“Trade horribly unbalanced?” collected sixty-odd replies and no resolution, which is what happens when a question is posed in the wrong units. Prices in this game look unbalanced because they are being compared against each other. They are not supposed to be. The only comparison that decides anything is between a price and the labour you would spend making the thing instead, and nothing in the trade interface performs that conversion for you.
Songs of Syx import-or-produce, at a glance
| Situation | Which way this points | What to do about it |
|---|---|---|
| Buying it beats running the workshop at these prices | Import it — worker worth 22.3/day vs break-even 55.6 | Import it and move the freed workers onto a good where your own production actually wins. |
| Domestic input costs run higher than the whole import bill | Make it yourself — worker worth -20/day vs break-even -25 | Producing this in-house is quietly the more expensive option once the inputs are counted — price the inputs before defending the workshop. |
| Import cost and domestic input cost land almost equal | Too close to call — worker worth 0/day vs break-even 0 | This close, decide on route reliability instead of price — an interruptible supply line is the real risk, not the coin difference. |
These are outputs of this site's own worker-value conversion run against illustrative prices we chose, not values extracted from the game files — buy and sell prices, worker counts and input costs come from your own market and industry panels. Use the calculator below for your own numbers.
Coins are not the unit of account, workers are
Your colony’s scarce resource is not money. It is people. Every industry you run is a claim on the same finite workforce, so a good you buy is not costing you coins so much as releasing workers, and a good you produce is not saving coins so much as consuming them.
That reframing produces a clean test:
- Work out how many workers this industry ties up to meet your daily consumption.
- Work out what importing the same quantity costs per day, fees included.
- Divide the second by the first. That is what each freed worker must earn elsewhere to make importing the better deal.
If your workers can clear that bar somewhere else in the colony, import. If they cannot, produce. The market price never enters the decision on its own, which is why price tables cannot answer this and why every thread about it stalls.
Do the conversion
Import it or make it? Price a good in workers, not coins
Import it landed cost 3.3 per unit against 1.82 net if you sold the same unit
- Import bill per day
- 990
- Workers this industry needs
- 20
- Workers freed by importing
- 16
- Each worker is worth
- 22.3 / day
- Import break-even per worker
- 55.6 / day
- Shipments in flight to stay stocked
- 2
Importing wins. Each of the 16 workers you free up would have to generate 55.63 per day to justify keeping the industry, and at your own numbers they generate 22.27. Put them somewhere the gap is the other way round.
Every price here comes from your own market screen — we assert none of them, because market prices move with your standing, the season and the patch. What we supply is the conversion from coins into worker-days, which is the comparison the trade panel never shows you.
Every price here is yours. We assert none of them, and not out of caution — market prices in this game move with your standing, with the season, with what your partners are themselves short of, and with the patch. The game itself simulates supply and demand on top of that: oversaturate a market without a price floor and a good you export becomes nearly worthless, and the reverse holds for a good you keep buying. Any table of “best goods to export” is a snapshot of one save at one moment being passed off as a rule. The conversion from coins to worker-days, on the other hand, is stable, and that is the part worth publishing.
The spread is the part people miss
Buy price and sell price are not the same number, and the gap is not a rounding error. As of V71, tariffs are charged both ways as a percentage of a good’s price, and every traded resource also carries a per-item price addition for the logistics of moving it — fees on top of the spread, not instead of it. Add that on and the round trip on a single unit loses you real value twice. This has a consequence that changes how you should think about stockpiles:
- Buying to cover a gap is normal, and the landed cost is what you pay.
- Buying to resell has to clear the spread and the fees before it clears anything else, which most goods never do.
- Producing to export competes with producing for yourself, and the sell price is the lower of the two prices — so an industry that looks profitable at the buy price is often break-even at the price you can actually realise.
The calculator uses the net sell price rather than the headline one for exactly this reason.
Supply is not the same as stock
The last output row answers a different question that costs people whole seasons: how many shipments must be in transit for a good to be permanently available rather than periodically available.
If a shipment covers ten days of consumption and a round trip takes ten days, one route is theoretically sufficient and practically not — every disruption becomes a stockout, and you will be reacting to a shortage rather than running a supply. Two overlapping routes turn the same import into infrastructure. This is the difference between “I import iron” and “I have iron”, and it is invisible until the first time a route is interrupted.
The two orders that make the decision reverse
The output labels itself import, produce or too close to call, and the third case is not a cop-out. When the two sides are within about ten percent, the arithmetic genuinely does not decide, and you should choose on properties the ledger does not model:
| If you care most about | Choose | Because |
|---|---|---|
| Never being cut off | Produce | Domestic output cannot be interrupted by a hostile neighbour or a bad season abroad |
| Freeing workers for a bottleneck | Import | The freed labour is available immediately; a new industry is not |
| Surviving a price swing | Produce | Your exposure to the spread drops to zero |
| Reacting to a temporary need | Import | An industry you build for one season is a workforce you cannot easily reclaim |
Notice that the first and second rows point in opposite directions from the same colony state. That is not a defect in the table — it is the actual trade-off, and the calculator’s job is to tell you how much labour each side of it costs so you can pick knowingly rather than by temperament.
Before you act on any of it, check that the workers you are freeing are not already committed elsewhere. The hauler throughput calculator will tell you if your logistics crew is the real constraint, and the import bill in food terms matters if the good in question is edible — a food import is a farm you do not have to staff, and it belongs in that balance rather than this one.
Which version this is written against
V0.71, the branch the community was playing through July and August 2026 — the trade thread quoted at the top is from early August of that year, and a 27 July 2026 thread names the version outright.
Prices are the worst possible thing to hardcode, and not only because of patches: they differ between saves on the same version. So this page publishes no price at all. The conversion from coins into worker-days is the durable part, and it is the part nothing in the game shows you.
Sources
- Songs of Syx Wiki, Trade — supply and demand are simulated on trade, so oversaturating a market without a price floor can make a good nearly worthless, and denarii lose value to inflation over time
- V71 - Reign of Terror - Available Now (Steam) — tariffs now apply both ways as a percentage of a good’s price and every traded resource carries a per-item logistics price addition, with early trade more expensive than late-game trade
