Manor Lords Trade Routes Guide: Best Goods to Buy and Sell

Trade is what turns a muddy little village into a proper town in Manor Lords. Your settlers can only make so much on their own, and half of what they want has to come from somewhere else. Salt, iron, shoes, ale - none of it shows up unless you pay for it.

The whole thing runs on regional wealth. You sell whatever your region makes too much of, then spend that money on the stuff your region doesn't have at all. Get that loop running early and money stops being the thing holding you back. Here's how the trading post works, which goods are actually worth carting out, and the slow leaks that empty your pockets while you're not looking.

Setting Up a Trading Post and Merchant Routes

Putting the post up

The Trading Post lives in the Trade tab of the build menu and costs 4 timber. That's cheap as dirt for what it does, so it's usually one of the first buildings worth placing once food and fuel are sorted. If a King's Road runs through your region, put the post near it. Traveling merchants reach a roadside post way faster than one tucked behind your fields. Close to your storehouse and granary helps too, since post workers spend a big chunk of their day hauling goods back and forth.

Then assign a family. The post does nothing without staff. One family member heads out to peddle goods, and the rest manage the inventory and set up market stalls for whatever you bring in. There are four worker slots, and a busy post genuinely uses them. A second and third family means more goods moved per merchant visit. The building holds 500 units of generic goods plus separate pantry space, so it can sit on a real backlog without choking.

Horses are worth the money

A horse costs 30 regional wealth, ordered right from the post, then assigned through the Advanced tab. One horse cuts the round trip down by a lot. As of the December 2025 update a post can hold up to four horses (it used to be two), and workers now only use horses assigned to their own post. So if you run two posts later on, each needs its own horse pool.

Buy the first horse as soon as your exports cover it. Grab the second when merchant cycles start feeling slow. Four is a late-game thing, for when several routes are running at once.

Reading the trade tab

Every good defaults to no trade. Switch it to import, export, or full trade, then set the number you want to keep on hand - the desired surplus. Export sells everything above that number. Import keeps buying until you reach it. Full trade does both directions to hold the number steady.

Next to each good you'll see the export price, then the import price. Importing always costs more, because there's a tariff stacked on top of the base value - 10 per unit since the December 2025 update, up from 5 before. There's also a small supply indicator showing how flooded the global market is for that item. One nice quality-of-life change from that same update: you can now see every price before owning a route. Used to be you were guessing half the time.

Minor trades, major trades, and when a route is worth it

Minor goods - firewood, planks, eggs, wool, most raw food - can be traded with no route at all. Your assigned family just carries them out on foot or horseback. Major goods, the ones that take several production steps (ale, shoes, tools, clothes, rooftiles, and all the military gear), stay locked until you pay for a route. The trade screen tells you which is which.

So what does a route actually buy you? A merchant on a regular schedule who deals in that one good, in volume. Without one, you're at the mercy of random passersby who show up whenever they feel like it. Route prices climb as you add more of them. They start around 30 regional wealth and get steep fast, with the later ones running into the hundreds.

The usual advice still holds up: skip routes on minor goods early. You don't need one to sell firewood, and the money is better spent on a horse or a second worker family.

Best Raw Goods to Export Early Game

Start with the junk you already have

The first silver in a new region pretty much always comes from whatever's lying around. A forest start sells firewood and planks. A hunting start sells pelts. Foragers dump mushrooms and spare berries. Since the resource rework, every region rolls either fish or small game, either berries or mushrooms, and either iron or salt, on top of clay, stone and farmland. Two of those get boosted into rich versions. So there's always something spare, and usually more of it than your people can eat.

| Good | Sells for (RW) | How you get it | Route needed? | |---|---|---|---| | Firewood | 1 | Firewood cutter's hut | No | | Planks | 2 | Logging camp + sawpit | No | | Fish | 3 | Fishing hut by a pond or river | No | | Bread | 4 | Windmill + communal oven | No | | Warbows | 5 | Fletcher's workshop, 4 planks each | Yes | | Tools | 6-8 | Smithy, from iron slabs | Yes | | Shoes | 8 | Cobbler's workshop, 1 leather each | Yes | | Ale | 8 | Malthouse + brewery, from barley | Yes | | Rooftiles | 8 | Clay extraction + kiln, wants rich clay | Yes |

One honest caveat: those are the commonly cited values, and the December 2025 update did a full rebalance pass on every good in the game. Treat the column as ballpark, not gospel. The good news is you can now open the trade tab and read the live numbers for free before you spend anything.

