, or where you can get your best bargains.

My experience, though, is that the cheaper it's sold the less units the market has to offer. So if you need a 100 wheat, going to the cheapest seller may leave you having to fly all over to gather up enough after all, or have to come back repeatedly.

Lastly, when you hover over the names of different market locations, the map will go into an autofind on the map for you, which you can use to locate the place by closing it and then clicking. Or you can just click on the destination for the ship to set course.

This also applies to a different search window, that you can open with F when you're in the map screen. It allows you to search on a large number of buildings and owned islands as your criteria search. For instance when looking for a place to hire more crew. Or you need to refuel badly. However, you will need to have FOUND something to meet with those criteria in order for it to show.

As a strategy, it's in your best interest to find islands that sell cheap and buy high in close proximity to each other to make a big profit with minimal overhead cost. Just be mindful that when you do that markets restock once a week and a close proximity between 2 locations are only good for so much easy profit in a week.

Time? Really? Why, yes.

While it's said time waits on no one and time flies, in Merchant of the Skies time will wait for you and only move when you fly. But there are a couple of exceptions.

First and foremost is the fast forward button below the time dial to idle in place. You WILL burn fuel when you do that, so be sure you don't do it while you might end up stranded away from a refuel point.

Then there is sales at the bazaar. Depending on the amount and the likelihood that it sells, a significant amount of time can pass, although it won't show until you have left the island. Every time you start a sale at the bazaar, a full day will pass, although that will only show after you return to the map.

Same applies to gathering resources on islands with the relevant collection upgrade. You will get resources at the cost of a day of harvesting.This applies to both your free scout and manual harvest.

Time in the game has more than a few significant aspects about it, which is why I put this in here. Besides the obvious of the different days that different markets will restock, a full cycle starting with orange day and all the way through to green, will be the end of your week and time to pay some bills. That is upkeep of your ship, your crew and any workers you have on your islands getting and processing you new resources. There is an option to turn it off, but after a full week you will be notified with a summary and the amount of gold you WILL have to pay.

Then there are locations that you can visit for benefits, but will have to wait a number of days before you can benefit from it again. These are respectively the Majestic Carrot (3 days) and the Mysterious Hands (5 days).

Your workers will produce produce resources daily, which will be shown when you check on the buildings. This can be done while you're on the island itself, or by hovering over the island with your mouse to get a summary of the buildings. And the bazaars each have different days when there are more visitors than other.

What's important to know about time is that days count by the turn of the day and not the time of the day. This can mean if you manage to arrive just before the turn of the day to upgrade a production building, you will get more just about as soon as you leave.

The same applies to inns and the giant chicken that can or need to be supplied with resources and will consume them each day.

So time matters and can be your friend when you can properly play with it. Like arriving just before the island with the cheap goods restocks to take the stock, and wait a bit to have them almost immediately restocked. Or doing the same with a large amount of goods that your favorite market can't buy all at once.

Yes! You too can be a temporal master! A TIME lord! And best of all, you don't need a modified DeLorean running on nuclear power to do it. (*cough*)

When you check your menus, this one is likely to quickly take your interest. The Skills and Perks window that comes with levels and gives you some sweet sweet benefits. But just getting knowledge points isn't going to get you those perks.

Knowledge Points are acquired pretty much through your actions of trading goods and running missions. But to spend them you will need to find the Isle of Giants. Which can be a harrowing task, even with the hint you get by clicking in your skills and perks screen where to go look for it.

Best way to have it marked on your map, is to continue on with one of the first missions you'll run into that will have you send an apprentice to another island to set up shop. After you're done, she'll hand you a scroll. The first out of three, and you get directed to find the Wise Man. He lives on Turtlewise, a giant flying turtle, that moves in a clockwise fashion through the map. Not exactly following the edge of the map, but you'll have to explore some of your map to have a chance to spot him. Once you have shown him the scroll, he will direct you to the Isle of Giants for translation.

Mind that due to a limit of missions, it only will register if you have an open slot for the mission to register. And if all else fails, try to reach the lower right corner of the map. That SEEMS to be the fixed location for it.

As for skill and perks, they are pretty much self explanatory. Perks to improve ship performance, perks to make more money, to produce more or save on costs.

I personally think your biggest interests early on are fuel efficiency of your ship and speed, along with reduction in upkeep costs. They will pay dividends in the long run more than any of the others. After that the Tax Evasion because it will have you earn more by halving the Income Tax at markets.

