Guide: Smuggling

This is a guide about how to begin smuggling and making tons of money.

Meet the Gloomy Middleman
If you have at least Affiliation: Villainy 3 and Veils 40+, when you dock at London, Albion, you will be approached by a Gloomy Middleman. When you meet them again while Exploring London, they will send you on A Smuggler’s Tale.The Gloomy Middleman want you to travel to Titania, The Reach, to investigate their smuggling connections there.

At Titania, you’ll need to locate The Midnight Rose by being extremely bohemian, very gossipy, or just asking the Incognito Princess. Once located, you must either spend an Unlicensed Chart or divert money away from repairing Titania. You can get an Unlicensed Chart by turning 10 Tackety Nameplates in to The Parsimonious Chairman at Port Prosper. From there, it's back to London!

Speaking to the Gloomy Middleman in London again will then send you to the Wit & Vinegar Lumber Company platform, just south of London proper. There, you must talk to The Blind Bruiser. They might turn out to be your old mentor if you happened to have taken the facet! This conversation unlocks all the smuggling prospects and ports and you can now finally get started!

The Smuggling Ports
There are 3 ports in which you can get smuggling prospects and buy contraband. Smuggling prospects are much like normal prospects except that the destination is always in a different region. Each smuggling port offers prospects and also sells the type of contraband used in that area’s prospects. There are no smuggling bargains. The way it works is you select a prospect, purchase the correct amount of contraband, smuggle it through the transit relay and deliver it to its destination. The rewards for completing each smuggling prospect are 1000-2000 sovereigns and so they are much less dependent on shipment size than normal prospect.

Beware the Revenue Men
Getting contraband through customs is the main difficulty when it comes to smuggling. A veils check is required to pass through, and it gets more difficult the more unhidden contraband you have. You can make this check easier or even automatic by using modules with Hidden Compartments. Compartments only hide the contraband, they don’t prevent it from taking up cargo space, so you’ll probably want an additional cargo module as well. A captain with 50 iron and veils can equip the Cabinet of curiosities, W&V sawing device and hidden hold for an easy 7 hidden compartments. This is enough for all but the largest smuggling prospects. If you absolutely have to go up to 9 compartments, just put 2 saws on there rather than trying to fill those 75+ requirements.

Beware Other Things Too
There are also sometimes customs searches when docking at any port, so if you have more contraband than you have hidden compartments, try to minimize the extra stops you take. Ministry Monitors will attack you if you are carrying contraband, but destroying them is fairly easy and can earn you even more contraband, so kill every monitor you see (you were probably doing that already anyway). However, Monitors and customs agents aren’t your only enemies when smuggling. Your crew will often attempt to use up your contraband during the voyage. Preventing them from doing so can easily kill up to 3 crew, so make sure you can handle that. Traveling back and forth between regions so much costs a lot of Ministry-Stamped Permits, which can be acquired by killing Monitors, or by helping the Stovepipes in The Reach. Both Tackety nameplates and Port Reports can earn you permits. Remember that you can build The Albion to Eleutheria Transit Relay which makes those trips much easier.