Star Trades Help Manual

Trade Routes

If you have ambitious plans for trading commodities, you can take advantage of the robust Trade Route feature. Creating a Trade Route sets a course for a given Cargo Ship, instructing it to go to a specified Depot, buy a specified amount of a specified commodity, then proceed to the next Depot on the route, sell a commodity, and continue doing this indefinitely. Trade Routes can be as complicated or as simple as you want.

To create a new Trade Route, click on Trade Routes on the left navigation bar. Click on Create A New Trade Route. From this screen, name your new trade route clearly, to avoid confusion in the future. After that, specify the different Depots that you want the Trade Route to include, and click on Create This Trade Route.

The path of your Trade Route is completed. Now, it's time to specify what actions you'd like ships on this Trade Route to perform at each depot. To edit the actions, from the Trade Route Screen click Change Actions, then select the Trade Route from the drop-down menu.

Now set up the actions at each Depot on the Trade Route by selecting Add, Change, or Delete, specifying an action number, Buy or Sell, the commodities and cargo pods.

Actions are performed in numerical order at each Depot, so be sure that an action to sell and thereby empty a cargo pod happens before a buy action that fills the same cargo pod. It may be wise to number actions 10, 20, etc., so you can later add more actions as you add cargo pods or change your plans.

Repeat this process for each Depot on the Trade Route. Careful selection of good Trade Routes can boost your company profits to great heights without your constant attention.

Once you have completed designing the Trade Route, you can add ships to travel it from the Cargo Ship Orders screen. A ship must be at or headed for one of the Depots on a Trade Route in order to be assigned to travel it. Once assigned (unless the controls specifiy otherwise), the ship will continue to travel that Trade Route attempting to perform the specified actions until you remove it, even if it cannot buy or sell the specified commodities. Even on a successfully operating Trade Route, you should periodically check for damage and remove a ship to a Spaceport for repairs if needed. Ships traveling on a Trade Route can be manually instructed to explore.

You can set some controls on your ships travelling on a Trade Route. Most importantly, you can instruct them to purchase sufficient fuel cells to get them to the next stop. You can also instruct your ships to stop and remain at a Depot if they are unable to complete the actions specified for that Depot, or if they are damaged beyond a specified level. To set controls for a Trade Route, from the Trade Route Screen click Change Controls, then select the Trade Route from the drop-down menu.

You can change the movements, controls, and actions of a Trade Route from the Trade Route screen at any time. To delete a Trade Route, simply click Delete A Trade Route at the bottom of the page, then select which route you'd like to delete on the next page.

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