When you check your journal, you will find a section with the World Resources that are available in the game. What it doesn't tell you is how large the stacks of each can become before you need an additional slot. It will tell you which are available at trade posts, and hence things you can sell on the market.

Resources can be narrowed down into 3 categories.

1. Basic Resources
   
2. Advanced Resources
   
3. Unique Resources

Basic resources are the basic things that you can harvest from islands and find and sell at any trade post. Wood, apple, stone, iron, sand, rainbow flowers, tea, wheat and gem. Note that dyes are an advanced resource and the only one available on the market and as such can be sold there.

Advanced resources, with the exception of dyes, can only be sold through the bazaar. However they also can be asked for in later requests for resources for the trade guild and your local shipwright. Advanced resources can be further separated in basic processed and advanced processed items.

The basic processed resources are:

• Lumber from wood at the sawmill
  
• Bricks from 2 sand and 1 stone at the oven
  
• Glass from sand at the forge
  
• Iron Ingots from iron at the forge
  
• Dye from rainbow flowers at the windmill
  
• Flour from wheat at the windmill

If you have the resources at the location of a production facility, your workers will process BOTH of the listed products daily in the amounts as indicated.

The advanced processed resources are a step up for needing advanced resources to make them. They are as follows:

• Bottles from glass at the tool workshop
  
• Gear from iron ingots at the tool workshop
  
• Bread from flour at the oven
  
• Apple Juice from apples and bottles at the alchemist
  
• Medicine from tea leaves, rainbow flowers and bottles at the alchemist

There are, despite the mention of only 2 in the book, a total of 3 unique resources.

1. Battery: initially obtainable only at the mysterious hands and needed for building recharge stations. Both features require you to finish story line missions to unlock the mysterious hands with the first scroll. Later there is an upgrade that allows you to collect batteries from storms. Refer to the special upgrades in the upgrades lists for details.
   
2. Golden Egg: laid by the giant chicken in a certain amount of time and solely meant for selling at the bazaar. The chicken needs to be unlocked and will only become available after you ran a couple of story missions.
   
3. Water: This resource can only be collected at a lake and ONLY when you have a barrel upgrade in your ship. The amount of water you can carry is limited to the size of your ship, and is something that the Fish God requests you to bring to him.

A quick overview of stack sizes for individual goods.

-- Note: This list was made when you didn't have a convenient list of world resources with the size of their stacks. Programmer, give me back all the efforts that went into making this list! (/end rant)

Okay, so the bazaar isn't really bizarre, but it comes with its own set of rules.

On the map the bazaar can be easily recognized by this icon and there are maybe 2 or 3 on the whole map. If you've found one and forgot where, the Quick Navigation island filter screen can help you with that.

When you hover your cursor over the location, you will be presented with an overview of how busy the bazaar is projected to be on which days. Suffice it to say you stand a better chance at selling stuff more easily when there's more people than when only a few are passing by.

But the size of the crowds isn't the only determining factor of the likelihood to sell out. Since the bazaar is like an open and free market, you can set the price for your goods that you intend to sell.

Here is where you meet with a different type of system that may get you WAY MORE bang for your buck, but it's offset against the likelihood for it to sell. With the slider you are able to set the price for your goods by type of goods, and comes with the need to offset profit against sale chance. Which means if you are really intent on selling your goods for a huge amount of income, you may well have to attempt a lot of times to find that one guy that's actually willing to pay for it. Which in turn could get costly when you have a huge overhead upkeep to pay while making repeated attempts. HOWEVER, as goods get sold inside a certain period, demand drops for the goods you've been selling and the basic standard price (and hence the price range) will drop with it.

That means if you sell goods like a golden egg for 997 gold on one day and manage to sell a few, but not all, if you want to sell again the next day the standard price will be lower since demand was lowered.

If you can't get an item sold, what hasn't been sold will be returned to your inventory and when you leave the island a FULL day's worth will have passed. You can't immediately hold a second bazaar sale after the bazaar is finished, and while sales are in progress you can't leave.

That said, the bazaar as a free market will not have you pay Income Taxes. There is no limit in what you can sell (including advanced and the registered unique resources), but it is offset against time to sell things opposed the immediate transfer from regular markets.

Since more people equates to more chances to sell, it's best to arrive on the days there are hordes or swarms of visitors for obvious reasons. That means if you can arrive JUST before the day turns, you can still benefit from the numerical advantage. (Why am I getting flashbacks to war games?)

Yes, if you can improve yourself, then of course a ship can too!

