Windrose Merchant Contracts Guide: How to Buy Bulk Resources
Manually chopping down a hundred trees to build a single staircase is a miserable way to spend your afternoon.
In the early game, you are forced to be a scavenger. You hit rocks with a pickaxe and chase boars for leather. However, once you transition into the mid-game, the crafting requirements for galleons and fortress walls become absurd. You simply cannot swing an axe fast enough to keep up with the demand.
Windrose offers a massive logistical shortcut called Merchant Contracts. These are specialized blueprints that allow you to construct actual vendor stalls directly inside your home base. Instead of farming, you can just pay NPCs to deliver bulk shipments of raw materials directly to your doorstep. If you are entirely broke and cannot afford these shipments, you need to read my money farming guide before continuing.
How to Acquire Merchant Contracts
You cannot just build a shop out of thin air. You have to purchase the architectural plans from the major factions.
To access these blueprints, you must reach Reputation Level 2 with the specific faction that owns the contract. If you have no idea how to farm Insignias to raise your reputation, stop right here and read my faction reputation guide.
Once you hit Level 2, head to the Tortuga market and speak to the Provisioners. There are currently three contracts available in the game, and they each cost a flat 100 Piastre to purchase.
Merchant Contract: Food (Bought from the People of Tortuga)
Merchant Contract: Natural Resources (Bought from the People of Tortuga)
Merchant Contract: Animal Products (Bought from the Rogue Buccaneers)
Building the Stall and Placing Orders
Once you purchase the plans, head back to your base. Open your Build Menu (B key) and navigate to the very bottom of the "Crafting & Utilities" tab. Place the Merchant stall somewhere accessible.
When you interact with your newly built Merchant, you are presented with a bulk ordering screen. You can order 1, 2, 5, or 10 boxes of a specific resource at a time. However, this is not an instant Amazon delivery.
Once you pay the Piastre fee and place the order, a 70-minute real-world timer begins. You cannot place another order with that specific Merchant until the timer expires and the shipment arrives. Because of this massive cooldown, you should always be ordering the maximum 10-box shipment of whatever resource you currently need.
Note: Certain advanced resources are completely locked out of the shop menu until you defeat the Local Threat (the main boss) of specific biomes.
The Complete Merchant Inventory
Here is the exact breakdown of what you can buy, the quantity you get per individual shipment box, and the Piastre cost.
The Food Merchant is unique. They sell bulk crops (like 30 Coconuts for 10 Piastre) but they also sell the literal Seeds for those crops (like 5 Tomato Seeds for 50 Piastre). You should never buy the raw vegetables; always buy the seeds. Once you have seeds, you can plant an infinite, free supply of food at your own base. Check my farming and crops guide to learn how to set up your Seedbeds.
The Best Resources to Buy
If you are on a tight budget, do not waste your Piastre buying cheap items like stone or clay that you can easily mine yourself in five minutes. You need to focus entirely on the bottlenecks.
Rough Hide: This is the absolute best item to purchase from the Buccaneers. Hunting boars one by one for leather is incredibly tedious. You need hundreds of hides for armor and ship upgrades. Buy it in bulk.
Flax Seeds: Do not buy raw Flax Fiber. Buy the seeds from the Food vendor. Flax is required to make Linen Fabric, which is the most highly demanded mid-game material. Establishing a massive Flax farm at your base is mandatory.
Sulfur: Used exclusively for crafting Gunpowder. Once you leave the Foothills biome, Sulfur becomes annoying to backtrack for. Buying it from the Natural Resources vendor keeps your cannons loaded. If you need a refresher on the actual crafting ratios for ammo, keep my gunpowder guide handy.
Hardwood: While relatively easy to chop down, your ship upgrades will eventually demand thousands of pieces of Hardwood timber. Buying a few hundred pieces from the vendor will save your axe durability and your sanity.
Drop your orders, go raid a pirate camp while the 70-minute timer ticks down, and check the Windrose Hub for more efficiency tricks.
