Trade Good

Overview
Trade goods play a very important role in a civilizations economy. There are many different trade good types each with their own special bonuses that greatly effect the efficiency of a town. Trade goods are randomly seeded throughout the map and can be identified easily by the unique three block tall pillar of bedrock with a sign displaying the type. In order to harvest trade goods a Trade Outpost improvement is required. Once the trade good is harvested it can be socketed in the town halls trade good item frame. The trade good will then produce coins and a buff for the town every hour for five days.

Trade Good Pillar and Expiration Date
Trade goods have an expiration date, every 120 hours (5 days) the trade goods disappear from where ever they were previously stored or socketed and reappear back in their Trade Outpost pillar (find out when exact reset will be by doing /civ time). You will need to recollect the trade good in order to use it again. But be warned, while it is in the trade good pillar it can be stolen by a spy performing the Pirate mission. If you die while running the trade good back to your town hall/capital someone else might pick it up and thus gain control of it. If you see a pirate, dont hesitate to slay him to get the trade good back. If the trade good item disappears (despawns) it can be found back in the trade outpost item frame. The trade good item can be placed in normal chests, but not in ender chests.

Making Money
To maximize income from trade goods it is essential to understand how they stack up, and which modifiers affect income and how. There are three different multipliers that stack multiplicatively. These are: Government Type, Monopoly Buff, Stacking Goods. The government type multiplier is straight forward, and gives a % increase of the base amount based on government type. The best type of government for trade goods is Theocracy with a 2.0 multiplier. The monopoly buff is 25% extra per monopoly buff and has no hard cap (except that there are only 8 trade slots). The multiplier is (1+NumberOfMonopoly*0.25). Thus the maximum multiplier is 3.0. The monopoly multiplier is for all socketed trade goods in the town. Stacking multiple trade goods of the same type will also give a multiplier. This multiplier will however only apply to those stacked goods. The multiplier is (1+(NumberOfGoods-1)*0.5). To prevent trade good stacking from breaking the economy there is a hard cap in place at 4 goods, which is equivalent to a multiplier of 2.5. You can have more than 4 of the same type, but the multiplier wont increase.

The ingame screen shown when you do "/town info trade" can be read like this: The number on the right of each good is the stacking modifier which is applied and thus gives an income shown on the right for each trade good. All of these individual income numbers are then added together and multiplied with the "Trade Multiplier" which is calculated as TradeMultiplier=GovernmentTypeMultiplier*MonopolyMultiplier. The sum is multiplied with the TradeMultiplier.

For making money it is vastly superior to stack the same type in 8 of the same or 4+4 configurations, but to do this careful planning has to be done when deciding where to place any town. Also many towns in a civ might work together to increase the money made. This can be seen from the last line in the example. If there are 8 towns with that configuration making each 4250 pr hour that nets a total of 8*4250 = 34000 coins per hour. Where they to stack a type in each town (8 Spice in first town, 8 oil in second town and so on) they would make a total of 100000 coins per hour or three times as much, using the same trade goods! This is of course without any monopoly buffs, which would increase the difference even more, if utilized correctly.

Examples
The following examples are all done with Theocracy as government type. The "Trade Multiplier" is the calculation outside of the brackets []. The first number inside the bracket is the number of trade goods, then the income, then the stacking multiplier calculation inside a parenthesis.
 * 4 Whales + 4 Herbs = 2*1*[4*500*(1+(4-1)*0.5)]+2*1*[4*250*(1+(4-1)*0.5)] = 15000 coins per hour
 * 4 Whales + 4 Gems = 2*2*[4*500*(1+(4-1)*0.5)]+2*2*[4*375*(1+(4-1)*0.5)] = 35000 coins per hour
 * 4 Salmon + 4 Silver = 2*1*[4*250*(1+(4-1)*0.5)]+2*1*[4*125*(1+(4-1)*0.5)] = 7500 coins per hour
 * 8 Tobacco = 2*3*[8*375*(1+(4-1)*0.5)] = 45000 coins per hour (theoretical maximum for trade good income per town)
 * 8 Pearls = 2*3*[8*375*(1+(4-1)*0.5)] = 45000 coins per hour (theoretical maximum for trade good income per town)
 * 8 Gems = 2*3*[8*375*(1+(4-1)*0.5)] = 45000 coins per hour (theoretical maximum for trade good income per town)
 * 8 pelts = 2*3*[8*250*(1+(4-1)*0.5)] = 30000 coins per hour
 * 4 Pelts + 4 Ivory = 2*3*[4*250*(1+(4-1)*0.5)]+2*3*[4*250*(1+(4-1)*0.5)] = 30000 coins per hour
 * 1 Spice + 1 Oil + 1 Limestone + 1 Whale + 1 Coffee + 1 Silver + 1 Salt + 1 Crabs =</tt>
 * 2*1*[1*125]+2*1*[1*375]+2*1*[1*250]+2*1*[1*500]+2*1*[1*375]+2*1*[1*125]+2*1*[1*125]+2*1*[1*250] = 4250 coins per hour</tt>
 * 8 Corn = 2*1*[8*125*(1+(4-1)*0.5)] = 5000 coins per hour</tt>