Hearth and Hamlet Trade & Expeditions Guide

What the trade screen contains

Opening an expedition from the Shipwright gives you four decisions, and they interact:

• Transport method - caravan or ship. Different capacities; ships arrive with the Harbor District and Shipwright and carry more.
• Destination - Ironrend, Crimsonvale, Rubescairn or Ankhet-Nar, each showing its own demand level per resource: normal, increased, reduced or high.
• Buy and sell lists - all six resources are tradeable in both directions: food, wood, stone, iron, gold and magic.
• Quality of goods and caravan size - the two multipliers on both cost and return.

The expedition cost itself scales with how much you send, paid in food and gold, and you have a limited number of caravans and ships in flight at once.

The quality multipliers

This is the part worth memorising, because the intuitive answer is wrong:

Premium doubles your return for a fifth more outlay, which sounds unambiguous - but the multiplier applies to a base that already depends on destination demand and cargo choice. A premium shipment of something the destination has reduced demand for can return less than a normal shipment of something it wants badly. Check demand first, quality second.

Choosing cargo

The rule that separates a trade economy from a busy trade screen: never sell what your next milestone needs.

Before launching, ask which building you are working toward, which research needs a heavy resource investment, and which material is falling behind locally. Then send whatever is overflowing and bring back whatever is gating you. Selling the resource that happens to be capped right now is the default behaviour and it is how runs end up gold-rich and stone-poor in front of a wall upgrade.

Trade is also the correct escape valve for a capped stockpile - it converts production that would otherwise be discarded into gold or into the material you actually need.

When to open the sea

Ships change the pace of a run more than any other unlock, because certain materials simply do not exist in your starting settlement and only arrive through foreign commerce. Gold from routes is also steadier than gold from taxation, and it does not cost happiness.

The prerequisite is a real food surplus. Expeditions consume food to send; running them out of a thin margin turns a good decision into a famine.

The Ashenholt question

Ashenholt is the kingdom your settlement fled - a place of endless war and corruption in the game’s own framing - and its soldiers turn up early demanding taxes. It is also the subject of Steadfast Resolve, an achievement for completing the game without ever trading with Ashenholt, held by only 3.8% of owners.

Trading with it is the easier path. Refusing is a self-imposed restriction that removes an income line for a whole run, and it needs the rest of your trade network up first.

Related

• How to get gold - trade in the context of every gold source
• Progression walkthrough - when the harbour stage arrives
• Achievements - where Merchant Kingdom and Steadfast Resolve sit