As soon as you’ve entered Mount and Blade II: Bannerlord for the first time and spent 20 minutes playing it you realize that it’s basically a game of … well everything. Character customization with unique talents and equipment? Check. Fighting medieval battles from horseback or on foot? Check. Strategic commanding of your army? Check. Forming your own band and kingdom? Check. Trading and organizing your own economy? Check.
However interesting all the aspects of this game may be, there’s one that’s key and unavoidable for every player: money making. As you know you will need to pay out weekly wages to your army and make sure they’re well fed all the time. And the bigger the army the bigger the expenses. Even though there are plenty of ways in which you can earn money in Bannerlord, there’s really only one reliable way, and that’s good old trading. Follow up with our guide and find out how to become a trade master in Bannerlord and have tons of money at your disposal.
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Trading Tips in Mount and Blade II: Bannerlord
Trading in Bannerlord is the key to a successful game. Almost everything has a price in the game (literally) and if you have enough money you can get around pretty easily. However, you need to learn the exact steps in this game of buying and selling before you can get rich.
Early Game Trading in Bannerlord
When you are just starting off in Bannerlord you only have a small party of soldiers, a low-level character, with everyone being modestly equipped. This limits your options but you shouldn’t worry, since you can do some great trading in the early game if you know what to do.
Once you’ve acquired some initial capital by fulfilling a couple of jobs from nobles and village elders, start asking around for trade rumors. You can get good trade rumors by talking to various nobles, random townsfolk, and best of all, caravans that are traveling throughout the map. They will all give you tips on which goods you can purchase cheaply in one place and then sell it on another for a better price. The best advice is given by the caravans when you ask them to tell you the news of the markets. I suppose that’s only natural since they are traveling the world and doing that for a living!
Luckily for you, you don’t have to memorize all these rumors like you had to in previous Mount and Blade games. As soon as you hear a rumor about a certain material or food for example, that rumor will be attached to the item in your inventory (as noted in the picture above) to keep reminding you where you can make a profit.
Usually, the town where you can get the goods for a good price and the city where you need to sell them to for a high price won’t be close by. So if you want to optimize your trading to be quick and efficient, we advise you to have a group of at least 40,50 cavalrymen with a couple of extra horses or mules. The cavalry moves quicker around the map, while the number of 50 men will guarantee that looters and raiders won’t bother you since their bands usually don’t exceed that number (and they only attack when they have the higher numbers).
Moreover, horses (whether from cavalry or the available ones in your inventory) and mules allow your party to carry more weight which means you can carry more of those goods that you intend on selling.
Late Game Trading in Bannerlord
After you have a bigger group, level up some of your units and your character you can proceed to the advanced trading. The above-described trading didn’t include any of your character’s individual skills and can be done by all kinds of characters in the game. Nevertheless, if you wish to up your game on trading you would need to pick up trading skills from your character screen. These will allow you to get a decreased penalty when selling trade goods, increase the carrying capacity of your party, increase the workshop production rate, etc.
This brings us to the best ways you can earn money in the late game. One of the best passive and reliable ways of earning in Bannerlord is organizing your own caravans. It costs you 15000 denars and 1 companion to send a caravan. However, we recommend you go for a bit more expensive option of 22500 denars that will give you increased security and save it from the looters along the way.
If you’re worried about the unreliability and the chances of losing your goods to bandits you can buy a workshop in one of the cities. There are all kinds of shops that you can purchase, tell them what to produce and just wait for your profits to come trickling down.
In the end, even though these solutions will bring you money, the final amount of money you get depends a lot on the number and type of trade skills you picked from your character skill tree. Pick them according to your strategy focus (caravans or workshops) and you’ll be making a lot of gold!
We hope that you’ll earn plenty of denars with our help! Read more on Mount and Blade II: Bannerlord in our guides discussing How to Recruit Clans in Mount & Bla3de 2: Bannerlord and Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord Skills Guide. Join us on Facebook and make sure you never miss an important gaming guide again!
