Windrose uses several overlapping economy lanes rather than one universal shop. You earn money by selling goods. You unlock better faction stock through reputation. And you buy different categories of items from different NPC roles. Once you keep those systems separate, the mid-game gets much easier to read.
The Three Economy Lanes
Lane | What It Does |
|---|---|
Currency sales | Turns loot and trade goods into spendable money |
Unlocks better Provisioner stock through Bounty Agent turn-ins | |
Specialized exchanges | Handles faction-specific buyers, unusual sales routes, and niche services |
Who Does What
NPC Type | Role |
|---|---|
Buyer | Purchases loot or goods and turns them into currency |
Sells faction stock, plans, and progression items gated by reputation | |
Bounty Agent | Handles faction reputation turn-ins rather than ordinary selling |
Sells workers and contractor-style support rather than ordinary trade goods |
What You Spend
Currency or Gate | What It Means |
|---|---|
The everyday money used for ordinary faction and merchant purchases | |
A higher-tier gold currency tied to pricier purchases and special transactions | |
Not currency, but a gate on what Provisioners are willing to sell you |
That last row is the one most new players blur together. If you have the money but not the reputation, some stock is still effectively unavailable. If you have the reputation but no money, the unlock still does not buy itself.
Where Different Goods Usually Go
Thing You Are Holding | What To Do With It |
|---|---|
Ordinary sellable plunder and trade goods | Take it to the appropriate Buyer rather than assuming Tortuga is a universal buy-all hub |
Contraband and rarer smugglers' loot | Treat the Smugglers of Port Royal as the specialized route, not as an afterthought |
Do not sell them. Turn them in through the Bounty Agent system | |
Plans, utilities, faction gear | Check the faction Provisioners and your current reputation gates first |
Tortuga is a Hub, Not a Universal Buyer
Tortuga matters because it concentrates the faction network and the next stage of the game, but it is a mistake to think of it as a single all-purpose merchant wall. Windrose's economy pushes you outward. Buyers, faction camps, and specialized routes matter because the game wants trade to feel tied to world geography rather than to one giant neutral marketplace.
Faction Shop Focus
Faction | Economic Identity |
|---|---|
Practical support, settlement-minded utility, and quality-of-life progression | |
Ship progression and the Brethren vessel line | |
Pirate gear, cannons, and broader combat-leaning progression | |
Contraband routes, hidden-base trade, currency friction, and premium utility |
Merchant Stations and Why They Matter
The buildable merchant stations are easy to underestimate because they look like support structures instead of adventure rewards. In practice, they are part of how the base economy grows out of pure scavenging. Once those stations are online, some resource and food shortages stop being full expeditions and become solvable shopping problems.
Buildable Merchant Stations
Current station listings show three buildable merchant stations that work inside the Bonfire range and require a roof. All of them trade in piastres and expand after local threats are cleared.
Image | Station | Current Listing Summary |
|---|---|---|
| Basic goods include crab meat, fowl, dodo egg, and feather. Advanced goods include meat, rough hide, hog tusk, grease, wolf fang, mountain goat horn, and bezoar | |
| Basic goods start with coconut. Banana, sweet potato, cayenne pepper, and the seeds for those crops appear after Coastal Jungle threats are cleared. Lime, aloe, corn, tomato, flax, and their seeds join after Foothills threats are cleared | |
| Basic goods include wood, stone, clay, and plant fiber. Advanced goods include sulfur, hardwood, and tree bark |
Good Purchase Priorities
Buy to remove friction instead of treating the station as a trophy shelf.
If you are constantly short on basics, the right merchant station or contract often helps more than a glamorous one-off unlock.
If you are saving for ships, stop spending as though ship materials will magically appear after the design unlock.
The Most Common Early Mistakes
Confusing a profitable sale with reputation gain
Unlocking faction stock before checking the materials needed to use it
Dragging everything back to Tortuga and assuming every faction or buyer behaves the same way
Ignoring specialized selling routes until inventory pressure becomes miserable
Most of those mistakes are really the same mistake wearing different clothes: treating Windrose like it has one economy when it actually has several.
See Also
Faction Reputation - the rank-gating side of the system
Bounty Agents - where reputation items go
Piastres - the everyday currency
Guinea - the premium gold currency
Current Merchant Contract Routes
Merchant Contracts are their own branch of the economy. You buy the contract item first, place the resulting merchant station at your base, then spend Piastres on the goods that station offers. The three contract items are Merchant Contract: Natural Resources, Merchant Contract: Food, and Merchant Contract: Animal Products.
Contract | Current Buy Source | Current Price | Builds |
|---|---|---|---|
Civilians - Level 2 | 100 Piastres for Food or Natural Resources | A base merchant station inside Bonfire range under a roof | |
Buccaneers - Level 2 | 100 Piastres for Animal Products | A base merchant station inside Bonfire range under a roof |
The contract system also explains why some raw item pages say ordinary vendors do not trade that item while a merchant station can still supply a matching stock. Those are separate systems.
Base Merchant Square Layout
Once the three buildable merchant stations (Food, Natural Resources, Animal Products) are unlocked through the Merchant Contracts, a common community layout is to cluster them together on a dedicated merchant square at the end of the base's pier. Keeping the three NPCs side by side turns a restock run into a single walking loop instead of three separate trips across the base.
The typical pier merchant square contains: one Merchant: Food, one Merchant: Natural Resources, one Merchant: Animal Products, and a Fast Travel Bell placed within a few tiles of the merchants. The fast-travel point is the key detail: with the bell on the same square, an inventory run is fast-travel to base, restock from all three vendors, then fast-travel back to wherever you were sailing. Without the bell, every restock turns into a full sailing trip home.
Canopy Options
The merchant stations require a roof above them, so the square needs some kind of covered structure. Two common approaches work:
Prebuilt Pier Canopies are the fastest option. Drop one of the prebuilt canopy pieces over the merchant square and the roof requirement is satisfied without any custom carpentry.
Custom canopies give a cleaner aesthetic for players who want the pier to match the rest of the base. A reliable build pattern uses pier pillars at the corners, a beam lock tying the tops together, 26 degree tilted beams forming the slope, bark walls for vertical dressing, and a tilted roof piece to complete the cover. This takes more materials and time but blends better into a tropical pirate base theme than the stock canopy.
Note that the merchant stations still need to sit inside Bonfire range to function, so the merchant square cannot be placed at the far end of an extended pier unless a Bonfire is within the radius. Placing a second Bonfire at the pier base is a common solution for long piers.
The merchants sold by NPCs at Tortuga (Provisioners, Fenders, Recruitment Vendors, and so on) are a different system entirely. Those NPCs are baked into the town and cannot be moved or duplicated. The buildable merchant stations described here are the only way to get those three categories of goods at your own base.