Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord – Starting Trade on Day One

Tips on getting that first profit from first run. Follow this guide to achieve profitability on the very first trade.

First Run

Character requirements:

• Any culture
• Any skill set

Point of this guide is to be useful to any setup on the very first day with whatever limited resources you have.

The Plan

Here is the plan for the first run. Detailed explanation will follow it:

• Do not recruit any troops
• Do not buy anything (so no mules/horses either)
• Find nearest city (with second one that’s at most day worth of travel from first one)
• Visit nearest city avoiding any brigands on the way (you should be faster then then)
• Go to marketplace and look through prices
• DO NOT BUY ANYTHING
• DO NOT WASTE TIME ON CHECKING RUMORS IN TAVERN
• Once you have scrolled through prices exit the city.
• Find another nearest city – it should be not further then a day worth of travel
• Go there and Visit the marketplace.
• Now you see rumors from prices from first city!
• BUY ONLY IF THERE IS PROFIT INDICATED BY RUMOR Even to the point of not buying anything.
• Buy only non-food stuff and only if the rumor gives you profit. Buy small amounts and spread your purchases across a few products.
• Exit city and travel back to the first city (avoiding those brigands)
• Sell everything and enjoy your first profit!
• Now go through the same process as before but this time check rumors from the second city.
• If your previous haul left you with big enough profits, do spent some of that profit on mules.
• Exit the city and go to the city you was before.
• Repeat as many times as you think your profits indicated by rumors is big enough!
• Once this route is exchange, find 3rd city that’s close to 4th city, and you guessed it. Repeat!
• Tips for latter stages – once you are tired of manually avoiding those looters you can and should recruit some troops. Picking ones that can become cavalry is best since that will give you fast and merry caravan that travel super fast between the cities.
• Once you start to have large initial sum of gold and vast carry capacity, you should avoid buying too much of any given product. In the second city prices will go down if you sell a lot of them. That’s fine as long as the price do not drop below your starting price. But it will if you sell to much of your product! Consider selling only portion of your product, and selling the rest in your next target.
• Have tone of gold and capacity? Consider grain trade.

Am I mad? That’s product sold at 12 gold if it’s a “good” opportunity! There is no way to make profit on that!

Well. I’m not mad, and I have math to prove it. (Hey, you can only blame yourself for asking me…) If you buy grain at 7 gold and sell at 17 gold you have 5 gold per item sold. That gives you 1,7 gold per each initial gold con you invested. Find a city that was under a siege and changed hands and the profits will go through the roof!

Explanations

In previous section, I presented the full plan without going into details. Here I present my rationale.

Since you are one man party your travel speed is very high and can avoid any enemies. Thus you should focus on spending all your gold on buying sellable products and can avoid for a while investing into the safety.

Downside is that you have to pay close attention to your route and manually avoid any enemies ahead of you.

Most reliable way to get trade rumors at the start of the game is to visit cities yourself. Going to a tavern is wasted time, especially since you may not hear any rumors at all, or what you hear may be impractical to implement with your available resources. Just do a trade between the two cities you visited. Rumors are fresh and you know exactly what’s profitable, you can do it with even small amount of resources.

Finally, your initial capacity is small, thus you can’t really “exhaust opportunities” on a single run, but can do multiple runs each time with different or even the same product and still get profit on each of the runs.

Once you have some trade skill, capacity and money? Feel free to deviate from this guide. Plan huge routes, acquire large retinue, start those juicy caravans, crash economies by buying all and selling all. Or maybe do it even after just a few runs. I’m not here to tell you how to play. I’m here to describe sure way to get those few gold coins early one if you need some pointers on that.

More M&B 2 Guides

• How to Activate Cheats.
• XP Multiplier and Smithy Stamina Mods.
• How to Make Money (Guaranteed Profits).
• How to Easily Level Up Your Charm Stat.
• Guide to Trading and Power Leveling.
• How to Get Easy Money On Start.
• How to Make a Custom Banner!
• Spy Party / Contender Traits.
• Quick Influence (Easy Way).
• Make Money Really Fast!
• Companion Stats.