Bartering and Ship

Whether you are just stepping onto a boat for the first time or looking to optimize your existing trade routes, this guide will cover everything from selecting the right ship to maximizing your daily silver gains.

1. Choosing Your Ship: Why Not a Carrack?

For standard bartering and maximizing profit-per-hour, you might think the Tier 5 Carrack is the ultimate goal. However, we do not recommend starting with or focusing heavily on a Carrack for pure bartering.

  • The Problem with Carracks: Building a Carrack requires massive material investments, daily quests, and around a week of solid grinding just to get the base materials—not to mention the cost and time of crafting its +10 blue gear.
  • The Starting Alternative: Start with an Epheria Sailboat or Epheria Caravel. You can either build one or place a pre-order on the Central Market. These are perfectly adequate for beginning your bartering journey and building up your base materials (Tier 1 to Tier 3 goods). You can also exchange Shakatu Seals for an Epheria Sailboat.

2. The Ultimate Bartering Goal: Epheria's Star and The Special Ship

As you barter, you trigger "Special Barters" or "Sudden Barters." These semi-rare events allow you to trade standard goods like Gold Bars for ultra-rare items like Garmoth's & Vell's Heart, Khan's Energy, rare lightstones, Tri and Tet Manos accessories, Crow Coins (up to 10k!), Carrack gear boxes, Barter & Sailing Artifacts, a delivery quest rewarding 100 Oquilla's Flowers, or 1-hour PVP elixirs granting additional AP/DR.

Among these drops is the ultimate prize for a barterer: Epheria's Star.

Unlocking the Special Ship

  1. Once you obtain Epheria's Star from a Special Barter, a questline will unlock.
  2. Travel to Epheria Port and speak with the NPC Philaberto Falasi.
  3. Upon completing the quest, you will be rewarded with a unique title ("Captain Epheria") and an exclusive, massive ship. the Epheria Galleon

Why is this Special Ship Better?

This ship is the undisputed king of bartering:

  • It requires no gear to be equipped.
  • Its base speed is an astonishing 200% to 210%, making it substantially faster than a fully-geared Carrack.
  • It features unique visual animations (dolphins swimming alongside you, a "time-tunnel" visual effect when using the Breezy Sail skill).
  • Important Note: To maximize this ship's speed, you must increase your Sailing Mastery. Equip Manos Sailing Clothes and a Loggia/Srulk/Manos Sailing Log (even at base enhancement, these provide significant speed boosts of 10-15%).
  • Pro Tip: The Corsair classes passive skill Sea Lungs provides an extra +1% increase to all Big Ship stats. This includes enhancements to your ship's Speed, Acceleration, Rotation, and Brake.

3. How to Barter: The Basics

Bartering is essentially a chain of trades: you trade base materials (like raw timber or dough etc.) for Tier 1 sea goods, then trade Tier 1 for Tier 2, and so on, all the way up to Tier 5.

The Process

  1. Open your Barter Information window to see what islands demand what materials. For example, an island might ask for Corn Dough in exchange for a Tier 1 good, and another might ask for Pine Plywood.
  2. Loading the Ship: You can load your ship directly from your storage. Make sure your base materials are in the ship's inventory, not your character's inventory.
  3. Sailing and Trading: Sail to the specific node/island. You do not need to disembark. Simply click the "Anchor" button when prompted near the island and select the "Barter" option.
  4. The Exchange: Trade your materials.
    • Tier 1 (White) to Tier 2 (Green) to Tier 3 (Blue): These trades do not yield silver directly; they build your inventory of trade goods.
    • Tier 3 (Blue) to Tier 4 (Yellow): This is where the profit begins. In the current economy, turning in Blue goods for Yellow goods nets you approximately 400 Million Silver per exchange. A full run of 10 exchanges yields 4 Billion Silver.
    • Tier 4 (Yellow) to Tier 5 (Orange): Exchanging Yellow goods for Orange goods yields 1 Billion Silver per exchange, meaning a full run yields 6 Billion Silver.

Remote Collection Trick (Quality of Life)

Normally, if you remote-collect a ship at a Wharf Manager, the trade goods inside are destroyed. However, the current system allows you to remote-collect your ship without losing the barter goods inside.

  • This means you can use a Traveler's Map to teleport back to a main city (like Iliya Island), remote collect your ship, and all your heavy Tier 4/Tier 5 items will safely remain in the ship's hold, saving you massive amounts of travel time.

4. Scaling Up and Making Billions

The core gameplay loop of bartering is incredibly simple but highly rewarding.

  1. Daily Limits: You can refresh your Barter Board up to 3 times (yielding 4 total boards) a day, allowing you to run multiple routes.
  2. AFK vs. Active: You can set an auto-path (T) and step away from the keyboard, letting the ship sail itself. Alternatively, if you actively use the "Breezy Sail" skill (Shift + W), you will arrive much faster. (Note: Using skills requires your Sailing life skill to be at least Skilled 1).
  3. Profits: Because each high-tier trade yields 400M to 1B silver, maximizing your daily barter refreshes can easily net you tens of billions of silver purely from AFK/Semi-AFK sailing up to 250 billions per day.

Summary Checklist for New Barterers:

  • Buy an Epheria Sailboat/Caravel off the Central Market to start.
  • Build a stockpile of Tier 1 to Tier 3 goods.
  • Always check Special Barters for the Epheria's Star.
  • Once you have the Special Ship, equip Sailing Mastery gear for raw speed.
  • Use the Remote Collection trick to save travel time.
  • Trade up to Tier 4 and Tier 5 goods for billions of silver.

Happy sailing, Captain!

Thanks to @Philipp for corrections, content improvements and contributions