Bannerlord: How to create a Caravan

Creating a trade caravan is simple in Mount and Blade II Bannerlord, you just need to know how to create a caravan and have the necessary leader and payment ready for it. Here’s how you can start to make your own caravans and make a mint off trade in Bannerlord.

Creating a trade caravan in Bannerlord

To create your first caravan in Bannerlord, you’ll need someone to command the caravan – be aware that this cannot be you – as well as 15000 gold, or 22500 gold for a stronger version we’ll discuss later.

If you have both a spare companion or family member in your party who is already equipped and up to the task, you’ll need to head to the nearest town and talk to a merchant there. Usually this means any of the first few NPCs in the notable characters list, particularly those who have ‘owned caravans’ present in their information box.

Click on a merchant, and choose talk or visit to start a dialogue. Inform them that you’d like to create a caravan using the ‘I wish to form a caravan in this town’ dialogue prompt,

You’ll be prompted first for the 15,000 gold payment to form one, and after agreeing you’ll also be asked who will lead the caravan. This is where you’ll need to select a companion or family member character to handle running the newly created caravan for you.

When you’ve paid up and selected your caravan master, the new caravan will be created and start roaming town to town in your Bannerlord world.

There is a lot of upfront cost to using caravans, and the investment of one of your companions isn’t that easy to ignore too, but it can definitely pay off in the long term. If you happen to be playing neutral rather than signing on to a particular faction, they are also pretty safe money generators currently.

In my games so far on the beta version 1.8 of Bannerlord, Caravans seem to consistently pull some level of profit daily meaning they will definitely pay for themselves if they live long enough. Add to that the relative speed of caravans means that very few neutral enemies such as sea raiders and forest bandits even attack them, nevermind manage to destroy them, and you have a consistent profit source.

If you add in a mod to get trade experience upon profit from your caravans and workshops, they’ll even be passively levelling your trade skill the entire time you leave them to roam the map. Note that vanilla game caravans will not grant you passive trade experience in Bannerlord however, though you can always use your main war party as a trade caravan if that’s how you want to play. If you want to do so, check out our guide on how to quickly sell a lot of your items at once to save time.

Can you create a caravan with stronger troops in Bannerlord?

If you want to be on the safer side and make sure bandits can pretty much never harm your newly formed caravans after you’ve made use of our create a caravan in Bannerlord guide, the good news is you can put together a stronger caravan.

When you next form a caravan, when you reach the payment stage, ask if you can make a caravan with higher quality troops, which is the second provided dialogue prompt when you ask a merchant to create a caravan.

This will up your caravan creation cost to 22500 denars instead, but short of getting dragged into a war while your caravans are inside hostile lands, there will be no warbands on the map likely to succeed or even attempt to bring them down.

Be aware this option doesn’t actually make the caravan larger, but it will create a caravan with higher-quality troops, granting it better protection than the cheaper option.