Stop Trader Chaos: Fix Your RimWorld Trading Spots Now
RimWorld Trade Caravans: Controlling Merchant Spots
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Traders keep strolling into your killbox or sleeping in your fields? You're not alone. RimWorld's visiting trade caravans have a mind of their own – in vanilla, you cannot choose where merchants stop. They might loiter in harm's way, get killed by raiders, or eat your crops. Luckily, there are solutions. This guide shows you how to designate a safe "merchant spot" for trade caravans, keeping them (and your colony) out of trouble. If you're new to RimWorld, start with our complete beginner's guide first. Skip down to the Quick-Start for the fastest fix, or read on for a deep dive into tactics, mods (like Trading Spot), and pro tips for managing traders.
Why Merchants Wander & Why You Should Care
In unmodded RimWorld, when a faction trade caravan arrives, the game picks a random outdoor spot on your map for them to gather. There's no way to control this by default. Often, the chosen spot is at the edge of your Home area – which might unfortunately be your trap-infested perimeter or a swamp. Here's why this is a problem:
Tripped Traps & Friendly Fire
Ever had visitors trigger your carefully laid traps? By default, caravans can and will path through trap corridors if that's "Home" territory. They also tend to stand between your turrets and incoming raiders, resulting in accidental shootouts. When a trader or their pack animal dies on your map, you take a -5 goodwill hit per death with that faction. A few unfortunate accidents and suddenly you've turned allies into enemies. For more on defensive structures and trap placement, see our combat and defense guide.
Inconvenient Trading
Sometimes the caravan's chosen hangout is far from your storage. If they stop by a far corner, your pawn has to haul trade goods across the whole map, wasting time. Or worse – they park in the open during toxic fallout or extreme weather and decide to leave early before you even initiate trade.
Blocking & Eating Your Stuff
Caravans might cluster in narrow choke points or doorways, getting in the way of your colonists. They also help themselves to your colony's tables when hungry (and will eat your food). It's common to find them feasting in your dining room or wandering through your freezer if you leave doors open. Learn about proper freezer design with airlocks to protect your food supplies.
In short, uncontrolled merchants = chaos. It's not really the traders' fault – RimWorld just wasn't giving us the tools to host them properly. Many players have asked: "Why can't we have a traders gather spot, like a party spot?" The developers have historically been wary of adding this because it can be exploited (imagine intentionally leading traders under a collapsing roof for free loot – players have done this). There's even a quote: "Discussions over that mod demonstrate why you'll probably never see it in the game; It's super easy to exploit.". So, no official trader spot exists as of RimWorld 1.4.
However, the community has created solutions, and with a bit of planning (or a handy mod), you can essentially get a "merchant spot" in your colony. Next, we'll cover a quick and easy fix, then delve into detailed strategies.
Quick-Start Guide: Controlling Where Traders Gather
If you take away one thing from this article, it's this: Use the Trading Spot mod. This lightweight mod gives you exactly what you want – the ability to place a marker telling traders, "Stand here, please."
Real in-game demonstration of the Trading Spot mod in action. The green marker designates exactly where trade caravans will gather, eliminating the chaos of random trader positioning. (Mod by Kiame, updated by GMT.)
Here's the 30-second solution:
- Install "[KV] Trading Spot" mod – Available on Steam Workshop and updated for RimWorld 1.4 (community fork GMT Trading Spot). It's safe to add to an existing save. Enable it in your mod list.
- Place the "Trading Spot" marker – In-game, open the Architect menu, go to Misc, and click Trading Spot. Click anywhere on the ground in your home base (ideally a safe, accessible area). You'll see a green spot icon (looks like a small mat or beacon). That's it – you have now designated a trader gathering spot!
- Future caravans will use it – The next time a trade caravan arrives, watch them beeline for your spot. They will congregate around that tile and unload pack animals there. No more guesswork!
- (Optional) Remove Home zone from dangerous areas – Just as extra insurance, clear the "Home" designation from any killbox or trap hallways. This prevents even vanilla behavior from choosing those areas if the mod ever failed. But with Trading Spot active, it should override that logic anyway.
- Enjoy safer trading – Now you can trade right where you planned, with your stockpile and defenses nearby.
That's the quick fix. For most players, this mod is a must-have QoL improvement. If you absolutely cannot use mods, your best bet is to jump to the Vanilla Tactics section. Otherwise, congratulations – you've solved the immediate problem!
Building a Safe "Trader's Post" in Your Colony
Once you have a way to influence where traders go (via mod or clever design), it's time to create an ideal trading area. Think of it like making a marketplace or rest stop for visiting caravans. Here's how to set one up:
Choose the Right Location
- Pick a spot on your colony perimeter that's easy to reach from the map edge but secure from threats. A popular choice is just inside your main gate or entrance.
