Merchant

The Trade Merchant swaps one resource for another on the planet you have selected. It is the only way to turn ore into hydrogen, or hydrogen into crystal, without moving a fleet anywhere. Each trade costs 5,000 credits.

There is no merchant to buy and keep hold of. You open the trade window, set the amounts, and the credits come off when the trade goes through.

Where to find it

Two places, and both open the same window:

• The green Trade link under your resource totals in the top right corner. It sits on every page in the game.
• Hire Merchant on the Store page.

Exchange rates

The rates never move. Ore is the cheap resource and hydrogen is the expensive one, at fixed relative values of 1 for ore, 1.5 for crystal and 2.5 for hydrogen.

Trade this	For this	Per 1,000,000 traded you get
Ore	Crystal	666,667 crystal
Ore	Hydrogen	400,000 hydrogen
Crystal	Ore	1,500,000 ore
Crystal	Hydrogen	600,000 hydrogen
Hydrogen	Ore	2,500,000 ore
Hydrogen	Crystal	1,666,667 crystal

Put another way: 2,500 ore buys 1,000 hydrogen, 1,500 ore buys 1,000 crystal, and 1,000 crystal buys 600 hydrogen.

There is no spread. The rate is the same in both directions, so trading ore for hydrogen and then straight back again leaves you with the ore you started with. The only thing it costs you is 5,000 credits each way.

Making a trade

1. Select the planet you want the resources on. The trade happens there and nowhere else.
2. Open the trade window.
3. Pick the resource to give away on the left and the resource to receive on the right. Whatever you picked on the left is greyed out on the right, because you cannot trade a resource for itself.
4. Type an amount, or press Max to fill in the largest amount you can trade right now.
5. You Get updates as you type. Press Initiate Trade and the resources change hands straight away.

Storage sets the limit

The merchant will not hand you more of a resource than the planet can hold. Max already allows for this, which is why Max is sometimes a much smaller number than the pile you were hoping to spend.

Type in more than that and the window warns you. The trade still goes through, but it is cut down to whatever fits:

A capped trade still costs the full 5,000 credits, so read the warning before you press the button. If you want the whole amount in one go, empty out the resource you are buying first, either by spending it or by sending it away on a transport, then come back and trade.

Storage comes from the Ore Warehouse, the Crystal Warehouse and the Hydrogen Storage tank. A planet with none of them built holds 100,000 of each.

Notes

• The resources land on the planet you had selected, on the spot. Nothing travels and there is nothing to wait for.
• Trades work on moons as well as planets. Moons cannot build storage buildings, so a moon is stuck at 100,000 of each resource and you can never trade for more than that at a time.
• Trades work on a deployed Hephaestus Class Attack Platform. It counts as all three storage types at once with room for 1,000,000,000 of each, so it takes the biggest trades in the game: up to 2.5 billion ore for 1 billion hydrogen. Clear out the resource you are buying first if you want the full amount.
• There is no daily limit and no cooldown. You can trade as often as you can pay for it.
• Energy cannot be traded. Only ore, crystal and hydrogen.
• Without 5,000 credits the trade is refused and nothing changes.
• There is no player-to-player trade window in SFC2. To move resources to another player you send them a transport fleet.