Alleviate your position in Caldaria by making up to 1,000 denars a day in passive profits! This can be accomplished quite early on into your campaign, securing you a steady cash flow that will enable you to maintain a solid core of elite badasses.
Acquiring the Workshop
In order to get a Workshop in Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord, you will need some denars to finance the operation and supplies.
Once you get that rolling, you will be able to passively pay for your army and equipment without having to worry about finances. This article will show you a great way to diversify your revenue via Town Workshops.
Most towns have a couple of Workshops. The easiest way to access them for now is to ‘Take a walk around the town center’ at any town, such as Lycaron, and hold down the ‘Alt‘ key to find the shop.
You will need at least 16,000 denars to be able to purchase a Workshop, although in some cases it can costs as little as 13,000 denars.
In this example, we bought ourselves an Ironmonger Workshop (Smithy) as weapons and tools are somewhat expensive.
The most expensive items you can buy are swords and armor. Since Smithies logically manufacture them, it should yield us the most profits.
Workshops will take a few in-game days to become fully operational and become profitable, but the first few days can also give you an indication on how well the Workshop will do.
Unfortunately our Ironmonger Workshop is not doing so well and we are already on the edge of bankruptcy within the week. It appears that the Ironmonger Workshop is not producing enough merchandise to break even.
Buying supplies and materials for the Workshop
Mount and Blade 2: Bannerlord features a living economy where supply and demand dictates the value of goods in certain regions, according to different circumstances.
Since the Ironmonger Workshop requires iron ore to operate, we will try to remedy this business by purchasing some Iron Ore and supplying it to our workshop ourselves.
To turn around our investment, we need to seek out villages that produce Iron Ore.
We can the use the Iron Ore to give a little production boost for our Ironmonger. This is a crucial step to jump-start the business in its initial phase.
Here’s a quick list of all the common raw materials and what you can convert them into, using a workshop.
| Workshop Type | Required Materials | Final Product |
| Wood Workshop | Hardwood | Bows and Shields |
| Brewery | Grain | Beer |
| Ironmonger Smithy | Iron Ore | Tools and Melee weapons |
| Pottery Workshop | Clay | Pottery |
| Wool Weaver | Sheep/Wool | Clothing |
| Tannery | Hides | Boots and Gloves |
| Olive Press | Olives | Oil |
| Silversmith | Silver | Jewelry |
If you are willing to put in the extra effort, you can even do more research and look for what specific goods are in high demand in your region.
For example, if the town of Onira has a high demand for Jewelry, they are willing to pay far above the market price for them. Therefore it would be worthwhile to open a Silversmith in that town to capitalize on it; assuming you are willing to find cheap silver ore to supply the town consistently.
Turning the Workshop profitable
After visiting a few villages that have Iron Ore as their main export, we have gathered enough Iron Ore to jump-start our business.
Throwing in some Crude Iron and Steel smelted from looted weapons, we have a good base to provide our Ironmonger.
After supplying our business with some much needed materials, we need to wait in town for the workshop to start working its magic. We waited in Lycaron for almost a week to see if our investment improved at all.
As expected, the Smithy is giving us much more promising numbers, already churning out profits.
Instead of our initial 15-45 denars within the first week, the profits have increased to around 95-135 denars after supplying it with more Iron Ore and other materials.
Unfortunately, factoring in how long ago we acquired this Smithy and how much fresh materials we had to buy, it does not seem to be worthwhile so far.
Workshops excel at giving you passive income. Tailoring it to the local Caravans and Villages is a requirement if you want the most denars for the least amount of effort.
Changing the Workshop type according to supply
If we follow what the locals can supply, we can see what they are producing and selling.
The most reliable way to find this out is to spend a few days patrolling around a town and inspecting the villagers who are travelling to the town and see what they are selling.
These Villagers are from Morenia and are en route to Lycaron. They are primarily selling Clay as they have vast quantities of them (over 30 is a good indication of rich supply).
From the materials table show previously in the article, we can discern that a Pottery workshop turns Clay into Pottery.
The profit margins on Pottery are also very solid, as clay typically sells for anywhere between 10-30 denars, but can be sold for as high as 200 denars.
It is also important to note that villagers supplying towns can come from more than just the bound villages. In this instance, the Villagers of Morenia are bound to the Morenia Castle, but still trade in Lycaron as castles are not trading hubs. This means neighboring factions, villages and caravans alike.
Now that we know that it will be a lot easier to provide clay to our workshop, we should shift the Smithy into a Pottery to cater to this new market supply.
Within only 2 days of changing the business type, we have already seen much greater profits without having to travel half the world in order to supply an unstable Workshop.
Another way to figure out the local supply is to just inspect the neighboring villages. We can see that the villages of Gorcorys and Avalyps both produce Grain as their primary export.
Referring to our chart, this means Vostrum is an ideal candidate for a brewery.
As expected, shifting the existing workshop in Vostrum from a Wood Workshop into a Brewery almost instantly increased the profits by 25% and will only improve as the business matures.
Making more Workshops and selling them for profit
As time goes on, the Workshops you own will slowly build up a stable supply of raw material and convert them into goods. Your profits will start to rise, and the business value will increase as well.
This opens up the possibility of selling the workshop for insane profits and moving on to greater ventures.
We are able to maintain a solid party of some heavy cavalry, veteran infantry, and elite archers with just a few businesses to passively pay for their entire salary and leave us plenty to use as we please.
Be aware, if the faction that owns the town of your Workshop decides to turn hostile; you will lose that Workshop. It is best to either plan around it, or try to sell the workshop before the hostilities begin.
Once you start rolling, you might be looking to build up tons of businesses. You can open up additional Workshops according to your Clan level.
This limitation exists to prevent people from making insane amounts of money within a few weeks of starting out the game. Once you get in to the late game, you can have a massive business empire.
Supply of raw material for any Workshop can be disrupted by sieges and banditry. It can be worthwhile to raid bandit hideouts that are too close to supplying villages or to cull some of the bandit groups roaming around.
If you workshop gets disrupted, it will take a while to go back to its original profits.
Building duplicate Workshops decreases your efficiency. The raw material prices will either become more expensive or more scarce and the manufactured goods will command less market value. It’s a good idea to diversify your workshops.
You should now have a solid understanding on how to make great profits using Workshops in Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord. Make sure to check out our other Bannerlord guides to take your campaign to another level.
