She is one of the four merchants (along with Ander, Beldar & Scorv) who will arrive at the Trading Postwithout the need to upgrade it. Of those four, she brings the most gold (so has the capacity to immediately buy the greatest value of items from you) and is (quite often) the first to show up in a given year (when she does show up in that year).
Strategy
In this section, the use of Trading Post and Trading Center may be used synonymously as it makes no difference.
General observations
There is a good chance that Atka will show up in a given year, usually showing up in the first third of the year.
She brings at least 2,000 gold, sometimes as much as 2,500.
She has an affinity for buying Beer, Candles & Pottery, with candles leaning towards a more favorable price.
You can sometimes buy and sell Coal & Iron Ore, with coal leaning towards a lower/mid price (so, better for buying from her) and iron ore (somewhat oddly) both okay/good to both buy from and sell to her (depending on the year).
She (basically) always brings Heavy Tools for you to buy, but they're usually mid/high in price. You can always spend 5,000 gold as a minimum buying her out.
Similar for Tools too (although only a third as expensive).
She is a fantastic source for Relics! No other merchant has shown such a variety, albeit with a heavy bias towards Targo's Hammer, and then (as a distant second) the Shroud of the Unknown Soldier. The other four relics that she brings she only brings rarely but she has been seen to bring them eventually.
Items you want to sell to Atka
You can prepare for Atka's arrival by having (moving items into stock each time you choose to) or keeping (enabling "keep in stock" for one or more items) your Trading Post stocked with items to sell to her. There are two limiting factors to how much you can trade per sale:
You can only store 500 of each of any given item in your trading post at a given moment.
Atka only brings so much gold with her whenever she visits.
Both of these factors can be overcome to a degree.
If you enable "keep in stock" for an item and you have a bunch more of that item stored nearby and you employ both villagers to stock the trading post, you might be able to get that item restocked during the same visit, and keep selling it to her repeatedly. However, even then, if you consider how much that item costs and how much gold she brought, you will find you can quickly (if not immediately) exhaust her gold supply. Focusing on her preferred purchases:
500 Beer will cost her at least 1500-2500 gold. You will take all her gold from her in 1-2 sales.
With Candles and Pottery costing ~3 times as much as beer, you can easily drain her of all her gold in the first sale of each of these items. Even if you're only partially stocked on all three of these, you can still relieve her of all her gold very easily.
Atka running out of gold to buy items from you might sound like a good problem, i.e. you didn't leave any gold "on the table", but it is a problem nonetheless. You can deal with this (often happening quite naturally) by buying items from her (although usually only because you actually need those items). As you do this, be mindful that you're putting gold back in her pocket that you can then leverage by selling more items to her (almost making your purchases "free").
Items you want to buy from Atka
What items you buy from Atka cab be quite a subjective decision. Although you might buy items for immediate/future sale to another merchant, this section only deals with items you buy for your own Settlement's consumption.
Every single item (with only one odd exception) that Atka brings for sale is (eventually) renewable in the game, i.e. you can either source it from the terrain or produce it yourself. Even Relics can be sourced from Ruins and from Raids. However, some of the methods by which you can do this are late‑game only, so buying items from Atka can be necessary early/mid game, and even in late game it can still be beneficial to buy certain items from her. You can follow an item's link to read in detail about how to source/produce it. This section calls out a few specific benefits/drawbacks to buying certain items from Atka.
Although an item might be sold at a "below common market price", that doesn't necessarily make it "cheap" to you. What an item costs you to source/produce it is probably the most complex topic in the entire game. From what it costs to "maintain" a Villager to source an item from the terrain, or then the additional cost of providing the Building (and source materials) in which (and with which) a villager executes their Profession to produce an item, no doubt an unending discussion could be had. Ultimately, we succeed by finding/promoting "equilibrium" in the game such that we end up with more Resources and more Gold then we consume/spend. One of the ways in which we do that is buying resources when we are unable or disinclined to source/produce them.
You usually don't need Coal until you have sufficient Population to support sourcing it from the terrain. That being said, buying coal can give you both a nice "head start" and even a nice "injection" into your stockpile.
Crude Weapons are better than nothing, and are the only item (in the whole game) your Settlement cannot source/produce itself. You will, hopefully, find yourself moving past them soon enough, but it does help to ensure your settlement doesn't run out of weapons altogether. If you're out of weapons and can't afford to buy Weapons or Heavy Weapons then you should buy these.
Hauberks aren't necessarily "cheap" at a minimum of 200 gold each, but they do afford greater protection to a Guard or Soldier than Hide Coats. How much better? Well, that hasn't been quantified yet.
It takes Heavy Tools to make heavy tools, so if you ever want to build a Blacksmith Forge and produce your own, you'll need to buy at least one. It takes less than one to make one, so you only need to buy one to get that ball rolling, and you can usually produce them faster than you will +consume them (unless you're selling them or have an insane heavy industry bias in your settlement).
The general thinking is that it's better (economically so) to buy a raw material (such as Iron Ore) and produce the produced material (such as Iron Ingots) yourself. One justification for this is to simply compare purchase costs to production costs, i.e. it takes five iron ore (and two coal) to produce five iron ingots, yet it typically costs almost twice as much to buy five iron ingots than the raw materials. Sounds easy, right? Well, remember, we're ignoring what it costs to "set up" this little iron ingot making machine, i.e. the forge, the blacksmith, the mining, the miners, the wainwright to carry the ores, the farmers to feed the villagers, the clothiers to cloth them, the soldiers to protect them, etc., etc. As stated before, a complex discussion, but the decision is all yours to either buy iron ingots or make them yourself!
