Trading in Dwarf Fortress first occurs in the first autumn after establishing your fortress, with the arrival of the dwarven caravan. Trading is a good way to acquire resources that aren't readily available in the local area. It also allows for more freedom in selecting starting gear and skills at embark, since neglected items can be obtained through trade later.
Trader is the term used at your trade depot to refer to your fortress representative when dealing with merchants in a visiting caravan ( r - "Trader requested at Depot"). As a profession, the term applies to visiting merchants and dwarves whose highest skill is Appraiser.
Building a trade depot is a prerequisite for trade with caravans that arrive at your fortress. While it may be convenient to build a depot outside at first, it is usually a good idea to move it inside, or secure it with walls, bridges and other fortifications, to protect incoming caravans and your goods from thirsty animals, thieves and goblins.
Everything that is on your map belongs to you, except:
| Suggested trading procedure | ||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Arrive at fortress location | ||||||||||||||
| Create goods | Build Trade Depot | |||||||||||||
| Check depot is accessible | ||||||||||||||
| Wait for caravan | ||||||||||||||
| Set goods to be traded | Wait for caravan to arrive at depot and merchants to finish unloading | Wait for the diplomat (if any) to reach your leader | ||||||||||||
| Wait for goods to be hauled | Turn your leader's labors off so they don't get distracted | |||||||||||||
| Conduct meetings with the diplomat | ||||||||||||||
| Request trader at depot | ||||||||||||||
| Turn your trader's labors off so they don't get distracted | ||||||||||||||
| Trade | ||||||||||||||
| Turn trader's and leader's labors back on | ||||||||||||||
| Retrieve bins from depot to reuse | ||||||||||||||
Before you can begin trading, you need to designate what goods to trade and have the fortress's representative trader at the trade depot. Select the trade depot with q and then r equest the trader. Be sure that b reads "Only broker may trade" if you want your broker to represent your fortress. If it reads "Anyone can trade", a random, probably unskilled dwarf will volunteer to conduct the trade. Pressing b will toggle this setting. Then select the trade depot again and press g for Move Goods, you will be presented with a list of all items in your fortress that belong to you. Mark the goods you want to sell --insert clever advice--, and your dwarves will begin moving them to the depot.
Once the trade goods are moved to the depot and your trader has arrived, select the depot again with q and enter the t rade menu. In the trade menu select the items to offer from the right and the desired items from the left. All caravans have a weight limit which cannot be exceeded, and the allowed additional weight is displayed in the lower right corner. If your broker (specifically, not necessarily your trader) has at least Novice or better Appraisal skill, the value of all items will be displayed. Once the proposal is ready, press t to propose the trade, but merchants will not agree unless they make adequate profit. Be sure to use trade, not offer o , as this will make a gift of the selected items. The amount of acceptable profit is determined by the trader's skills and the merchant's mood, described below. Merchants may attempt to propose counteroffers if they do not accept the proposal, which can then be accepted, rejected, or further amended by the trader.
With more experienced traders and pleased merchants, even marginally profitable trades can be successful, and counterproposals can be rejected safely, offering the same trade again. Note however that a low profit margin for the traders may not be desirable - it has been suggested that both export and profit numbers influence the size of next year's caravan and, in the case of the dwarven caravan, immigration numbers. [ Verify ]
Note: Goods brought by caravans rarely have base quality higher than superior, and decorations on a good rarely exceed superior as well.
Note if you give or trade away an artifact, you will receive a special screen: 
| Brown | Items have been created (or modified) by your fortress. They can be traded away or offered as a gift. |
|---|---|
| Gray | Items were created by another source. They can be traded, but if one of these items has been selected, the entire selection cannot be offered as a gift. |
| Purple | Items are under a no-export mandate. If they are traded away it will result in disciplinary action (see justice) against the dwarf that brought the item to the depot. |
| Green | Items have just been gifted to the caravan and they will not trade it back. |
| Red | Items have been seized from another caravan and cannot be traded as is; you will need to decorate them or turn them into other items for them to become "valid" trading items. |
Note that containers (barrels, bins, etc.) will be displayed according to the origin of the container, not the contents. So a foreign barrel holding locally-produced beer will display as foreign (white). Once you v iew the container, the locally-made contents are displayed as local (brown).
Pressing s from the trade menu will seize the selected items of the merchant's. If you seize goods from a caravan, the merchant will respond "Take what you want. I can't stop you." and then leave immediately without the seized goods. Items cannot be seized from the dwarven caravan, and other races will not buy goods stolen from one of their caravans (then marked in red) unless they are tricked into asking for them via counteroffer, or the items are "laundered" by decoration or used to create other goods. Seizing goods will hurt diplomatic relations, but is not grounds for an automatic siege.