- Outside the Killbox: Don't put the gathering spot inside your active defense killbox or trap maze. Place it off to the side or in a separate entrance used only for friendlies. For more on defensive base design, see our colony layout guide.
- Ground conditions: Aim for high ground or at least solid ground. Paved or floored areas are best – it makes a nice "plaza" feel and avoids slow movement.
- Distance from hazards: Consider your typical raid angles. If you often get raiders from the west, maybe place the trade spot on the east side of your base, so caravans aren't caught in crossfire.
Set Up the Area
Enclose or Not?
You can leave the trader spot area open-air, or you can enclose it in a low wall or fence. Enclosing with a gate can be useful if you want to protect traders from wandering predators.
Roofing
Build a roof over the spot (supported by pillars). This protects traders from rain, snow, and fallout. They won't complain, but if acid rain is on, unroofed traders could die or leave.
Lighting
Place a couple of lamps or torches. Trading at night is annoying if you can't see – plus light makes the area look welcoming and prevents traders from getting eaten by night predators.
Amenities
Consider a large table with plenty of chairs in the trading area. Traders will use your tables when they eat. If you don't provide one nearby, they might trek to your rec room or eat on the floor.
Stockpile for Trade Goods
Create a small stockpile zone at the trade spot filled with items you're likely to sell. This way, when the trader arrives, all those items are right next to them in the trade interface. For tips on organizing your base and stockpiles, check our base organization guide.
Defense Considerations
Treat the area like any important part of your base. Maybe install a panic alarm (a turret or two) nearby just in case a fight spills over. If hostiles attack a caravan, the caravan fights back.
Example Layout
Imagine your base entrance: a double gate opens into a 10x10 courtyard. In the middle, you place the Trading Spot marker. Around it, you've laid stone tiles. There's a long table with eight chairs against one wall, maybe a few bedrolls or sleeping spots tagged for "Guest" (if using Hospitality). A torch or two on the corners for light. You've also set a stockpile in one corner with items to trade. This courtyard is open to the sky but fenced.
When a caravan arrives, they walk through the gate and bam: they're in this comfy courtyard. They hang out, their muffalos munch on a patch of grass you left, the traders go use the table to eat a meal from their inventory. Your colonists can come trade easily. If a raid comes, you close the outer gate and maybe allow them further in or have your own men cover the entrance. It's contained and controlled.
Avoid Inaccessible Placements (Important!)
Do not place the trading spot marker in a location traders can't physically reach. For example, don't put it inside a building with no doors, or on a lone island surrounded by deep water, or atop a mountain peak only accessible by drop pods. If you do, caravans will "freak out" trying to get there. Usually, the game will detect no path and they might just stop at the edge of the map or wander aimlessly.
If you ever notice a caravan not moving toward the spot, or hovering at map edge saying "wandering", check if you accidentally blocked the path or if the spot got roofed in and door-locked. Fix it (unforbid a door, etc.), and they should resume.
Handling Traders in Vanilla (No Mod? No Problem...ish)
What if you're playing on console, or you just really want to avoid mods in this run? You're not entirely without options. While you cannot explicitly set a trader spot in vanilla, you can manipulate game mechanics to influence where traders go. Here are some pure-vanilla tips:
Home Zone Manipulation
As mentioned, caravans seem to prefer the edge of your Home area for their meetup. The "Home area" in RimWorld is mainly for cleaning and fire-fighting, but the game also uses it as a proxy for "player's base". If your Home area is very spread out or oddly shaped, the caravan's chosen spot might be weird.
Trick:
Before a caravan arrives, make sure the only part of your Home area that touches the map edge is the spot where you want traders to go. Remove Home designations from other perimeter sections. For example, keep a strip of home area by your front gate, but not along the outer walls elsewhere. When the caravan spawns, the theory is they head to the nearest home-edge, which will be that gate area.
Does it always work? Not always – RimWorld AI can be fickle. Sometimes they ignore your bait and stop elsewhere outdoors. But it tends to help. Some players reported success by shrinking Home zone to force caravans near the main doors.
Open/Closed Doors
By default, all doors are allowed for friendly factions. In vanilla, you can't set permissions on doors, but you can forbid a door (which actually stops your own pawns too) or simply hold a door open to entice passage. Here's how you use this:
- Funnel with open doors: Keep the door (or gate) open where you want the traders to enter and hang out. Any other entrances to your base, keep them closed. Visitors will naturally path through open doors over closed ones because it's faster (no delay opening).
- Lock out of specific areas: You can't truly lock in vanilla, but you can create physical barriers. For instance, if you don't want traders wandering into your workshop area, put a door there and keep it closed.
