Mount and Blade 2: How to Make Money Fast

When you first start your adventure across Caldaria, you’re a complete nobody and it’s down to you to forge your own destiny. To get up and running, however, you’re first going to need to fill your coffers. But like everything in the game, actually making money isn’t really explained all that well, and most of the obvious options are incredibly time-consuming. So, here’s how to make money fast in Mount & Blade 2 Bannerlord.

This guide is going to assume that you are fairly early on in your campaign playthrough of Mount & Blade 2. As such, here we are going to detail a single tried and proven method of earning decent amounts of money quickly so that you’re able to build up your clan, get yourself a companion, and earn enough to deck out your hero with decent equipment.

Therefore, we’re going to skip over talking about obvious money earners like questing, selling prisoners, selling plunder you’ve won from battles, and smelting weapons into materials. Those work just fine, but learning how to trade is far more effective.

Now, let’s get into it.

How to Make Money Fast in Mount & Blade 2 Bannerlord

This method revolves around the simple act of buying and selling goods. Trading is easily the fastest way to make money, and while it may not seem like the most exciting activity, it can actually be quite a rewarding experience.

First things first, for this method to work effectively you will want to purchase at least two mules and/or have a party of 15 or more. Of course, technically you can buy/sell goods without either, but having mules and a large(ish) clan size will mean your carrying capacity is higher. The more mules the better — trust us, they are an excellent investment.

The basic idea of what we’re going to do is to purchase a huge number of goods in one town for a low price, and then sell those goods for a higher price in another town. Typically, it seems that at least one town in the area tends to have lower prices than the other. Or at the very least, there is one town that purchases items for much more.

Now, you’ll want to head to an area of the map that has two or three cities in close proximity. You’ll see in the above picture that we chose the Battanian region, where Car Banseth, Dunglanys, Marunath, and Pen Cannoc are all less than a day’s march from each other. You can sell to villages, of course, but they will only be able to afford a maximum of 1,000 Denars for any one trade, so it’s not very efficient.

In our case, we found that Car Banseth always has items a bit cheaper than elsewhere. So, all you need to do is visit the town, access the trade menu, list items by price, and then look to see which ones sell for more elsewhere. Choose items that have a decent profit margin. As pictured below.

It should be noted that the prices listed are actually “rumors” and aren’t always accurate. Sometimes, for example, it may say a particular town will pay 80 for something when in fact it may only be 55. But, at worst, you’ll just earn less of a profit.

Importantly, once you have plenty of capital to play with, you can start buying huge quantities of more expensive materials to trade. As you turn a profit on each, it won’t be long before you’re as rich as Croesus.

To give you some idea, we started this method with around 1,500 Denars and after around two or three hours we were at over 20,000.

Advanced Techniques

Caravans

From here, you can expand your trade empire by purchasing and running multiple caravans. This where the real money is, and it’s all earned passively, too, which is very nice. To set one up, simply talk to a merchant in any city you visit.

Purchasing a caravan costs 15,000 Denars to set up and requires a companion to oversee. One important thing to note is that if you are a vassal you’ll likely need to keep your trading within that territory to keep your overlord happy. Also, try to set up caravans between cities that aren’t on a frontline with other empires, since frontline cities frequently come under attack and aren’t able to be traded with during that time.

Workshops

Further, you can also purchase workshops in different cities, which again earn you passive income. Like caravans, there is a high set up cost involved (15,00, but it’s absolutely worth it in the long run.

The tricky part about workshops is working out which type of workshop to turn yours into once you have purchased it. Basically, you want to turn your workshop into one that produces a certain good based on what resources/materials the villages around you produce. Thankfully, making things much easier is this excellent list produced by Droblue over on Reddit.

That should give you a pretty good idea of how to get money fast in Mount & Blade 2 Bannerlord, as well as a brief look at some more advanced options. Basically, it’s all about the trade game!

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