Sky Merchant

About the game

Sky Merchant is a trading simulation with the soul of a storybook. Forty floating islands drift on seasonal winds; routes that were profitable in spring literally blow away by autumn, and half the game is reading the almanac like a sailor. The other half is the ledger — a beautiful hand-drawn book where every debt, favour and cargo manifest is written in ink you can flip back through.

The airship grows plank by plank from smuggler's skiff to three-deck trader, and crew members join with actual opinions about your routes — carry weapons and your pacifist navigator quits, on principle, taking her wind-charts with her. There is a gentle plot about a vanished cartographer, but most players simply live there. Few games before or since have made profit feel this cosy.

Technical notes

Wind simulation is a seasonal vector field over a hex sphere, precomputed to fit DOS memory. The ledger is the actual save file rendered as a book — a celebrated bit of diegetic engineering.