Humble beginnings
As a general theme in Mercatorio, more efficient and profitable production requires more complex setups and is more at risk of supply chain disruptions. When just setting out, and while still learning the mechanics, it may make sense to take a more humble approach, focusing on self-sufficiency and resilience over profit margin.
If profit margin is what you’re after, have a look at the Earning a living post as well.
Starting out
At the start of the game you will have a storehouse with some construction materials and a little bit of money. You will a worker (yourself) and the potential to host two tenants, all of which can contribute low cost labour.
The goal of the game is to earn prestige, but there’s no need to rush into that. The more immediate concern is to get some cash flowing into our coffers, as the initial money won’t suffice for everything we’d like to build.
Household production
Even without any production buildings we have the ability to get to work, using household production methods.
Some of these will work without any other input than our own labour (knight duty and delivery duty), while others require some inputs.
Furniture duty for instance requires labour (that’s us) and timber. It
looks quite profitable, despite what turns out to be a high cost for
timber. We’ll put this aside for now and move down the production chain
to take a look at the split timber 1 production method (which takes
place in the logging camp building)
Note that out town doesn’t have a good estimate for the sales price of timber, but the “calc breakeven” button shows us what our production cost would be. It may be worth to establish our own supply of timber before we think about assembling furniture from purchased wood.
Incidentally the logging camp is one of the cheapest and easiest buildings to construct.
And what’s more, timber is required for construction of almost all buildings, so this is definitely a good product to have our own supply of.
Construction of a logging camp takes only one game month/turn, and if you obtain the 40 labour in the first turn (with your own labour or by manually purchasing from the market) you can immediately complete it without using a construction rush (just click “finish”). You can even repeat this process when expanding the logging camp, allowing you to quickly get a multi-plot timber production facility within a single turn, if this is desired. In general, you should expand the initial logging camp instead of building multiple of them.
Housing tenants
Another building that is a safe bet to build early on is the farmstead.
This building is rented out to a tenant peasant household, which will pay their rent in the most versatile resource of them all, labour. There are special restrictions on the number of tenants you can house, starting with two and growing as you obtain more prestige. As with the logging camp, you usually want to expand the initial farmstead with more tenants instead of building multiple separate buildings.
The construction of the farmstead is more expensive and time consuming than the logging camp, but can be built with your own resources now that you have a logging camp.
Putting it together
With our buildings completed and linked up with the storehouse, we get this setup:
We have ourself running delivery duty in the town full-time and our tenant working the logging camp.
We produce 10 units of labour, 9.8 of which are spent on splitting timber, and we produce 125 units of carting, just under 1 is used to deliver the timber to the storehouse, while 124 are sold at the town market. We have positive cashflow, positive flow of timber (for furniture production, or more construction) and no dependencies. This is a great starting point, and depending on the unique market situation, we can move into furniture assembly, looking into exporting our timber directly, or make a parallel production chain with different products.