A common vanilla strategy is: have an "airlock" entry – two doors in a row. When traders arrive, open the outer door (so they come in) but keep the inner door closed. Traders will gather in the space between because they consider it part of outside (outer door open) but don't go further inside (inner door closed). This mimics what the Trading Spot mod does, though requires manual door fiddling.
Sacrifice Zone (Allies Welcome, Enemies Beware)
Some players without mods create a sacrifice zone for caravans – basically a safe area that's also covered by turrets, so if a raid comes, the traders in that zone help fight but also are protected by your turrets. This is more of a tactic than controlling their position, but the idea is: if you know they like a particular area (say near your front gate), you double down and make that area fortified.
It doesn't move them to a spot, but rather accepts where they tend to loiter and optimizes it. Over time you might notice a pattern on your map – caravans often choose the same general spot (especially if your home zone hasn't changed). If that spot is acceptable, reinforce it and call it your unofficial trading post.
When Caravans Won't Leave or Do Weird Things
A quick vanilla troubleshooting tip: sometimes caravans bug out – e.g. the trader got killed by a bear, and now the rest won't leave; or they decide to hang around indefinitely. Without mods, your options are limited. One trick: if the game thinks a caravan is stuck, saving and reloading can nudge them to leave. Another trick is to send a caravan of your own out – visiting caravans often leave when you form a player caravan.
In any case, the above methods are more about dealing with caravan behavior than setting a spot. The truth is, in pure vanilla you're always going to be a bit at the mercy of the RNG for where traders go. You can minimize the issues, but to completely solve it, a mod or two is the way to go.
Mod Solutions in Depth: Fine-Tuning Trader Behavior
We already highlighted the Trading Spot mod in the Quick-Start, but let's dive a bit deeper into the mod landscape. There are a few mods and mod combos that together let you practically manage every aspect of visiting traders. We'll also cover compatibility (especially with popular mod Hospitality and the Vanilla Expanded series).
The MVP: [KV] Trading Spot (and [GMT] fork)
RECOMMENDEDThe original [KV] Trading Spot mod by Kiame is a classic. It's super simple: it gives you a placeable spot (just like the Party Spot or Caravan Packing Spot, same idea) which tells NPC trade caravans where to gather. The mod has been around since at least Alpha 17, and for RimWorld 1.4 (Biotech era), a modder "Gerrymander" updated it – that's the [GMT] Trading Spot version.
How it works under the hood:
Normally, when a caravan enters the map, the game picks a random spot. This mod overrides that decision: if a Trading Spot is present, spawn the caravan at the edge closest to that spot and then path them to the spot tile. It's equivalent to forcing their AI to gather around an invisible flag that you control.
Usage tips:
- Place the spot in a clear area.
- If you want to change it, you can have multiple spots but it's recommended to stick to one.
- If you want to remove the mod mid-game, delete the spot from your map first! Otherwise the game might have a reference to an object that no longer exists.
- The mod is lightweight – it doesn't run any heavy code continuously, only when caravans spawn.
Hospitality Mod – Great for Guests, Irrelevant for Traders
COMPATIBLEA lot of folks install the Hospitality mod expecting it will let them manage all visitors. It does – except those visitors who are specifically trade caravans still behave like caravans, not like casual visitors. The Hospitality mod is fantastic for creating guest rooms, making visitors happy, and even setting up a shop where guests can buy things. However, by default, it doesn't corral trade caravans to a certain spot.
Using Hospitality with Trading Spot:
Hospitality + Trading Spot mod go well together. Hospitality will handle the social aspects (you can entertain the caravan members if they're idle, for example, or they may buy items from your shelves if you set them for sale), while Trading Spot handles the positioning.
Use Hospitality to improve relations and get extra trade from non-caravan visitors, but rely on Trading Spot to physically control caravan locations. The mods are confirmed compatible – no issues running both.
Side note: If you have Hospitality and you want caravans to act more like visitors, one hacky thing some players do is attack a caravan to down the trader, capture them, then release – effectively turning them into a "guest." This is highly not recommended though, as it involves violence and risk.
Locks or Door Control Mods
ALTERNATIVEIf adding a trading spot marker feels too cheaty to you (though it really shouldn't – it's a sanity feature), an alternative is to use door management mods to simulate "NPCs not allowed beyond this point." A prime example is the Locks mod. These mods let you set rules on doors, such as allowing only colonists, or colonists + guests, etc.
How it works:
With a locks mod, you could mark all internal doors as "No Visitors". Then, caravans that arrive will path as if those doors are walls – meaning they'll generally stay in the open or in whatever zones are allowed.
For example, if you have an outer gate and an inner gate and you lock the inner gate for visitors, the caravan will come through the outer gate and then stop, because the inner gate is off-limits. They'll mill around there – voila, an improvised trade spot.
