Trading

Trade is the heart of the port's income.

Offers and bids

Each ship that lands brings:

• Offers — goods it wants to sell you from its cargo.
• Bids — goods it wants to buy from your stores.

Buy goods cheaply from one ship, store them, and sell them to another at a better price. The margin is your profit.

The GCX exchange

The Galactic Commodity Exchange sets the reference price for every good. It is informational: you don't trade with the exchange itself, but its prices tell you whether a ship's offer is cheap or expensive. Market news moves prices — a mining strike, a shortage on a colony world — and every problem is someone's opportunity.

Rules or review

You decide how much of the trading you do by hand:

• Rules decide — set rules per good (buy below a price, sell above a price) and matching deals go through automatically.
• Review — the rules propose each deal and the ship waits for you to adjust and confirm it. If you don't decide in time, the deal goes ahead as proposed.
• Trading off — the port buys and sells nothing; ships leave with their cargo. Landing fees, fuel sales and repairs carry on. Switching it on releases any deal waiting for review, untraded.

Most players start on review to learn the prices, then hand routine goods over to rules. Turn trading off when cash is tight or your stores are full.

Storage limits everything

You can only buy what you can store. Solids go to warehouses; liquids and gases to tank farms; the Port Authority holds a little of each. A Cargo Terminal near your pads lets each deal move more goods.