There are plenty of islands with a Ship Workshop to help you get some things that will make your ship faster, gather resources from the air or islands (which are also in the air) and who knows what else!

However, you only have ONE opportunity to get an upgrade for free, so you may want to think carefully about what you'll pick. While your starting ship has only 1 slot for an upgrade and you really, really, REALLY want to get your hands on that spiffy crane to start getting lots and lots of goods for free, I do like to point out that if you want to get on the case of feeding the Fish God water early on, that the barrel upgrade will set you back a whopping 2,000 gold. And for a long time THAT is a LOT of money to make, or needed to buy new goods to make even bigger profits.

Besides the regular upgrades, there also exists a unique upgrade shop that doesn't sell upgrades for money, but requires those tickets you get from completing missions. It is a shop that is impossible to reach without some batteries on your starter ship, or having built a recharge station on an island as a waypoint, or you have a bigger ship with much better distance per energy ratio. It resides on the island of the first of three Griette Statues, and is a favorite tourist destination. Be mindful of this when you take a tourist on board when you haven't unlocked a fresh supply of batteries at the mysterious hands to reach it.

There also is a location where you will encounter a story line quest with an artist that want to visit all three of the statues and tells a bit about them.

Where it comes to the active upgrades, the harvesting types, you'll find that the durability will go down with each use. Once durability completely runs out, you don't lose the upgrade. You simply can't use it anymore until you have it repaired. The most conventional and cheapest way (arguably) is to find scrap fields and harvest them. (Note: this interacts with the upgrade durability perk.) Another way, which can be costly, is to remove and buy a new upgrade at your local ship workshop.

The regular upgrades and cost in G for gold coins.

* Capacity depends on your ship's storage size. Does not count as a harvest module, so no loss in durability.

The special upgrades with the cost in number of tickets.

**Requires empty storage space, like scrap processor and crane, but for the "extract" option to appear, sometimes you have to be on the rim of the thunderstorm icon, not under it. (credit ChaosFred)

And that's them ropes... wait a second, there are no ropes!? What about my rigging, then?

If you've been reading all of it this far, pat yourself on the back for putting up with my rantings! And I'd love to rant about how insane some of this process building is and all, especially since your SECOND story line mission IS about setting up a production line that seems simple at first but you'll soon find to be WAY MORE than you bargained FOR!!!

But I won't.

As stated in earlier sections, basic resources can be found and gathered on resource islands. Each island you visit and harvest for the first time will give you some for free. After that, you need the specified upgrades to gather more at the cost of time. But that will become tedious fast, gets you nowhere and overall isn't particularly cost effective for the real big bucks.

It all starts with buying an island with resources. Which takes money, and to make matters worse, not all island resources are priced the same! So, let's put this in a table, shall we?


That means you are going to have to invest a lot of money before you can turn that into a profit. And even more than you think. Also some resources seem to be mostly exclusive to certain corners of the map, so it'll be hard to put all your eggs in the same basket.

Once you have purchased an island, you get to the part of managing it. (It's the same location as the button for purchasing the island.) That means you get to build stuff, but that is going to require resources and yes MONEY. The only thing you can build on any island right away is a Charging Station. All other production buildings can only be built until AFTER you put up a storage building. (Strange how you need storage in order to start producing resources.)

I may put up a list of buildings, costs and all that at a later time, but you'll just have to figure out some things on your own. Only friendly advice I'll offer is when you go out for your first island purchase (which most likely is a sand island for that mission I was talking about) is that you first get 2 additional crew on your ship and bring along plenty of wood and stone. Storage takes some gold and 2 wood to build. The basic sites like wood, sand and stone, also only require the most basic of resources of wood and stone to build collection buildings. Check the list for more information.

A few things that are important to keep in mind when you start planning the beginnings of your great trading empire (so that it'll NOT strike back at you in the future).

• The maximum amount of buildings for each island is 5. There is a perk that will add an additional space for building. And that's IT.
  
• All production buildings will only operate with a full crew. For most basic buildings that is 2 workers, but there are that take 3-5 workers.
  
• Once you have put them to work, basic resource gathering will continue indefinitely until your storage is full. You can't call them back, and not sure whether they will when you demolish the building.
  
• For production buildings that make advanced products, you CAN turn off their production, in case you don't need it. But you seem to still PAY for them at the end of the week.
  
• A great boon I'm sure you'll agree, is that upgrading a production building increases the daily output WITHOUT requiring you to bring in additional workers.
  