Be careful: Some locks mods had issues with performance or pathfinding. There's a note on the Steam workshop: "The 'Locks' mod makes the game lag very hard and breaks pathfinding." – newer versions might have optimized this, but if you notice stutters when caravans come, it could be the locks mod constantly checking.
Trading Control (and similar advanced mods)
ADVANCEDTrading Control mod is a newer entry that encompasses a bunch of trading QoL features. It includes a "caravan spot" functionality (similar to Trading Spot mod), but it doesn't stop there.
What it lets you do:
In essence, Trading Control is like a superset for those who really want to micromanage trade events. If your only issue is caravan positioning, Trading Spot mod is tiny and straightforward. But if you're an advanced player modding heavily, you might prefer one mod that does it all.
Compatibility: Trading Control should not be used alongside Trading Spot mod (they'd conflict or be redundant). Use one or the other. It plays fine with Hospitality and locks mods, etc.
Vanilla Expanded (VFE) Considerations
The question often comes up: do any of the Vanilla Factions Expanded (VFE) mods or Vanilla Expanded series provide a solution for trade spots? The answer: not directly in terms of caravan gathering.
Some Vanilla Expanded mods influence trading in other ways (for example, VFE – Empire has a tax spot where your tax collector delivers resources), but they don't give you placement control for merchant caravans.
If you use a full suite of Vanilla Expanded mods, you likely still want to grab Trading Spot or Trading Control. The good news: Trading Spot is "vanilla-friendly." It doesn't conflict with big mod packs and won't dramatically alter game balance. Many modpacks actually include it by default because of how sensible it is.
Advanced Tips & Funny Business
Now that you have the serious strategies down, here are a few "advanced" or less orthodox things players do regarding trade caravans and spots:
Caravan Honey Pot (Exploit)
Some players set the trading spot inside a trapped room intentionally. When a caravan arrives, they send them into that room, then trigger the traps or collapse the roof – basically murdering the caravan "legally." This results in heaps of free loot. For more on trap design and defensive structures, see our combat and defense guide.
⚠️ Warning: This is considered an exploit. The game penalty is the faction will hate you if they realize you caused it. Plus, you'll have no one to trade with if you abuse it too much, since factions will stop sending traders if relations tank or if too many caravans vanish mysteriously.
Trading Spot Indoors?
What if you want traders to come inside your base or underground? By default, caravans avoid going deep indoors. Even with a trading spot, if you put it in a tight indoor space, they might stop at the entrance of that building.
Some players have built an "indoor market" – a big hollow mountain room with a spot inside. To do this, you must ensure the path to it is clear and maybe even mark some of that interior as Home so they consider it. It can work, but results vary. Generally, keeping the spot just outside or in a courtyard is more reliable.
Multiple Spots for Different Factions?
Suppose you want allied tribals to go to one area and outlanders to another. The mod doesn't support multiple active spots (only one is used). But you could try a workaround: place a spot, wait for the faction caravan you want in that area to show up, then after they arrive, move the spot for the next caravan.
Instead, consider using multiple entrance designs and the door locking trick for nuance. For example, have a "tribal gate" and an "outlander gate" and open the one relevant depending on who's coming.
Not Just for Traders
The Trading Spot mod actually affects all groups that use the trader/caravan AI behavior. This includes things like visiting allies coming to help (not raiders, but allies that arrive because you called for military aid or they offered help against a threat).
Your friendly fighters will position where you want them rather than somewhere useless. Another group is travelers passing by – though they usually just exit across the map, they might briefly go to the spot area if it's on their way.
Trade Ships Drop Spot
If you're a fan of neatness, consider also a mod to control where orbital trader goods land. Normally, when you buy from an orbital trader, items fall around your orbital trade beacon(s).
Some mods let you designate a specific "drop spot" (e.g. next to your stockpile, rather than scattered around each beacon). One such mod is literally called "Trade Ships Drop Spot". It's separate from caravans, but thematically related (keeping trade stuff tidy).
If you have both a Trading Spot and a Drop Spot mod, you've basically mastered both forms of trading in RimWorld – land and orbital.
Trade Ships Drop SpotFAQ – Burning Questions on Trader Spots
Can I choose where traders enter the map?
Do orbital traders use the Trading Spot too?
Will a trading spot mod work on an existing save?
What about enemy traders or visiting neutral factions?
My map has multiple colonies – can I have different trade spots on each?
By implementing the above strategies – whether by smart base design or simply installing the right mod – you'll transform the way trade caravans interact with your colony. No more random cowboys tromping through your hospital, no more merchant getting eaten by a surprise cougar because he wandered off to the river. You'll have a proper trading post, just like a rim settlement should!