The three income streams
Every crown your company earns comes from one of three places. Most bands live on the first; the wealthy ones work all three.
Contracts
Your bread and butter. Take jobs off a settlement's contract board for guaranteed pay (and renown). Always your most reliable income — everything else is supplemental.
Loot
Weapons, armor, shields, helmets and trophies pulled off the dead. Sell what you won't use. Late-game loot from champions and named drops is where the big sale prices live.
Trade goods
The merchant side-game: buy goods cheap where they're made, haul them somewhere they're wanted, sell high. Optional, but it can bankroll a whole company if you commit to a route.
What sets a price
Every buy and sell number in a market stacks from four things. Learn them and you can read a town at a glance and know whether to open your purse or empty it.
| Driver | What it does |
|---|---|
| Economic difficulty | Set at campaign start and fixed for the run. Harsher tiers (Expert) cut your selling prices and shave contract pay. You can't change it mid-run — the other three are where you play. |
| Settlement type & size | The biggest lever you control. Large cities have deep coffers and pay the most for loot and treasure; small villages produce goods cheaply. Sell where the coin is deep, buy where goods are made. |
| Relations | Your standing with that specific settlement — better relations means better prices both ways, there. Built mainly by completing its contracts. This is why a "home base" town becomes your best place to offload loot. |
| Settlement situation | Temporary events (raided trade routes, disease, missing villagers). Some swing all prices, some hit one good. An undersupplied town pays more for what you bring — a payday if you're selling, a rip-off if you're buying gear. |
A town's buy and sell modifiers are linked. A rich city that pays well for your loot also charges well when you shop; a cheap village is cheap both ways. So sell loot and treasure at a deep-pocketed city you're friendly with, and stock cheap supplies and trade goods at poor producer villages. Don't expect one town to be best at both.
Selling loot the smart way
- Sell to the right shop. A Weaponsmith pays best for weapons (including bows and ammo), an Armorsmith for armor. The general Marketplace takes anything but pays less — use the specialist when there is one.
- Bigger settlements pay more and have more gold. A large, prosperous town can actually afford your pile of loot; a poor village runs out of coin after a few sales. Haul serious loot to a city.
- Don't flood one town. Dumping twenty suits of armor in one shop tanks the price and drains the shop's gold. Spread big hauls across a couple of settlements, or sell over multiple visits.
- Repair only keepers. Damaged loot you intend to sell is usually not worth repairing — the tools and crowns spent rarely beat the price bump. Repair gear you'll actually equip; sell the rest as-is.
- Relations move the price. A settlement that likes you buys your loot higher and sells gear to you cheaper (see Renown vs Relations below). Favor towns you've done contracts for.
- Haggle sparingly. You can talk contract pay up by roughly 3–10%, but each haggling attempt costs about ½ point of relations with that settlement (unless you have a Negotiator follower). Don't haggle towns you trade with constantly — the lost relations cost you more over time than the one-off bump.
Carry loot to a large city you're on good terms with, sell weapons to the weaponsmith and armor to the armorsmith, and split the haul if it's huge. That single habit is worth thousands of crowns over a campaign.
Trade goods: buy low, sell high
Trade goods are commodities — gems, salt, furs, dyes, copper, amber, lumber, and the like — that exist only to be bought and resold. The whole game is the spread: a settlement that produces a good sells it cheap and pays little for it; a settlement that can't get it pays a premium. Buy at the source, sell far away.
| Trade good | Cheap at (producers) | Sells high to | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gems | Mining / gem villages | Large, distant cities | Highest value per inventory slot — the premium hauler's pick. |
| Dyes | Dye-producing villages | Wealthy cities | Strong, consistent margins. |
| Salt | Salt works / coastal villages | Inland settlements | Reliable staple profit. |
| Copper / Amber | Mining & coastal villages | Distant cities | Solid mid-tier goods. |
| Furs | Hunting / northern villages | Southern cities | Good when carried away from fur country. |
| Lumber | Forest villages | Rebuilding / harbor cities | Low value normally — but a rebuilding city pays a fortune (e.g. buy ~175, sell ~375). |
| Peat | Swamp villages | — | The worst trade good. Skip it. |
- Distance and danger = markup. The further (and more dangerous) the haul, the bigger the spread. A short safe hop barely pays; a long road across a region that can't produce the good pays best.
