Items – Trade Unions, Ships, Town Halls & More

Overview

This guide describes the items available in Anno 1800 and breaks them down into several categories, showcasing the effects they have in-game, where to use them and some theory crafting as to why they are such powerful game-changing items to have, search for and acquire in each of your game sessions.

What Are Items & Why Use Them!

Note: Don’t like to read? Use the table of contents in the right hand column to skip the babble. Sorry the guide is no longer updated, mainly because there feels like a few thousand items in the game now and it was too hard to keep up with it.

A great addition to Anno 1800 is the use of items that can change the way you not only layout your islands but can effect your strategies as well as the way you play your overall game.

From what I can gather, there are nine main categories of items that include your Trade Union, Ships, Military Ships, Steamships, Sailing Ships, Harbormasters Office, Town Hall, Character Items as well as Zoo and Museum items. Each category has different methods of acquiring items, for instance Trade Union items mainly come from quests offered by your citizens as where you can purchase ship items from various sources.

Trade Union items typically effect the way your production buildings operate, they offer bonuses such as productivity increases or worker reductions. Ship items include things such as movement speed increases or damage increases. Military Ship items typically increase your ships attack speed and/or range.

Harbormaster items can increase the rate of self-repair of your ships that are in range. Where as Town Hall items effect your citizens buildings providing you with benefits such as increased income per house or an increase in attractiveness.

Character Items are the largest mystery of the bunch and I have no clue what these items actually do, nor can I find other players who know what these items do other than being purely cosmetic. I theorize that maybe they slot into the Museum during late game or may somehow play a part in the final tier of citizens but time will uncover this mystery. If you know the secret, please let us know in the comments.

Items should be taken seriously, they provide substantial game-play benefits and as far as I can tell Trade Union items are somewhat RNG related, meaning each new game-play session you could wind up using them in different ways. For instance in one game the first item I acquired was the Baker, which eliminated the need to have Flour Mills but in a later game my first item was a Canner that reduced the workers needed for the cannery building.

Fundamentally previous Anno games had you laying out production buildings around a Warehouse, while this still holds true, buildings such as the Trade Union and Town Hall also need to be factored into your decisions in order to maximize the potential of certain buildings.

To date I’ve discovered about 105 items in the game but I know there are many many more waiting to be found and I’ll do my best to update the guide as I discover them. I do enjoy the additional game-play they offer and I hope they continue to expand upon them in the upcoming DLCs.

Let me know about items I’ve missed and your thoughts about the use of items in the comments below.

Trade Union Items

The Trade Union building can be acquired once you reach the Workers (2nd) tier and enables you to slot 3 different items into each Union building. Depending on the item used, the Trade Union can have a substantial effect on the other buildings you place inside of it’s radius.

For instance, the Baker (shown here) was one of the first items I acquired during one of my games. As you can tell from the image, this item replaces the need to have a Flour Mill (as long as the Bakeries are inside the Trade Unions influance ring).

Each Flour Mill I didn’t have to build saved me 50 income. I made sure that I built all of my Bakeries within range of this particular Trade Union in order to utilize this early game advantage. Then down the line I got and added the Epic item Patissier Patrice to this Trade Union that increased the productivity of all Bakeries effected by this Trade Union by 40%. A pretty large increase.

As of writing this I have found 42 Trade Union items but this only scratches the surface, I know there are plenty more to discover, let me know what you found in the comments below.

Common Items