TRADESMAN Deal to Dealer Carts, Sleep, and Haulers

Your cart is house, warehouse, and ambulance. TRADESMAN: Deal to Dealer starts you in a basic wagon hitched to a horse. Everything that happens at night, every extra ware slot, and a surprising number of quests attach to that box. Treat it like gear, not like scenery.

How to change the wagon

In any settlement, walk up to your cart and click it. A three-tab menu opens. The second tab is carts. Arrow left and right to preview types you have unlocked. You cannot dream a legendary hauler into existence from this menu; you still need the recipe materials and the region that sells the work. Community writeups agree on the shopping list: planks, ore, and tools. Those are Industrial goods you should be trading anyway — trading and the goods tier list.

Better carts pay you at bedtime. Overnight rest restores more, sometimes grants watch power, sometimes extra cargo comfort. Always set a watch before you sleep. Unwatched camps are how you wake up missing stacks. Sleep is also the autosave — Getting Started and controls cover the save.ini path.

First trades and new towns — cart life on the road

Horse, boar, bear, Bigfoot

The transport slot is a mercenary with a cargo job. Defaults:

• Horse — tutorial hauler. Fine until Animal Handling comes online.
• Boars — Leadership-adjacent animal talents let you hire them as mercs and haulers. Cheap, ugly, honest.
• Bears — Fishpool and river towns sell cubs and later legendary roar-bears. Epic hauler bears (Claw-type) show up around river settlements and are a common “best before Bigfoot” pick.
• Bigfoot — southern mountain / Bigfoot village line. One legendary fighter is available with fewer gates; the hauler Bigfoot wants max reputation in its village. Details on animals and reputation.

Animals fight. A hauler is not a backpack. If your bear is the only creature still standing, the cart still moves, but the next road will hurt. Pair the slot with a human frontline from the mercenary tier list.

Cargo wells and “safe” loads

The HUD shows numbered cargo wells along the bottom. Extra wells come from Leadership talents, some books, and some cart tiers. A full common squad is honest at one stack. That sentence is in every good beginner thread because 1.0 still scales enemies to cargo. If you just bought a bigger box, do not celebrate by filling it. Celebrate by surviving a two-town loop with the same one stack, then add the second.

Quest boards, egg crates, and passengers sit in the same wells. A taxi plus a military legendary is two problems. Run quests on a diet cart.

Materials loop that does not bore you to death

You will drive the same mill road a hundred times for planks. Make it pay:

1. Buy the mill’s demand on the way in (often food).
2. Leave with planks/tools, not with four duplicate saws.
3. Park upgrade materials in a well you refuse to sell, even to Kirya.
4. When a town offers cart work, do it immediately. Driving around “until later” is how you die on a starter axle in the snow.

Some wrecked or special wagons appear as world props (walker carts in ruin towns). If the prompt says you can repair, that is a quest, not a free legendary. Bring the listed goods.

Night, traps, and 1.0 quality of life

Traps no longer freeze the merchant. You roll over them and eat the damage. Trap-vision talents still help you click less. Night driving is a lighting and ambush problem; a better cart plus a watch is cheaper than a fifth mercenary you cannot feed. Cooking leftovers before sleep — talents and squad builds.

Wasteland carts will want different comfort (heat, dust) as that zone expands — Wasteland. Until then, the starter-to-bear pipeline is the whole transport game. If the horse is still named Horse and you are in the capital, that is a style choice, not a build. Official trailer mood shots of market streets are what a upgraded town run should look like, not a UI to copy.

Keep the links Discord handy for screenshot comparisons of cart tabs after ninja patches. The three-tab click path has been stable; the bonuses on each chassis have not.