• Since you are limited in the number of buildings per island, be aware that once you unlock the Caravan Office, you will need a Recharge Station before you can build the office.
  
• The water tower adds 50% to harvesting speed per level for tea, wheat, flowers and apples, but you need water for them to operate. Caravans can do the work for you.

The production buildings are organized in such a way that you are capable of setting up production of advanced items, which become a necessity for other production buildings. For instance, just to be able to make glass, you need stone bricks for the forge. And to make a tool shop you need bricks, lumber and iron ingots. The latter are made in the forge.

The Wise Man on his roaming turtle will sell bricks and lumber, but it's not cheap and like all markets restocks on the first day of the new week. That is, right after you got your weekly report. Furthermore Turtlewise moves at the turn of each day, and besides bricks and lumber, the Wise Man sells medicine which is needed in a particular quest and does offer 5 gems each week for 75 gold. Handy early in the game, but compared to most markets once you've grown them, may not be helpful when you need the big amounts for scrolls.

Darn it all... well, since I have to go through all this anyways, might as well make a record of the information.


And there we go for that first list. This was brought to you through a lot moaning, complaining and other assorted non-productive exclamations of reluctant behavior. Be thankful, because I'm enough of an idiot to actually go and set up an additional list sorted by buildings to show costs for upgrades and effects for each level. Once I figure out how to sort them. You know, give each their own category, or group them up in a bunch... *groan* (you see!?)

After looking into a bunch of buildings and their upgrades, I have determined that for all the base buildings a multiplication of the original value applies for building a new building. That means for the next level it is the base resource cost * 2 and the one after resource cost * 3.

Most production buildings have 5 levels to max out and their production output stacks in the same numbers of the base's costs. So if a level 1 building produces 1 item, at the next level it's 2 and up to a total of 5.

Two exceptions (still needs testing) are Storage which starts with 4 slots and can be upgraded to level 7 for for a total of 16 storage slots, and the water tower which doesn't register a maximum level but does have an upgrade cost for at least an additional level to give a 100% bonus to tea, apple, rainbow flower and wheat production.

If that\s the case, expect an additional entry to the list for the buildings above to give some idea of what to expect in base production output.

Once you get around to restoring the Great Lighthouse, by which time you will have done your share of building up bases, you will unlock the ability to expand your activities to even more than just your own ship and have some of the more tedious work get done while you're off making more money. Or the other way around.

This section is specifically dedicated to give you a heads up of what you may be facing when you're wondering of whether you're ready to make that leap.

To build a Caravan Office and make it operable, there are a few things to know if it's your first time.

• You need to have a Recharge Station built (2 Iron Ingot, 2 Battery) where you want to build your office. (Although you CAN remove it after the office is built.)
  
• The Caravan Office takes 20 Lumber and 20 Bricks to build.
  
• The Caravan Office takes a whopping 25 workers for it to operate.
  
• While the level 1 Caravan Office has room for 2 ships, you will need to buy the ships at a shipwright.

If you've any experience for running a ship with a larger crew (and that's highly likely) you should know that your weekly bill will rise by quite a bit. If you're not confident you can handle a 200+ weekly bill, you probably should strengthen the markets and your own productions before you go into this. Though odds are that when you have finally managed to unlock caravans, that shouldn't be a problem.

When you finally get the Caravan Office built and running, you will find that your choices when buying a ship at the shipwright will have changed to give you options in regards of the newly bought ship, as long as you have an empty slot for additional caravans.

Once you have a ship to play mule for you while you're off gallivanting about, you will get a new icon added to the lower right line of icons to start giving your caravan some directions of what to do.

Oh, updates how I loathe thee!

Well, for those new to this, don't sweat it. Those who have been here before, as of update 1.6.4 the caravan commands have been improved and in my (not so humble) opinion a lot for the better.

First and foremost, commands of actions to take change depending on your target. For sending a caravan to a base with a storage building at least, the commands aren't too different from those you can set for visiting islands with a market. The only real differences between the two are how it's termed, but I'll be listing all of them here anyways.

Another improvement (in case you care) is that interactions for future exchange of goods in a caravan's hold that aren't there yet, is that you have more control on how MUCH of the as of yet fictional inventory is to be deposited.

When it comes to bases, there are 5 commands.

