Toolbox Theory Part 3: Trade Contracts (17.03.2026)

Hello, this is the last part regarding the Toolbox Theory. This time we will talk about trade contracts, which will have many uses, from custom production to megastructures.

Trade Contracts and Merchant Reputation

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

These serve as a replacement and major overhaul of the vanilla bar missions you might have encountered before — the classic "I want your colonies to produce Y supply of X for a certain period of time." This time everything is done remotely, as traders post their contracts every three months.

Trade-net for all types of contracts!

Taking contracts will reward you with a huge payoff. Here you earn a much bigger percentage per commodity compared to internal and external trade. It will also increase your Merchant Reputation, which is essential for getting better contracts.

Merchant Reputation

Around level 9, contracts will start offering more than just money as rewards. Sometimes investors have... other means to pay for things.

AI Balls

Be really careful with the number of contracts you accept. You can only start fulfilling trade contracts when your faction's production is significantly higher than its demand, so internal trade must always be fulfilled first and foremost.

You can miss a contract up to three times. After that, the next miss will terminate the contract and you will receive a reputation penalty.

Details of Contract

State-Mandated Contracts — Contracts Issued by Your Faction

You, as well as your faction, are capable of issuing trade contracts. For now there is only one contract that can be issued directly by you, while the rest are issued automatically by your faction. The purpose of these contracts is to create a mechanic that only uses resources produced by your faction and only by your faction.

Direct Procurement Contract

Vaults of Knowledge 5.0: Rework for the New Economy System

Due to the economy overhaul opening many new possibilities, the old mechanic that defined VoK — Global Production — would fully contradict the new system. Because of that, I decided to remove about 40% of VoK content so it could be properly reworked to fit the new economy overhaul. One of those systems is custom production.

I also made some small UI changes, and this is how the new interface looks!

New Production UI

New Production UI - List of Current Orders

The Custom Production UI I made previously was the oldest UI in terms of implementation. It still used very old code and a much worse approach to UI design that I had back then. What I am most proud of is this scrollable list, which no longer lags even when there are 500 or 600 buttons.

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

• Resources for each order are consumed only at the end of the month. This means every order has an initial delay while the required resources are delivered. Once delivered, production starts.
• You don't pay immediately or when production starts. You only pay when production is finished and you receive the product (also at the end of the month).
• Global Production no longer exists, and production orders are now tied to trade contracts.

To see the progress of current orders or edit them, you can click on one of the production order buttons in the Current Orders list.

Order that is about to have resources delivered

Order that already has all resources delivered

If you are wondering how many resources are still needed for an order, you can simply check the Trade Contract UI to see the remaining requirements.

Order that already has all resources delivered

That is all for this dev diary. The economy overhaul itself is mostly finished. I will still need to balance it, and maybe add more features if I feel like it.

For now the major task is rewriting VoK to work with this new economy system, and rebalancing many industries and megastructures.

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

In the next dev diary I will further showcase trade contracts across VoK (Black Site Projects, Megastructures) and introduce a new type of structure — Great Wonders (technically megastructures also count as these).