Transporting

The sum

You buy in city A, carry the goods to city B and sell. What you keep:

sale − purchase − tax − setup fees − trip costs − expected losses

With Premium the sales tax is 4% (8% without), and listing on a sell order adds a 2.5% setup fee; selling into a buy order skips the setup fee. That puts the minimum gap at about 4.2% for an instant sale and 7% for a listing with Premium, before trips and risk. How to flip items has the full break-even table.

What usually moves

• Raw resources toward their refining city. Refiners get a +40 production bonus at home, so Martlock buys hide, Lymhurst fiber, Fort Sterling wood, Bridgewatch stone and Thetford ore.
• Refined materials toward crafters. Bars, planks, leather and cloth flow to the city that crafts the items using them: Lymhurst for swords and bows, Bridgewatch for crossbows and plate armor, Martlock for axes and off-hands, Thetford for maces and fire staffs, Fort Sterling for hammers and holy staffs. The focus and RRR guide lists every city's specialties.
• Gear toward Caerleon's Black Market, which buys equipment for instant sale. You pay only sales tax there, no setup fee, and the price is whatever its buy order shows when you arrive.
• Food and potions toward the cities where PvP and dungeon players stock up.

Treat those as starting points. Check the exact item in the Market Explorer before you assume a route pays.

Weight decides the trip count

Every item has a weight. Raw and refined materials of the same tier weigh the same per unit in game data, which makes refined goods far denser in silver per kilogram.

Item	Weight each
Iron Ore, Steel Bar	0.51 kg
T5 resources and refined (Cedar Planks, Ornate Cloth)	0.76 kg
T6 resources and refined (Runite Ore, Hardened Leather)	1.14 kg
T8 resources and refined (Adamantium Ore, Adamantium Steel Bar)	2.56 kg
Master's Broadsword	11.4 kg
Pork Pie	7.99 kg

A T6 bar takes four Runite Ore and a T5 bar to make, yet weighs the same as one ore. If you refine, haul the bars.

Pick the mount for the load

Carry weight below is the mount's bonus at normal quality, from game data. Your character and bag add their own capacity on top.

Mount	Speed	Carry weight
Expert's Transport Ox	85%	1,901 kg
Grandmaster's Transport Ox	95%	2,667 kg
Elder's Transport Ox	100%	3,200 kg
Elder's Transport Mammoth	30%	22,521 kg
Moose	120%	374 kg
Elder's Riding Horse	135%	247 kg

On blue and yellow routes, capacity wins: an Ox carries about 3,700 Iron Ore in one trip. The Mammoth moves a guild's stock but crawls, and it is a target the moment it leaves safe roads. On red routes a fast mount with a smaller load is usually the better trade, because you lose less when it goes wrong and you spend less time on the road. Being overweight slows you further, and slow and heavy is exactly what gankers look for. All 109 mounts with speeds and carry weights by quality are in the Reference tables.

Know the zones on the road

You can ride between the five outer royal cities without touching a red zone. Every road into Caerleon crosses red zones, and that is where most haulers get caught. Brecilien sits in the Mists, so its market has its own prices and its own risks on the way in. In the Outlands the Smuggler's Network links every Smuggler's Den market, with a distance fee and no Premium discount, which sometimes beats riding at all. Zone colors, PvP flags and death loss covers the rules in full.

Put a number on the risk

Expected loss is the chance of losing a load times what you would lose. If you think one red-zone run in ten goes wrong and the load plus mount is worth 2,000,000 silver, budget 200,000 a run. On a blue and yellow route the number is near zero.

Ways to bring it down:

• Split a valuable load into smaller trips. Three trips at a third of the value each cost more time but lose a third as much in one gank.
• Ride at quiet hours for your server.
• Ride in a set you can replace and leave your best gear in the bank.
• Scout a red road before you take a full load through it.
• Never stop on the road to gather, fight or chat.

If the haul only pays with a risk of zero on a red route, skip it.

Check both ends before you buy

Prices move while you ride. Read the age of each price before you trust it: a sell price seen two days ago in the far city may be gone or undercut. In the Market Explorer anything older than an hour carries a Stale chip. If the profit hangs on a stale number, confirm it in game.

Then check volume. A city that sells ten of an item a day will not take three hundred of yours at the price you saw, and selling into a thin market pushes the price down with every unit.

Run it in the Transport calculator

1. Open the Transport calculator and pick the cargo. It fills the weight per item from game data, unless you typed your own.
2. Set Buy in and Sell in, the quality and the Cargo quantity. The calculator buys at the lowest sell order in the first city; the Black Market cannot be a buy city.
3. Choose Sale execution: Buy order sells instantly, My sell order lists and adds the listing fee.
4. Pick a Mount and its quality, then add your character's and bag's own capacity to Available cargo capacity (kg), since the mount preset counts only the mount.
5. Open Trip costs, risk & fees and fill in Cost per trip, Total manual risk allowance, the sales tax (4 or 8) and the listing fee (2.5). These start at 0, so a blank field means you have not counted it.
6. Read Net profit, Trips, Cargo weight and Return on cost. Prices you typed are marked as yours; observed ones keep their time.

Signed in, you can save the plan and reload it next time the route looks good. For order trades inside one city, use Market flipping instead, and see How to calculate real profit for a worked example of margin against return.