A circuit of markets worked out here, from the station you are docked at — and the one number Directive 47 will not read from your journal.

1 Your balance is asked for, never taken.

FROM THE JOURNAL where you are docked your cargo capacity — both are facts about the ship TYPED, EVERY TIME what you are worth never read, never saved, never inferred Your balance is in the journal. It is the one figure here that is about you rather than your ship. Cargo capacity is a property of the hull. What you are worth is nobody's business but yours.

2 This one is not a plot at all.

THE OTHER TWO submit a job, wait for it, and read back the answer THIS ONE asks what the markets hold, then does the sums here Which is what lets it hold cargo past a poor buyer and still come home. A planner that sold everything at every stop would be a simpler planner and a worse one.

3 A price is a report, and it has a date on it.

YESTERDAY somebody was there and reported it LAST MONTH the arithmetic still works perfectly FOUR YEARS AGO and is worth nothing at all So every stop says when its market was last reported, beside what it says the price is. The same reason outfitting stock carries a date. A figure with no date invites you to trust it.

The details

The card called Trade run on the Routing tab’s Plan page, and the plot_trade_route tool behind it.

What you fill in

Box What it means Out of the box
Credits to trade with Your working capital Required — never inferred
Hops How many buy-and-sell legs 5
Longest leg (ly) The furthest one hop may reach 40
End where it started Whether the circuit closes Unticked
Large pads only Skip stations your ship cannot land at Unticked

It plans from the station you are docked at. There is no origin box, because a trade run that starts somewhere you are not is a trade run that starts with an empty leg.

Why the balance is typed every time

Your credit balance is in the journal, and Directive 47 does not read it. It is the one figure on this page that is about you rather than about your ship — cargo capacity is a property of the hull and the route means nothing without it, but what you are worth is nobody’s business but yours. It is not saved either, so it is typed each time.

If that annoys you, it is meant to be a small annoyance in exchange for a promise that is easy to check: search the code for your balance and it is not there.

It is arithmetic here, not a job over there

The other two planners submit a job and wait. This one asks the service what the markets around you hold, and then works out the circuit on your machine. That is why it can do the thing a sell-everything-at-every-stop planner cannot: hold cargo past a poor buyer and carry both credits and cargo between hops, because sometimes the move is not to sell.

It is also why it is quicker, and why the waiting message is different — “Working it out…” rather than the queued-job wording the others use.

Large pads, and the stop you cannot land at

Large pads only is not a preference. A route with a medium-pad station in it is a route with a leg you cannot fly in a Type-9, and the plan will not tell you at the point of plotting which stop that is. Tick it if your ship needs it.

Every stop carries a date

A trade stop says when its market was last reported, for the same reason outfitting stock does. A route can be arithmetically perfect against a four-year-old price and worth nothing at all. There is a bound on how old a price may be — max_price_age_hours on the tool, spelled the way the commodity search spells it — and it is the same idea the rest of the market answers inherit.

Fleet carriers

A carrier’s market is player-set and can be a joke, and the carrier itself may be a hundred light years away by the time you arrive. Treat any leg that names one with more suspicion than the rest.

The tool schema and the service it calls are on Route planning — one page for all three planners, because that part really is shared.