There are four things that make a complete Guard or Solider: a melee weapon, a ranged weapon, armor and a Shield. You have multiple options for three of these, but there is only one kind of shield in the game. You either have them or you don't. When it comes to checking this box, be grateful that they cost what they do, as compared with the most expensive options of the other three (relative to a shield) Weapons are expensive, Heavy Weapons are very expensive, and Platemail Armor is incredibly expensive!
If you can buy 1000 Smoked Fish from Atka, you can feed 20 Villagers for two whole years! On the other hand, you will only feed 1000 villagers for two weeks!
Another common mantra is "never sell Stone". You can only source stone from the terrain with a Quarry, which is a very late‑game Building. You will always use more stone than you expect, and quicker than you might expect too! Until you build a quarry (if you ever choose to do so) resourcing stone is a finite exercise. You will run out nearby and you can only send villagers farther and farther away to source more so far until it becomes pointless (or impossible, as the map itself is, itself, finite).
The case for needing Toolsat all has not yet been quantified. There are some players who find no problem at all never having tools available in their settlement.
See the items sold section below for complete details on what items Atka brings, when she brings them, and what they will usually cost you.
Trading between merchants
On occasion, you will have two (and sometimes even three!) Merchants present in your Trading Postat the same time. When this occurs, depending on which merchants they happen to be and what they're looking to buy/sell, you could have an opportunity to trade between the merchants, i.e. buy an item from one merchant that you then immediately sell to another merchant.
You must be careful to stock an item you buy rather than transfer it. If you accidentally transfer it instead, you will introduce delay in the transaction, quite possibly so much that the target merchant leaves your trading post before you can sell them that item, which usually turns out to be a costly mistake to make!
You can pause the game and still trade with merchants in this way. As items are never being brought to (or taken from) your trading post (all the movement of these items is "internal" to the trading post and happens "instantly" within the game) you are able to buy/sell in this way with the game paused, carefully taking your time even if your settlement is currently experiencing a raid!
Whenever you do this, be mindful of the rule of diminishing returns. As you progress through the game, your gold reserve will grow and your ability to produce (and consume) more expensive items will also increase. When you have 20,000 gold and you can trade Beer between two merchants still making 500 gold profit, even then it starts to become a little unnecessary and even boring. This kind of trading is usually best leveraged in early/mid game.
For details on which items are good for this kind of trading, and between which merchants, see the items bought and items sold sections below.
Relics
Atka is the only merchant to (eventually) bring any one of six different Relics for you to buy from her.
You can't yet sell relics in the game at all. Also, you can only buy relics after you've built your Temple.
As relic prices range from 1000 gold all the way up to 4200 gold, be prepared for your planned relic purchase by building up your gold reserve accordingly.
See the Relics section below for more details on which relics Atka brings, how much they will cost you, and how often she beings each one.
There's a 66% chance that Atka will show up in a given year.
Earliest arrival (month)
0.8
Average arrival (month)
2.2
Latest arrival (month)
4.8
Usually late January thru late April?
Gold brought
Least gold brought
2081
Average gold brought
2374
Most gold brought
2499
There seems to be just a little bit of a tendency to either bring less or more gold each year, i.e. a slight clumping on the plot towards the extremes of the range.
Items bought
What this table is showing you:
The symbol "◀▶" if an item is, on occasion, both bought and sold by the merchant in the same visit. In such a case, this table shows the data for when the item is bought, and the table in the next section shows the data for when the item is sold.
The numbers shown below were actually recorded in gameplay. If a portion of a price range is blank, that's because no values were recorded for it.
The chance that a merchant buys an item at all (during a given visit) is broken down by the price they pay for it. There are no items that a merchant will want to buy every time they visit; what they want to buy varies from visit to visit, just like the price they will pay for it.
Any merchants listed as pairing with are those that are known to sell that item, so when they are present at the same time might afford the opportunity for you to trade between the merchants (making profit only from the difference in their prices for that item but a profit nonetheless even if you don't keep any of that item in inventory yourself). When doing this, care must be taken to stock the item when bought (don't transfer the item).
The symbol "◀▶" if an item is, on occasion, both bought and sold by the merchant in the same visit. In such a case, this table shows the data for when the item is sold, and the table in the previous section shows the data for when the item is bought.
The numbers shown below were actually recorded in gameplay. If a portion of a price range is blank, that's because no values were recorded for it.
The chance that a merchant sells an item at all (during a given visit) is broken down by the price you pay for it. There are no items that a merchant will want to sell every time they visit; what they want to sell varies from visit to visit, just like the price you will pay for it.
The minimum, average and maximum amount of an item brought for a given visit.
Any merchants listed as pairing with are those that are known to buy that item, so when they are present at the same time might afford the opportunity for you to trade between the merchants (making profit only from the difference in their prices for that item but a profit nonetheless even if you don't keep any of that item in inventory yourself). When doing this, care must be taken to stock the item when bought (don't transfer the item).
Follow the relic's link to learn more about it. The effect (described in the last column) is only a brief description of the relic's benefit when equipped in a Temple.
The price is the median price. A range is not shown as the variance between the lowest & highest prices is usually only ~10%.
A merchant always brings exactly one relic on each visit. The chance shown is that it will be that relic that they bring.
Note: Don't forget that you can't buy a relic until you build a Temple.
