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Trading and Merchants
April 16, 2026 at 12:19 PM
Add a current merchant-contract route table to the Windrose trading overview after the April 16 contract audit.
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.
Lane | What It Does |
|---|---|
Currency sales | Turns loot and trade goods into spendable money |
Faction reputation | Unlocks better Provisioner stock through Bounty Agent turn-ins |
Specialized exchanges | Handles faction-specific buyers, unusual sales routes, and niche services |
NPC Type | Role |
|---|---|
Buyer | Purchases loot or goods and turns them into currency |
Provisioner | Sells faction stock, plans, and progression items gated by reputation |
Bounty Agent | Handles faction reputation turn-ins rather than ordinary selling |
Recruitment Vendor | Sells workers and contractor-style support rather than ordinary trade goods |
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.
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 |
Insignias and Letters of Favor | 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 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 | 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 |
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.
Current Windrose.tools 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.
Station | Current Listing Summary |
|---|---|
Merchant: Animal Products | 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 |
Merchant: Food | Basic goods include coconut and banana. Advanced goods include sweet potato, cayenne pepper, lime, aloe, corn, tomato, flax, and related seeds |
Merchant: Natural Resources | Basic goods include wood, stone, clay, and plant fiber. Advanced goods include copper ore, iron ore, sulfur, hardwood, and tree bark |
Buy to remove friction, not just to collect fancy inventory.
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.
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.
Faction Reputation - the rank-gating side of the system
Bounty Agents - where reputation items go
Piastres - the everyday currency
Guinea - the premium gold currency
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.
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.
