Free TradersReport
English：Free Traders · Factions
A small faction that owns not one inch of land, yet runs farm shops across the Empire and fields the only travelling caravan of its own in the game. They outlaw everything connected to hemp while pricing hashish at 1200%.
The Free Traders are a small faction, small enough that there is no patch of the map that belongs to them. They control no towns, patrol no zones and hold no outposts. What they own is a handful of shops inside other people's cities and one caravan out on the road.
Their shops sit in other people's towns
The main Free Trader asset is the Farm Shop, which sells farming equipment, seeds and produce, along with animals and the food to keep them. The wiki lists them as standing in Bark, Black Scratch, Brink, Farming Village, Fishing Village, Heft, Heng and Stoat, with world states adding Blister Hill, Holy Farm, Port North, Port South and Slave Farm South.
That list runs past the borders of the United Cities. Black Scratch is a Tech Hunter town, and Blister Hill and Holy Farm belong to the Holy Nation. The wiki describes the Free Traders as the faction that runs farm shops in United Cities towns, but the shops themselves travel further than that sentence.
The Farm Shop is a notable piece of shop design: maximum stock 222 items, restocking every 12 hours, among the largest and fastest-refreshing vendors in the game. Each one keeps one or two Garru (at 40% adult age) and one Bonedog (at -10% adult age) for sale.
Three other vendors sit under their name: the Fish Shop, plus two shops built on United Cities templates — one larger general trader and one small weapons shop. The Fish Shop caps at 20 items on a 24-hour restock, and only opens in locations that a world state has already rewritten.
The one caravan
The Free Traders field a single travelling caravan, the only one they have, led by Harmothoe and spawning between Trader's Edge and Heng. Her own story is in her article; what matters structurally is that this caravan is the only Free Trader asset that moves.
Killing her does not remove it. The game sends a generic Caravan Trader Boss to take the slot and trade carries on.
Travelling with the caravan are Caravan Guards and Pack Beasts, and the shops are held by Shop Guards. The character list also names an "Outpost Guard", which the wiki flags as never spawning. That one is a leftover from the history below.
A law with nobody to enforce it
Free Trader trade culture is essentially the Empire's, with the difference that more food spawns locally — Greenfruit, Gohan and Riceweed among them.
The distinctive part is the prohibition. They tolerate nothing tied to hemp production: a Biofuel Distillery (Hemp) and a Hemp Farm are illegal buildings in their territory, and Hashish, Bloodrum and Hemp are contraband to carry.
| Item | Price multiplier |
|---|---|
| Hashish | 1200% |
| Hemp | 400% |
| Bloodrum | 400% |
| Sake | 150% |
That table and the ban above are two columns of the same config file. The 1200% is a black market price, not a general store price, as covered in Economy and Trade.
The two sites they may take over
The Free Traders own no towns, but two locations fly their flag under specific world states, and both require somebody else to fall first.
| Site | Condition | Result |
|---|---|---|
| Drifter's Last | Lady Merin and Slave Mistress Grace both killed | The town gains a police station, an independent bar, a ronin machine shop and a thieves' guild. The game files call this version "prosperous" |
| Slave Farm South | Grace and the Slave Market Master both killed or imprisoned | The slave camp is half-rebuilt into a farm town, the vendor list is replaced, and the place ends up smaller than before |
Both cases say the same thing about where the Free Traders sit in the design: they are what fills the space after the Empire withdraws. The player pulls down a slaving supply chain and what grows back is a farm town with a general store.
A faction on good terms with everyone
The Free Traders' relations table has three entries and all three are maxed.
- United Cities +100
- Shek Kingdom +100
- Swampers +100
The first two are worth putting side by side. The United Cities and the Shek Kingdom are old enemies, and the Free Traders sit at +100 with both. Everyone else gets the default of 0, which is to say no position at all.
Their race weights read the same way: Scorchlander 100, Greenlander 70, Shek 50, and even Hive Soldier Drone 10, Hive Worker Drone 5 and Hive Prince 1. The faction carries a colour scheme, so their armour and clothing come out dyed to one palette.
The version that was cut
An earlier build had a different Free Traders. The wiki's "Free Traders (Alpha)" page records that while they still owned no towns, they did hold outposts northeast of Black Scratch and south of Eyesocket, built as an Outpost s-III that was flophouse, medical station and trader in one building. Back then they had no negative relations with anybody. One small detail from version 0.50: flophouse beds elsewhere were broken, and the beds at a Free Traders outpost were the only ones characters could actually sleep in to recover.
Those outposts and their Outpost Boss are gone from the game. What is left is the Outpost Guard on the character list, marked as never spawning.