- A producer pays scraps for its own goods. Never sell salt to a salt town. Sell it to a town with no salt nearby.
- Settlement situations swing prices. A city with raided trade routes, missing villagers, or a disease is undersupplied — it pays more for what you bring (great to sell into) but stocks little and prices gear high (bad to buy from).
- Relations are the biggest lever. Buy from settlements that like you and the whole spread widens. The "buy/sell trade goods" ambition is a clean early nudge into this loop.
Cheap goods flip for small but near-free money on travel you're already doing. Buy a low-value good (peat bricks are the classic) for ~90–110 where it's produced, carry it to a large city that doesn't make it, and sell for ~120–130 — 20–40 crowns a unit for zero extra effort. It's small, so only do it when you have spare inventory slots that aren't needed for lootable gear.
Your campaign origin tilts the whole economy. Beast Slayers get ~10% worse buy/sell prices on trade goods but earn more from trophies. Most other origins use standard market rates. Know which side of that line your run starts on before you commit to a trade route.
Reading a town before you spend
Each settlement is a little economy. Learn to read it at a glance:
Size & prosperity
Villages are small, cheap producers with thin gold and gear. Towns and cities are larger, richer, and stock better equipment — and have the coin to buy your loot. Prosperity rises with safe trade routes and successful contracts; a flourishing city is the best place to both shop and sell.
The buildings
Buildings decide what's for sale: Marketplace (trade goods & general), Weaponsmith (weapons, bows, ammo), Armorsmith, Tannery, Kennels (war dogs), and more. Bigger settlements have more buildings — and therefore more and better wares.
- Watch the smiths for named gear. City weapon/armor shops occasionally stock a named item — check them when you pass through a prosperous town.
- Stock the consumables that win fights: tools (repair gear in the field), medicine/bandages, ammunition for ranged brothers, and food to keep the company fed and at full effectiveness.
- Buy gear where it's cheap and plentiful — a well-supplied, friendly city — not from a struggling settlement that prices everything up.
- Keep food topped up. A starving company loses resolve and morale; running out of food mid-expedition is a self-inflicted wound.
- Shops restock over time. A picked-over shop refreshes its wares every few days (and some situations force a restock), so circle back or check a neighboring town rather than waiting around.
Renown vs. Relations — two reputations
People conflate these, but they're separate systems and you raise them differently.
Relations (per settlement & faction)
How a specific settlement and its noble house feel about you. Raised by completing that settlement's contracts (and good trade); lowered by failing them or attacking their caravans. This is what moves your buy/sell prices and your access to a town's services. Some origins start disliked.
Renown (your whole company)
Your global repute as a mercenary band — how reliable and competent people judge you to be. It does not raise contract difficulty; it raises contract pay, and at high levels it unlocks the big leagues. You start somewhere between −100 and 200 depending on your origin.
How to raise renown
- Complete contracts. The steady engine — finish jobs (don't fail them) and renown climbs.
- Win battles. Beating enemies, especially tough ones, adds renown on top of contract rewards.
- Fulfill ambitions. The single most efficient way to build renown early — knock out your company ambitions deliberately, not as an afterthought.
- Don't fail or abandon contracts. Failure costs renown and relations — a double hit. Only take jobs you can finish.
More renown means better-paying contracts for the same work. Difficulty doesn't scale with renown itself; the noble jobs are just harder by nature.
The big unlock is noble-house contracts (the lucrative colored-flag jobs), gated behind an ambition rather than a single number. The game checks three things: you've completed the banner ambition, you've completed at least two ambitions total, and you're at ~800+ renown. Around the Professional threshold (~1,050) the "Make Nobles Aware / Catch the Eye of a Noble House" ambition appears — take it to open the noble boards. If it's slow to show, cancel your current ambition to reroll the offer.
Money problems in Battle Brothers are almost always a routing problem. Sell loot in rich, friendly cities; run one trade good on a long safe loop; bank renown through ambitions; and never fail a contract. Do that and the war chest takes care of itself — see Game Phases for when to invest it.