Storage capacity

Introduction

In Anno 1404 there are several different types of storage buildings, each having their own purpose. This article's goal is to help eliminate the confusion about what each storage building does and how to use each one.

Maintenance Costs

All buildings and ships in Anno 1404, with only a few exceptions cost maintenance. The maintenance cost refers to the amount of gold they cost you every minute (60 seconds). These costs will be deducted from your balance gradually in a linear fashion, not once per minute.

Production buildings' maintenance costs can be reduced (often cut in half) by shutting the building down ("Zzz" icon). However, Trade buildings and storehouses, which includes all the storage buildings listed in the rest of this article, cannot be shut down and are always active. Therefore, it's important to optimize the type and amount of storage buildings you use.

Warehouses

For general information about warehouses, see Warehouses.

When you first start a game, you can only build Small warehouses. However, once you get an oriental ship from Al Zahir, you can build oriental warehouses. They are more costly to initially build compared to Small warehouses but cost significantly less in materials and maintenance than the large occidental warehouse.

You can build occidental or oriental warehouses (and most other buildings) on any island, western or eastern, so you could decide to build one or the other based on their costs. However, it doesn't make too much difference whether you choose an occidental warehouse or a oriental warehouse. Some players prefer to keep each type on their respective northern/southern islands for aesthetic reasons.

Your warehouse (one per island) defines the baseline storage capacity for that island (40 starting island-wide storage for a Small warehouse or Oriental warehouse). To increase your storage past 40, you have to upgrade your warehouse (only occidental warehouses can be upgraded), build and upgrade market buildings (discussed further below), or better yet, build storage buildings, to increase an island's storage capacity (discussed further below).

Oriental warehouses do have two advantages compared to Small warehouses. They immediately provide three sockets for Items to be used and the start with 3 market carts to pickup goods. Occidental warehouses only start with one socket for Items and one market cart and gain an additional socket and cart for each upgrade to medium and large.

Name	Gold coins	Wood	Tools	Stone	Glass	Maintenance cost	Market carts	Storage capacity	Strongbox slots
Small warehouse	300	3	2			10	1	40	1
Medium warehouse	450	5	5	4		15	2	50	2
Large warehouse	800	7	6	7	2	20	3	60	3
Oriental warehouse	400	3	5			20	3	40	3

Market buildings

Market buildings are used to carry goods from production buildings to your island storage. Every market building, marketplace, or bazaar is considered magically connected together, regardless of whether actual roads connect all the buildings. So remember, you do not ever need to create vast road networks on your island. You only need to connect each individual production building to a market building or warehouse.

In the early game, you generally only need one cart so it's best to use a Small market building to connect production buildings to. As you expand production, you can use cobblestone roads to speed up cart travel and upgrade to a Medium market building or Large market building.

As the game progresses, you'll get more and more money and the Oriental market building is actually cheaper and has less maintenance costs (5 gold less) than a Large market building. So you may wish to slowly replace all your occidental market buildings with oriental market buildings around mid-game.

Tip: To be the most cost efficient, use only oriental market buildings world-wide at the mid to late game.

Name	Gold coins	Wood	Tools	Stone	Glass	Maintenance cost	Market carts	Storage capacity
Small market building	200	2	3			10	1
Medium market building	400	5	4	3		20	2	+5
Large market building	700	8	5	6	2	30	3	+10
Oriental market building	700	8	5			25	3	+5

Storage buildings

When should you increase your storage capacity on an island? Any time you keep getting warnings about production buildings ceasing production because storage is full you should try to upgrade storage capacity or start trading the excess. The goal for storage capacity is to keep increasing it until you eventually reach the maximum 999 storage capacity per island.

There are four ways to increase your island-wide storage: 1) Upgrading your occidental warehouse (10t increase for medium, 10t increase for large); 2) Building a small market building and then upgrading it to medium (+5t) and large (another +5t); 3) Building oriental market buildings (10t each); 4) Building storehouses.

Tip: You shouldn't build market buildings just to increase storage capacity as they cost more and store less than the specific storage buildings discussed below. Only build market buildings for pickup of goods from nearby .

Without capacity increasing items:

Historic warehouses are costly and slow to build, but provide the cheapest mass-storage in the long run.
There is hardly any difference between two small storehouses and one large storehouse, but 2 large storehouses take as much space as 3 small ones, making for more storage over area, superiorising large over small.

With capacity increasing items:

+10 or less: Small storehouses are superior to large ones as they have less maintenance per ton (0.60 gold/ton vs. 0.75 gold/ton), but historic warehouses remain cheapest in the long run (0.5 gold/ton). (Capacity increasing items have no effect on Historic warehouses.)
+15 or more: Small storehouses are the best choice as they have equal or lower maintenance per ton of all storage buildings and are the cheapest to build. With a +15 increase item, a small storehouse costs 0.5 gold/ton versus 0.67 gold/ton for a large storehouse and 0.5 gold/ton for Historic warehouses. Two +10 items would make Small storehouses 0.43 gold/ton and large storehouses 0.60 per ton.

Still, you may want to reserve your socket slots for other items, making Historic warehouses your best choice. A good productivity-increasing item can make you far more gold per minute than a small-storehouse approach can save you.

Tip: The ultimate goal for at least your main settlement islands is to increase the storage capacity to 999, which usually means building 3 Historic warehouses (900t). Along with your original fully upgraded occidental Warehouse (60t) and four other Large market buildings or Oriental market buildings, you'll reach 999t capacity.

The Provision house is a curiosity: It provides 10 tons of storage space, but has no maintenance when not producing provisions (its maintenance is 15 gold/minute for the 24 seconds it takes to make a provision package). So it's the cheapest possible storage space relative to maintenance, but it costs so much to build that probably few use it for storage alone.

Name	Gold coins	Wood	Tools	Stone	Glass	Size	Maintenance cost	Storage capacity	Maintenance per storage capacity
Large market building	700	8	5	6	2	4x4	30	10	6 / 1
Oriental market building	700	8	5			4x4	25	5	5 / 1
Small storehouse	1000	4	4			2x2	15	15	1 / 1
Large storehouse	2000		4	4	4	3x2	30	30	1 / 1
Two Small storehouses (by comparison)	2000	8	8			4x2	30	30	1 / 1
Historic warehouses	25000	220	340	350		6x6	150	300	0.5 / 1
Provision house	10000	20	20	35	25	3x4	0	10	0 / 1