Why the boring bulk goods matter

Firewood at 1 apiece sounds like pocket change. It isn't, because you have tons of it. A woodcutter family with a healthy forest behind them produces far more than the village burns, and every unit above your reserve walks out the door for free money. Planks are the same deal at roughly double, though the sawpit only takes one worker now, so it's a slower drip than it used to be.

Stone starts got a big boost from the update. Rough stone, rubble stone, dressed stone and mortar are all real trade goods now, and a rich stone deposit with a quarry on it is one of the better money-makers in the current build. One well-known community walkthrough sells rough stone above a surplus of 0, rubble stone above 20, firewood above 50, and planks above 40 - and cleared about 1,000 regional wealth in year one off cheap bulk goods alone. Steal those numbers as your starting point, then raise the reserves as your stockpiles grow.

Moving up to the 8-silver tier

Once you've got worker families to spare, the real money is in finished goods. Shoes, ale, rooftiles and clothes all sit around the 8 mark, which is four times what planks fetch. Shoes got a quiet buff in the December 2025 update too - they now cost 1 leather instead of 2. So a cobbler workshop turns pelts and hides you'd otherwise sell cheap into top-tier exports. That's the single best early upgrade to a hunting region.

Ale is the other big one, and it pulls double duty. Families drink 1 ale every 3 months, and a stocked tavern is part of what lets burgage plots hit level 2. So the same barley-to-ale chain that earns 8 a unit is also keeping your housing upgrades alive. Selling ale and drinking it aren't in competition as much as you'd think, as long as you set the export reserve high enough to cover the tavern.

Warbows are worth a look if your forests are thick. Around 5 apiece from the fletcher's workshop, 4 planks each, and they need a route. It's a decent plank sink once your construction needs dry up.

Cheapest Imports to Cover Resource Gaps

Buy the input, not the product

Here's the tariff math that saves people the most silver. Every imported unit carries that 10 regional wealth tariff, and finished goods already cost more than their ingredients. Import ale and you're paying the ale price plus the tariff. Import barley - a minor good, no route needed - run it through a malthouse and a brewery, and you land on ale at 8 that you made yourself. The community consensus has always been that importing raw materials and finishing them locally beats importing the finished item, and the tariff doubling in December 2025 made that gap even wider.

Same logic up and down the list. Hides over shoes. Iron ore or slabs over tools. Wool or linen over clothes. The catch is that processing eats workers, buildings and fuel, so it's not free - it's just usually cheaper than the alternative once the chain is standing.

What your region will actually be short on

Since every region now gets either iron or salt (never both), and either fish or small game, and either berries or mushrooms, imports are how you fill the hole your map rolled.

• Salt or iron. Salt turns pork into sausages, which is a solid food variety play. Iron feeds tools, weapons and armor. Whichever one you lack, plan on buying it.
• Barley on bad soil. If your barley fertility is rough, importing barley beats importing ale every time.
• Tools for maintenance. Workplaces need upkeep since the update, and tools are the common fix. A lot of players set tools to import up to a surplus of about 10 and forget about it.
• A food type you can't grow. Burgage plots now want food variety across categories (foraged, meat, fish, vegetables, grains, animal produce). If your region has no fishing and no ponds, imported fish literally unlocks housing levels for you.
• Livestock. That's the Livestock Trading Post's job, a separate building. Oxen for hauling, horses for trade, sheep if you want a wool operation - sheep are the expensive ones, so save them for when the export money is steady.

Keep import reserves low

An import rule keeps buying until it hits your surplus number, and every unit costs the tariff. So don't set "import firewood to 200" as a comfort blanket. Set it just above what you actually burn between merchant visits. A small number checked often beats a big number you set once.

