Claims and Resources

Claims and Resources are the ways by which the economies of Offworld Trading Company function.

Money is the heart of Offworld Trading Company. Players gain cash by selling excess resources like carbon, fuel, and silicon on the open market, and spend it buying the resources they’re short on. Prices fluctuate in real time; dump a bunch of iron on the market and its price will crater, making it cheap for other players to buy up (and making their stockpiles worth much less in the near term).

Resources are extracted from the planet from concentrations visible on the map, or created by a player’s industrial buildings like an Electrolysis Reactor turning water into fuel and oxygen. However, each building – extractors, processors, or special facilities like Patent Labs – requires a claim to be spent acquiring the land to build it on.

Claims are acquired by leveling up your HQ (at a hefty resource cost), or for cash at the Black Market (at an escalating and significant cash price). Buying out a player by buying out all their remaining stocks at once will give you an additional 2 claims. Getting a new claim in Offworld Trading Company is a lot like claiming an expansion site in a traditional RTS.

Claims by HQ level
Note that these are the base numbers of claims on Manager difficulty.

You may also receive a bonus claim at the following HQ levels by founding later than other players.