Buildings/Courier Station

The Courier Station is a building which is home to the Mysterious Merchant. The Mysterious Merchant will visit your city periodically and an icon of a gipsy will appear over this building when she has arrived. She offers items from the for gems at a discount of 30% to 90% off the shop price and some items in exchange for food or wood.

Mysterious Merchant
The Mysterious Merchant always appears at the courier station at exactly 0:00 UTC. She will reappear more often after completion of upgrading buildings, training troops, and defeating barbarians.

On each visit, she will offer 16 items for purchase: 4x resources, 4x speedups, 4x boosts, and 4x other items. You can refresh her selection by pressing the "Refresh" button in the top-right corner of the window. You can purchase each item only once per visit per refresh. Refresh costs are as follows:

Food and Wood Items
The Mysterious Merchant also offers some shop items priced in food or wood instead of gems at a lesser discount of 10% to 40%, depending on the specific item. Food resources may be purchased only with wood, while wood resources may only be purchased with food. All other items randomly appear as costing either food or wood.

Buying resource items using resources is a common method to bank resources away as items for later use, where they cannot be plundered by other governors.