Pressing the seize button while no goods are selected will result in the merchant interpreting your seizure as a joke. This apparently does nothing to benefit or hinder your trading.
As a side note, if you deconstruct your trade depot with a caravan in it, all the caravan's items will drop to the ground, to be readily hauled away by your dwarves. This does not mark the items as stolen, and the caravan will leave. However, next year's caravan is partly based on the profits from the previous year - so if you are relying on that race's caravans for needed items, you're hurting yourself in the long run.
Trying to interrogate a merchant can also cause a wagon to fall apart.
Another way to steal without marking as stolen is to forbid the trade depot just before they leave, causing them to leave their goods at the depot.
If you're using the search plugin for DFHack (e.g. from the Lazy Newb Pack), be warned that s means "seize" and NOT "search", and there is no warning for it. Use q to search the merchant's goods and w to search yours.
Note that the civilization attached to a particular caravan will keep track of the value of items the caravan was carrying when they set out to trade, and they will compare this value with the value of items they return home with. Regardless of what method you use to confiscate items from a caravan, even if you came to possess the goods through no fault of your own (an ambush killed the traders and guards, for example) the parent civilization may decide that you stole from them and send a siege instead of a caravan the following year. It is prudent to take measures to protect caravans visiting your lands!
o You can also give away items, as gifts to the leaders of the civilization you are trading with. This presumably helps relations between yourself and the other faction, though there is not yet a clear correlation between the value of the offerings and the improvement to relations. The exact effects of offerings on trading are unknown but it is believed due to the offerings' net trade value being counted towards the merchants' profit, possibly with a modifier (possibly a multiplier of more than 1 as a bonus or less than 1 to compensate for the improved relations) [ Verify ] , which in turn increases the quantity and variety of trade goods brought by next year's caravan. Also the Monarch requires offerings to be made before their arrival. You cannot offer items that were not made at your fortress; the merchants do not want your spare Goblinite clothes.
The value of an offering for the purpose of becoming the capital is adjusted by your current export agreement.
Unless you are looking for fun, under no conditions should you offer or trade items which are wooden or used wood in their creation (clear glass, for example) to elves, as this will insult the traders, and may cause them to leave or even damage relations enough to provoke a war between you and the elven civilization you traded with. They will accept their own "grown wood" items in trade without insult, however.
By default, each friendly civilization will send one merchant caravan per year, linked to one season, which is spring for elves, summer for humans, and autumn for dwarves - no race trades in winter by default. Merchants from different races has different trading preferences.
If your fortress was founded in spring, it is highly unlikely that you will receive an elven caravan that spring, and it is uncommon for a human caravan your first summer, so probably your first and only caravan your first year will be the dwarven one. Caravans will only show up if that race considers the fortress site accessible (as denoted on the embark screen) and "worth the effort" (as determined by the [PROGRESS_TRIGGER_*] tokens in the entity definition), with the exception of dwarves, who always arrive unless they are extinct.
"Greetings from the mountainhome. Your efforts are legend there. Let us trade!" (Or, if your fort is the mountainhome. ) "Greetings from the outer lands. Your efforts are legend there. Let us trade!"
Typically, the first caravan you receive is the dwarven one from your home civilization, giving you at least 22 weeks to prepare (assuming you started mid-spring, the default). This does require that you are on the same continent as they are, and you are not isolated by mountains or bodies of water.
The dwarven caravan:
The dwarven caravan from your home civilization:
Assuming you do have friendly contact with elves, their first caravan will arrive sometime in spring, giving you about a full year before they arrive.
The elven caravan:
Because they do not utilize wagons, elven caravans have a much smaller weight limit than dwarven and human ones, making trading heavy items like furniture problematic. Because of this and that they tend to offer only items made of (living) wood*, the total value of what they offer tends to be considerably less than other caravans, meaning your fortress doesn't have to bring nearly as much to trade to get everything that it might find useful.
(* Wooden items offered by the elves have been "grown" as that item, so, somehow, that makes it acceptable to them. See next section.)
"No wagons" also means that the entire caravan will use the most direct 1-tile-wide path to your Trade Depot, which could be a good or bad thing, depending on that path and your plans for this caravan.
Elves view living trees as sacred - or some crap like that. Offering or attempting to trade items that required the killing of a tree will greatly offend the merchant, causing their mood to drop rapidly. They will refuse to trade any more that season and leave immediately. Additionally, you will be called "uncouth", "crude", and "barbaric" for not understanding their customs.
"Once a beautiful tree, and now? It is a rude bauble, fit only for your kind."
