Toolbox Theory Part 3 : Trade Contracts (16.02.2026)

Hello, this is last part regarding Toolbox Theory. This time we will talk about trade contracts, which will have a lot of uses, from Custom Production, to Megastuctures.

Trade Contracts and Merchant Reputation

As mentioned in first dev diary there are three types of trade present in Toolbox Theory. Internal, External and third one : Trade Contracts.

Those serves to be replacement and big overhaul towards vanilla mission, that you could have encountered in bar. The "I want your colonies to produce y supply of x for certain period of time. This time everything is done remotely, as traders post their contracts every 3 months.

Trade-net for all types of contracts!

Taking contracts will reward you with huge pay-off, given that here you earn much much bigger percentage per commodity, compared to internal and external trade, as well as it will increase Merchant Reputation, which is essential, to get better contracts.

Merchant Reputation

Around level 9 contracts will have more than just money as reward. Sometimes investors have ... other means to pay for stuff

AI Balls

Be really careful with amount of contracts being accepted. You can only start to satisfy trade contracts when faction's production is way bigger, than faction's demand, so internal trade must be fulfilled first and foremost!

You can miss the contract up to 3 times. After that next miss will terminate contract, and you will get reputation penalty.

Details of Contract

State-Mandated Contracts - Contracts issued by your faction

You yourself, as well as your faction is capable of issuing trade contracts. For now there is only one contract, that can be issued by you yourself, while rest are issued by your faction automatically. Purpose of said contracts is to have mechanic, that will only take resources produced by your faction and only by your faction.

Direct Procurement Contract

Vaults of Knowledge 5.0 : Rework for new economy system

Due to economy overhaul opening a lot of new doors, and that would fully contradict mechanic, that was all around VOK: Global Production. I decided to nuke 40% of VoK content, to rework it, so it suits new economy overhaul. One of those is custom production

I did small UI changes, but this is how new interface looks like!

New Production UI

New Production UI - List of Current Orders

Custom Production UI that I made previously was the oldest UI in terms of implementation. It still had very very old code, and way way worse approach towards UI, that I had back then. What I am proud the most is this scrollable list, that does not longer lag, when there are like 500,600 buttons.

Let's list the changes that will come towards production as there are few of them.

• Resources for each order are consumed at the end of month only! So for each resources there is delay of order, as it needs first resources to start production. Once delivered production starts
• You don't pay immediately, nor when production starts. You only pay, when production is finished and you get product (So also at the end of month)
• Global Production does not longer exists, and productions orders are tied to trade contracts.

Let's list the changes that will come towards production as there are few of them. To see current orders progress, or to edit them, you click on one of production orders buttons, in Current Orders.

Order, that is about to have resources delivered

Order, that has already all resources delivered

If you wonder how many resources you still need for order, you can just see trade contract UI to check it.

Order, that has already all resources delivered

That is all for dev diary, economy overhaul itself is mostly done, I will still need to balance it out, maybe add more stuff if I feel like it. For now major thing, is to rewrite VoK for this new economy system, and re-balance a lot of industries, and megastructures.

This will be by far the most impactful and biggest update ever to AoTD. I really wanna give it time, see how it plays.

Next in dev diary will be further showcase of trade contracts implementation across VoK (Black site Projects, Megastructures) and new type of structures - Great Wonders (Technically megastructures count towards these as well)