Written for planning this without deep game knowledge. Where something is outside what this tool models, it says so.
Contribution Point (CP) - the currency of this whole problem. Spent to own nodes, connect them, and rent lodging. Refundable, so it is a budget rather than a purchase, which is exactly why the optimal answer is worth computing.
Node - a place on the map you can own. Owning it costs CP. Some produce nothing themselves and exist only to connect two others; the tool calls those waypoints, and they are pure overhead you cannot avoid.
Plantzone - a node a worker can actually be assigned to. "Worker node" here means the same thing.
Lodging - where a worker lives, rented with CP in a town. A worker must be lodged in a town connected to the node it works, and distance costs cycle time.
Cycle - one unit of worker output: it walks, works, deposits, repeats. cycles/day is how often that completes.
Workspeed / Movespeed / Luck - the three worker stats that matter. Workspeed sets how fast a cycle completes, movespeed how much the walk costs, luck raises the chance of the better drop on nodes that have one.
Worker species - goblin, giant, human. Goblins are fast but travel poorly, giants the reverse, humans in between. The solver picks per node.
Central Market - the player-to-player market. Sales are taxed; buying is not.
Sale tax - what the market takes. ×0.845 is a common effective rate with a Value Pack and reasonable Family Fame. Set yours in the drawer; it moves the headline a lot.
Value Pack - a paid subscription. Raises your effective sale rate and doubles warehouse slots from 16 to 32, which matters here because this plan produces 71 item types.
Vendor price - some drops sell to an NPC at a fixed price instead of on the market. Those are never taxed and never move. Only 0.3% of this plan's income is genuinely of this kind - see How Income Is Calculated for why that number is lower than it looks.
Sack - a container item (Some Archaeologist's Sack and friends). Its value is the value of its contents, so it is priced off other items and moves with them even though it sells to a vendor.
Order book - the standing buy and sell orders behind a price. The bid side is people waiting to buy: an instant sale, sometimes above the quoted price. The ask side is listings you must queue behind. A quote with no bids under it is a price nobody has agreed to pay.
Hard price band - BDO enforces an absolute floor and ceiling per item. A price cannot leave it. Knowing both bounds the best and worst case exactly, rather than by extrapolation.
At cap - an item pinned at its ceiling. Demand is outrunning supply and the price cannot rise further, so there is no upside left and every surprise is downward.
VT - volume, the space items take in storage and on your character. This plan moves ~24,140 VT a day, which is what decides how often you actually go and sell.
Imperial delivery / crates / processing / cooking - ways to turn raw drops into more silver than selling them raw. All real, none modelled here. Treat the headline as a floor.
Energy - spent on many actions including re-assigning workers. The reason node choice is worth getting right the first time, and the reason the tool reports which nodes today's prices merely flatter.
MIP / mixed-integer program - the mathematical form of this problem. Solvers like HiGHS can prove a solution optimal, which is the difference between this and a spreadsheet.
MIP gap - how far the current best answer might be from optimal. 0% means proven.