1. Unload Cargo - brings up a window of world goods and their max stacks for selection
   
2. Unload All Cargo - quick, easy and just drops everything no questions asked, does NEED free storage space
   
3. Load Cargo - brings up what's in storage and lets you pick from it
   
4. Load Cargo (Wait) - unlike the regular load brings up world goods to specify how much your caravan will pick up BEFORE leaving (handy for supply running with whole stacks)
   
5. Wait - plain and simple, wait for a specific day of the week

For islands with markets, things change a bit up with:

1. Buy - pick materials sold on the market, no control over how much
   
2. Buy (Wait) - same deal, but with more control over how much you want and have the caravan idle until it has the demanded amounts
   
3. Sell - same as regular buy, but will stay at the market until all of the item is sold
   
4. Sell (Don't Wait) - for those that have too much goods and not enough money in a single market to sell it all, this is how you can make a full sales run without having to worry about the caravan staying away for weeks to sell all of it
   
5. Wait - wait for it!

When sending a caravan to the bazaar there are only 2 options.

1. Sell All Cargo - and just that, sell everything you bring and don't leave until it's all gone, so be sure that the caravan doesn't have anything it isn't supposed to sell
   
2. Wait - for he who can wait gets old and grey... okay, seriously, wait for a particular day which for bazaars can make a difference in how quickly cargo gets sold

Some additional things to know where it comes to caravans and AI behavior (credit ChaosFred, except the last three)

• Caravans aren't affected by your perks and can't get upgraded. They technically use the ship's base stats (check Shipwright section).
  [*} Caravan ships don't care about energy capacity, so even a boat or pink can travel straight from corner to corner. Nor does crew size matter, but weekly costs are affected by energy use per second, so speed of the ship factors into your cost.
  
• Caravans are unaffected by thunder storms and wind effects.
  
• AI behavior of caravans: when sent out to buy things from a market, be sure that the caravan has the space for it, or otherwise it'll just idle indefinitely!
  
• Caravan's selling price interacts with Income Tax of markets. Including local reduction to prices and perks. The same applies to selling on the bazaar, but the the caravan doesn't affect the demand.
  
• Caravans selling in markets and bazaars do not contribute to skill points or market growth.
  
• Idle caravans generate an icon in the bottom right of the map screen, but caravans on the move must either be selected in the map, or through the caravan office to change orders.
  
• Sending caravans to lakes allows them to transport water. Don't know whether ship size influences amounts, but give it good odds. (Significant for filling up water towers.)
  
• Even when you leave a caravan to idle, you will still be paying costs every week. Remember that when you don't really have anything to do for your caravans. At the caravan office you can sell your caravan ships for 40% of the original price. (Not sure whether discounts for purchases count or not.)
  
• Last but not least, although the Wise Man on Turtlewise has a sales feature, caravans cannot be sent to pick up your weekly prescription of "medicine". Or anything else, for that matter.

This one is probably a BIG mistake for me to do, but since this is a game ABOUT flying merchant ships, ignoring the great big white elephant will make this guide only silly. (Not that I'd complain if it only were good for a few good chuckles.)

I'll try to put this a proper descending order and WITH pictures, so you lot better appreciate me taking a loss of money flying to and fro to get them all. Because not every shipwright sells ALL the ships, and there's a LOT of shipwrights to visit. I will also renege from indicating prices of the ships. The only thing I'll say is that it PAYS to do missions of supply for the shipwrights, because it WILL earn you a discount on NEW ships. And since bigger ships do get expensive, just a 15% discount makes you wallet cringe a whole lot less at the sight of it.

So, here it goes!







*For games started before update 1.6.3 Fretta has 100 energy storage and 0.1 E/s. New games hold the current stats.




And that's about all that I can find. A couple of notes on this when you're trying to figure out what's most cost-effective. A bigger tank doesn't necessarily mean you can get further. You ship's max speed and rate of consumption per second factor into this. If it's a slow ship, with a high consumption rate, that big tank just means it costs more in fuel.

And where it comes to economic efficiency of a high performance ship, you should remember that what you may save on fuel costs may cost you in paying your crew and weekly upkeep.

Not that I'm really one to bother with complex calculations. I just go with the ship that looks cool and has decent enough aspects.

Some of the things here have been mentioned before, but if you're no much for perusing all of the guide, this section is a list for a handy reference that may or may not be of use to you.

• It's maybe a silly thing to some for this one, but I think this is the most important of tips that goes for any sandbox game. Remember to have FUN and ENJOY yourself. Because if you don't, you're like those folks I met in my tabletop RPG days (YES, I'm that old!), whom after an explanation came with their first question, "So, how do you win this game?"
  