Balancing Regional Wealth With Trade Income

Two pools that don't mix

This is the part that trips up new players. Regional wealth belongs to your townsfolk. Treasury belongs to you, the lord. Trade fills the first pool. Taxes at the manor skim it into the second.

Treasury pays for mercenaries, retinue upkeep and settling new regions. Regional wealth pays for imports, trade routes, livestock and burgage extensions. Money cannot move between them. So you can be rolling in trade income and still too poor to hire a mercenary band when raiders show up. Getting rich through trade doesn't hand you an army - the army comes from a different system, in a different order.

The other regional wealth taps

Exports do most of the work early, but they're not the only source. Level 2 burgage plots generate passive regional wealth every month, commonly cited as 1 per family, and 2 at level 3. Clearing bandit camps pays a lump sum too, though the December 2025 update cut that by about a third. The passive plot income is the sneaky one - a town full of level 2 plots earns real money with no merchants involved at all. That's a big part of why the export-to-housing-upgrade loop compounds the way it does.

When to start taxing

The classic faceplant goes like this: build the manor in year two, slam the land tax to 10%, and watch approval crater by month three. Tax takes a bite out of approval, and approval controls how fast new families arrive. Tax before your approval is high and stable, and you shrink the very population that generates your wealth.

The safer sequence: get one export flow running first, keep the market fed and fueled, let approval settle somewhere good, then introduce the land tax at around 5%. Step it up in small jumps with a month between each, so you can see what every increment actually costs you. The manor screen shows a predicted approval hit before you commit, so use it. Most mature towns end up somewhere in the 10-20% range.

And no, there's no separate trade tax in the game. People have been asking for one since early access. As of the current build the land tax is the only lever you get for pulling trade profits into your treasury.

Don't forget the tithe

The food tithe at the manor pays out influence instead of money, at 2 influence per 1 food donated since the update doubled it. Influence is what claims new regions. If your expansion is stalled, donating surplus food beats buying your way in with anything else.

Common Trade Route Mistakes That Drain Silver

Buying routes you don't need

The most common leak, by far. Routes cost real regional wealth, the price climbs with every one you add, and a minor good doesn't need a route to sell. If you're moving firewood or planks, your trading post family already handles it on foot. A route there mostly buys you a slightly steadier schedule for money that should've gone to a horse.

Flooding a single good

The global market reacts to supply. Export nothing but shoes for six months straight and the price sags, hard, sometimes to the point where you can't move the stock at all. Watch the little supply dot next to each good. When your main export's price starts sliding, pause it and switch to a backup for a while, then come back once demand recovers. Two or three export goods in rotation will out-earn one good pushed to death, basically every time.

Setting the reserve too low

Export sells everything above your surplus number. Set your firewood reserve to 10 in October and you'll be buying that same firewood back in January, at the import price, with a tariff on it. A good rule of thumb from players who've run this for a while: keep roughly 6-12 months of food and fuel in the tank, and only sell what's genuinely above that. Raise the reserve number as your population grows, because last year's comfortable stockpile is this winter's shortage.

Leaving full trade on something jumpy

Full trade sounds tidy - hold the surplus at exactly the number you set. But it will buy to get there, and buying always means the tariff. On a good with a volatile price, full trade can end up purchasing at the worst moment. Plain import and plain export rules are easier to predict. Reach for full trade only when you really do want both directions on the same item.

Importing the finished product

Covered above, but it deserves a spot on the list since it's the biggest silent drain. Finished goods cost their full price plus the 10 tariff, and you skip none of it by not owning the production chain - you just pay someone else's margin forever. If you're importing ale, shoes, or clothes month after month, that's not a trade strategy. That's rent.

Running the post on skeleton crew

One family, no horse, three export rules set. The merchants show up, and there's nobody to load the cart. The post needs staff matched to how much you're moving, and it needs its own horses assigned through the Advanced tab - they don't wander over from the hitching post on their own anymore. A fully staffed post with a horse moves several times what a bare one does, and the difference shows up in your ledger within a season.

Set firewood to sell above 50, stone above 20, planks above 40, and let the cheap bulk stuff fund your first real export chain. That's the whole trick, and it works in nearly every region you'll start in.