Anno 1800 How to Get Saltpeter (The Fast Way)

In Anno 1800, the road to modern cities is paved in coffee, rum, and some of its more obscured raw materials like Saltpetre or Saltpeter. The Anno 1800 Saltpeter, for that matter, is one of the more difficult to acquire resources. That’s because you can’t use specialists to make them out of thin air like money. So we have a guide here on how to get Saltpeter in Anno 1800 and which of them is the fastest.

Saltpeter Usually Requires Nitre

Before we get to reaping the Saltpeter, you will need to ensure that you actually have what it takes to make them. Saltpeter comes from the Saltpetre Works factory building. If you want the Saltpetre Works to give you Saltpetre, then the island on which you build it needs to have Nitre in its fertility table.

Nitre has the same icon as Saltpetre to make it less confusing. Moreover, this kind of fertility only appears in the Old World and Cape Trelawney. That means you can only build Saltpetre Works on coastal areas in your Old World and Cape Trelawney islands. And they also have to be fertile with Nitre.

You can technically yield Saltpetre in The New World through Alpaca Farms, but you’ll need to hook the farm to a source of Electricity. Both of those methods consume a lot of space and also produce pollution. Hence, we recommend another method of acquiring Saltpeter…

The Fastest Way to Acquire Anno 1800 Saltpeter

Forget about those factories and farms, they’re bulky and generate Saltpeter too slow compared to our preferred method: Docklands. Here’s a step-by-step process to get more Saltpeter than you can ever need without relying on Nitre fertility.

1. Ensure that you own the Docklands DLC. We recommend just buying it since it will save you a lot of headaches by cutting down whole production chains.
2. Build the Docklands Main Wharf coastal building and set up a barter trade for Saltpeter by pressing the Export/Import button.
3. After pressing the Export/Import button in your Docklands Main Wharf, scroll down in the Global Importers section (on the right) and look for The Promise Trust company. Select Saltpetre.
4. You might want to trade something of higher value to get more Saltpetre, such as Jewellery. Or just about any surplus of your other resources will do, as long as you can sustain the trade every 20 minutes.

You’ll then have to wait for Captain Tobias to arrive (every 20 minutes) and he’ll initiate the trade. Once enough trades have been made, your storage will likely be overflowing with Saltpetre, as long as you have spare goods to trade for it. That’s why it’s good to have some kind of currency ‘goods’ that you’ll stock in surplus so you can buy anything you need from Docklands.