  
• Always remember to have your ship fueled up properly. Even a bill of 15 gold for filling up your starter ship's 3 energy is cheaper than the TOWING COST you will have to pay if you run out.
  
  
• Don't underestimate the power of Income Taxes at the markets. Buying gems for the average price of 150 gold and selling them for 188 gold with a 22% Income Tax is going out of your way to LOSE MONEY. Global perks have the ability to halve it for all markets, but local markets can be made to reduce Income Tax by an additional 30% individually for 9 tickets in two steps. That 30% is applied on the number of the tax. So 22% Income Tax will be reduced to 15.4%
  
  
• The markets will only buy the goods that they also sell.
  
  
• The markets have a limited amount of funds! So even if you bring a whole load of goods, you won't turn it all into money when it exceeds the market's buying power. All transactions at a market will allow the market to grow. Both in goods on offer AND money available to buy goods from you. This growth only applies to the market where you buy and sell.
  
  
• Market growth is affected by how much money is exchanged. Avoid buying and selling at the same time. Instead, make separate deals for buying items and selling items for maximal market growth.
  
  
• At the end of each week you will have to pay your crew and upkeep for your ship. Be sure that you can afford it when you expand your business and buy a bigger ship. Later on, when you unlock caravans, remember that those too will cost upkeep money.
  
  
• Keep an eye on what the letters you receive tell you. Many of them will lead to story line quests and the unlocking of new features.
  
  
• Near as I can tell, there are 4 different styles of buildings, and for 3 styles at least, the Trade Guilds hold their own ranking. While you grow your types of mission by doing missions of a specific branch to become Journeyman, etc. The different styled Trade Guilds hold their own rankings.
  
  
• Trade Guilds and Houses in the beginning can be a good help to discover new locations when your map is still unexplored. Be wary of accepting tourists wanting to visit the Grietta the Explorer Statue, however. If you don't have the batteries to make it there with your starting ship, odds are that you'll just waste money getting stranded in a void without refueling stations, and will get dragged back to where you started.
  
  
• You can only ever accept a total of 4 missions at a time. Try to not accept more than one mission at a time that looks like it will cost a lot of time or effort to finish. Except for a couple of the first story line missions you get.
  
  
• You get, following an early story line mission, only 1 free upgrade for your ship. Make sure that you know the value what you use it on. (For instance, my first time I mistakenly used it for the shovel upgrade, which is like THE second cheapest of all upgrades and least useful.) The free upgrade will apply to ALL workshops, including the special upgrades.
  
  
• The barrel upgrade costs 2,000 gold, and you'll need it to feed the Fish God 800 water eventually. (Hint! Hint!)
  
  
• Don't go looking for the Isle of Giants as soon as you get your first perk point. Rather, continue what you're doing and explore more of the map while following the early story line missions. Once you get your first scroll and spoke with the Wise Man, you get an automatic bearing for its location. It's likely you'll have more perk points by then to make the trip more valuable by having more options to pick from, rather than to struggle to get there for a single perk point. (Mind that you have an open slot for the mission, though, when you talk to him about it.) And should you be unable to get a fix on the location, in two different maps the place was located almost in the lower right corner of the map.
  
  
• When you start buying islands to grow your business, make sure you have the money and some additional people already on board, along with plenty of wood and stone to immediately get production off the ground. You won't be able to immediately get back all the money you put into it and likely facing a good number of weeks to get a return of your INVESTMENT. Like in any real business venture, it takes money to make money.
  
  
• The bank gives you interest, but the interests may be quite small even with perks. Instead, there's a technique by "fake-bankrupt" yourself to get more gold at your startup to get more gold when you begin and hasten early growth. Be warned to not use it too much as later updates may leave you with severed debts to pay off.
  
  
• The maximum amount of bank invest is 2.000.000.000,- gold. Due to the coding limit, there is actually a glitch where once your invested gold reached certain amount (by interests or deposits), it will jump to the max value amount. (credit ChaosFred)
  
  
• When you are trying to look at information of a previously visited island by mousing over it, while still at another island, you can use Z to scroll down. You can also use it for any other ingame window that can scroll.

Work is pending, on account of storm clouds delaying additional shipping of materials. We apologize for the inconvenience.

For those who see things they need comment on for being incorrect, for those who offer some contributions to make life a little easier for me. Many thanks for making sure that this guide won't confuse people and distribute misinformation.

My thanks go out to:

red_mage_king
ChaosFred
RFPNJ