Trading is an essential process in Mount and Blade II: Bannerlord. When you first start the game, it’s an excellent way for you to quickly earn money after attacking looters and taking everything they have them. You can bring that loot back to town, and if the trader has enough coin to satisfy your offer, you can walk away with some great money. But there are ways to take further advantages of trading throughout the kingdoms in Bannerlord.
Trading is pretty straightforward. Whenever you enter a town, a castle, or one of the larger settlements in the game, you can visit the town’s trader to see what they have to offer. They should have assorted items that you can choose to purchase from, and you can freely offer them anything in your inventory. The prices for each item vary, and when you offer to sell anything, your total gold given or received goes down based on how much you purchase in the same transaction. You can break a sale up by first purchasing what you want from the trader, and then selling to them. It shouldn’t matter how you go about it, but in the lower section of the screen, in the middle, you should see how much money you’re receiving or giving at the end of the transaction.
Not every town has a trader, though. If you don’t see a trader in a castle or town, feel free to visit another one to find what someone willing to purchase your items.
Now, each item has a different price attached to it. You can see that price when you hover over it in your inventory or the trader’s inventory. If you hover over it enough, you can also see information regarding the product and how it’s being received elsewhere. For example, if you’re selling oil to the trader in Ath Cafal for 114, you can see you’re making a profit in the general region because, in the nearby province of Lageta, you can purchase it for 100.
If you were to visit Lageta, purchase all of the oil, and then bring it to the trader in Ath Cafal, you could make an overall 14 profit from the transaction. Still, it does cost you time and days to travel between those regions when you hover over an item, notable Misc. goods, such as beer, oil, grain, etc. You can see opportunities to make a profit between towns by personally traveling between them. Sometimes, the small price description of your item tells you that you can potentially sell it elsewhere for a higher profit. If you’re willing to venture that way to sell it, it’s worth your time.
If you’re looking to improve your character’s trading skills, you need to create caravans and sell items at a profit. To do this, you need first to purchase them in a province, and then sell them elsewhere. One way you can do this, for example, is to buy a perishable item, such as meat, grain, or a useful material, such as hardwood or wrought iron, from a trader in one town, and then taking it to another.
You don’t want to purchase all of the items, though. The more you are buying from a trader, the more costly it becomes, and the more you sell to a trader, the less it goes for because you sell it in bulk. You want to find a medium where what you purchase from a trader won’t deteriorate in value from what you sell to the buying trader of another city, and you make it worth your time to travel between the two locations.
Going about this process in Mount and Blade II: Bannerlord takes time. You don’t want to spend too much time buying everything from a trader, and you don’t want to spend too much time traveling between locations. Instead, focus on balancing out how much an item is worth between two known locations, double-check their overall distance, and see if you can make a profit. For those looking to focus on increasing their character’s trading ability, this, and caravans, are an excellent method. It does take time.