Unacceptable items (as offered by dwarves) include:
However, stone and metal items, even when charcoal is used in production, are acceptable (since the elves are unfamiliar with metalworking, and do not know that charcoal is used to make metal items). Items made from silk are acceptable, as are all non-wooden plant-derived products such as cloth and thread. Items made of bone (totems too), horn, shell or leather are acceptable, so are meat and fish. You can also transport your goods to the trade depot in a wooden bin, as long as you do not try to sell the bin. Living animals are acceptable, as long as the cage or trap is not made of wood.
Be especially careful with reselling decorated items from other caravans, as non-wood/glass items may have decorations of wood or clear/crystal glass. Note that "grown" wooden items from elven caravans can be resold to them, as the elves know that they were made in an elf-kosher way.
Assuming you do have friendly contact with humans, their first caravan will arrive sometime in summer, giving you well over a full year before they arrive.
The human caravan:
Choosing to seize goods from a human caravan without marking anything to be taken is treated as a joke, which will raise the visiting trader's mood. This can only be done once each year.
A goblin caravan will only arrive if you mod the game, primarily because their entity lacks the entity tokens needed to make use of pack animals and wagons. That, and that the token [BABYSNATCHER] makes them hostile to all non-goblin civilizations. The same caveats apply to kobolds (whose [UTTERANCES] and [ITEM_THIEF] tags, similarly, make them hostile to every civilization).
The goblin caravan:
[ Verify ] If your trader has Novice or better Judge of intent skill, there will be a line added below the merchant's dialogue describing the caravan's attitude. Their attitude rises with successful trades (especially if they get lots of profit) and falls when you propose deals they don't like. You can never make a deal that's at a loss for the merchant, even if they are at the highest possible mood.
The happier you make a merchant, the less profit margin they will demand in a trade. Dwarven merchants start off wanting about 100% profit, maybe a little more. If you repeatedly offer less than what they expect, that will "lower" their mood. If, on the other hand, you meet or exceed their expectation, that will, over several trades, improve their mood. If merchants reach the lowest level, no further trade will be possible, and they will immediately pack up and leave your depot. Since annoyed merchants are more likely to reject deals, you should be generous in initial negotiations. Skilled negotiators seem less likely to offend merchants with unsuccessful deals.
An easy way to capitalize on this mood system is to perform several partial trades. First trade for a few items, offering goods twice the value of the items you ask for (e.g. offer 2000☼ for 1000☼ of his stuff). This will likely make the merchant ecstatic about trading with you. Perform the next trades more aggressively, working them down to about a 30% profit. With the merchant in such a good mood, they are more likely to counteroffer than reject a trade outright. If you don't like the counter-offer, try to split the difference, or just back out of the trade and start again.
Outpost liaisons (from your own civilization) and foreign Merchant Nobles (if added with the TRADE responsibility) will arrive with the caravan to speak to your noble dwarves (and they will speak to those dwarves, even if they have to wait at their bedside in the hospital for months after the caravan has left), appearing on the map edge at the same time as the caravan (though in a different location). Meeting with them allows you to request specific items for the next caravan to bring (at a premium price) or take requests for production for the next caravan (for which the merchants will pay a premium).
Current trade agreements can be viewed through the Civilization menu ( c ). These trade agreements are cleared when a liaison of the corresponding civilization enters the screen, so they are generally not accessible after the caravan has arrived.
In the event that your leader is replaced, killed, or taken by a strange mood, the liaison may decide to leave your fortress "unhappy". Bug:576 Curiously, this will not occur if your leader is otherwise unable to perform the "conduct meeting" task. You can currently lock a liaison in a room and they will wait years to attend the meeting your noble is constantly conducting (and all subsequent diplomats appear to wait in line for the first to finish); this behavior is presumably a bug. Bug:8947
Whether having successfully met with your leader or given up, a liaison who has decided to leave but is prevented from reaching the map edge will eventually go insane.
If you order your military to kill merchants from your own civilization, a bizarre result of the way loyalty is handled makes the members of your military who attacked the traders become enemies of your civilization, but remain members of your fort's government (dwarves of this faction are referred to as separatists). As enemies, they attack your other dwarves (citizens), but as members of the fort, they still follow orders. Allowing citizen militia dwarves to attack the separatists will give them opposite loyalties of the separatists, (i.e. loyal to civ, not to fort), or loyalists, who do not follow orders. And then, if a separatist or loyalist kill a citizen, they become enemies of the civ and fort, making them Renegades, who are essentially complete enemies of the citizens.
To prevent the cascade from spreading, order the original separatists away from the fortress and let them fight amongst themselves. If the results are renegades, it is okay to allow other dwarves to kill them (by stationing them nearby). If the results are separatists/loyalists, then you will need to separate them, somehow.
