Trade Routes

A trade route is a way to tell a ship to automatically transfer goods between islands. They are free and you can create as many as you want.

Trade routes can feel overwhelming, so to start with we'll stick with simple trade routes, which are all you need to finish the game.

A simple trade route picks up a good from one island, sails to another island, drops the good off, sails back to the first island, and repeats.

Here is a simple trade route that transfers fish from an island named *Phantom Holm* to an island named *Seal Refuge*:

Each entry under "Waypoints" is an island at which the ship will stop. The icons under each waypoint indicate the load/unload actions that will happen. In this example, the ship will try to load fish five times at the first island and then unload five times at the second island. If the ship tries to load or unload when there's no room to load or no goods to unload, then that action is ignored. Having each action five times means the trade route will fully load/unload any ship with up to five slots.

Below the waypoints, the UI shows the ships that are currently on the trade route, which can be removed, and inactive ships, which can be added.

A ship on a trade route will pause for 5 minutes after each stop. Here is how many goods/hr each ship will transfer on a simple trade route:

(This differs from goods/hour on the ships page because 1) the 5-minute pause at each stop 2) trade routes involve a round trip)

As you can see, smaller ships generally cost much less money to add throughput to a trade route, but they can also be more annoying to manage and produce. The slower/bigger ships in each tier have slightly better cost per throughput, but they also mean goods only get picked up every four hours, which can slow things down or cause storage problems.

### Advanced Trade Routes

You can give a trade route more than two waypoints, and each waypoint can have a mix of loading/unloading multiple goods. Here are some uses for this:

* Two islands each have goods that the other needs. Carrying goods in both directions gives ships twice the throughput of a simple trade route.
* Island 1 has something island 2 needs and island 2 has something island 3 needs. If a trade route picks up at island 1, drops off then picks up at island 2, then drops off at island 3, it's only traveling empty 1/3 of the time instead of 1/2 the time, for 1.5x the throughput of a simple trade route.

When giving a waypoint multiple actions, they are executed in the order they are shown in the UI, so you want to put unloads before loads and higher priority goods before lower priority goods.

###### Empty ship after unloading

Under each waypoint is a "empty ship after unloading" option.

Imagine you have a two-slot ship transporting wood and stone from one island to another. It goes to the first island, executes a "load wood" and "load stone" action, goes to the second island, and executes "unload wood" and "unload stone" actions. If the second island ever fills up on wood, then the "unload wood" action at the second island does nothing. This means the ship will return to the first island with one slot still full of wood, execute a "load wood" action, and now have two slots of wood, and have no room for "load stone", and the second island will stop getting stone via this trade route. The "empty ship after unloading" option indicates that after the ship executes the "unload wood" and "unload stone" actions, it'll throw out anything else that's left, to make sure there's room for pickup. If you're only using simple "move one good from one island to another" routes, you don't need to worry about this.