Factorio Forums

If MP eventually comes, a trade depot would be neat.
You could make a proposal of trade with another player like "10 copper plates for 10 iron plates" and Robots would automatically exchange resources from chests specified at said rate. So you can make player's resource protected if wanted and have an automatic supply of traded materials.

Of course that would be cool. But Multiplayer isn't there for now ^^.

Necroing.

Opinions needed.

I'm not sure, if a trade is really needed, even for MP. Because in my opinion it might be part of the task to exchange things. Trade conceptually not needed to play this game.

What's really needed is something, that enables me
- to "request things that I need from somewhere/anybody else". (*)
- to "provide things that I not need to anywhere/anybody else". (*)
- to organize the distribution between request and provided (by train, bots, belts, or some new mechanism (which we have some more suggestion about)).

(*) This might be also my own part of the factory, but too far away to just bring the things to this point.

For this no trade is needed. But possible.

A trade is then nothing else, than some kind of (fair) accounting the provided versus the requested to the "where/anybody".

So the logical order would be to implement first this three points, that enables me to exchange and then implement a trade-accounting.

The only thing trade worthy would be blueprints or future technologies not available otherwise. I can think of some mod ideas (limited trade resources depending on starting map). The upside to trade is that it gives the seller something to do. The downside is that it would take away something to do for the buyer.