Questions about caravans

When a caravan is destroyed by attackers, some of the materials are lost, and some of the materials are dropped to attackers.

You might want to review the Caravans page on the wiki.

There's no reason your friend couldn't send a very lightly loaded caravan in front of yours, but if you defend it, you're risking attackers going for yours instead (while all your friends are defending the decoy, or after defeating those friends), and if you don't defend it, you risk them knocking it over, seeing it's empty and then coming for yours like they originally were going to anyway.

I don't believe we know the cost of launching a caravan yet.

I can't say where the risk/reward is for attackers. Steven's take is that it will hurt your reputation with other players (not a game mechanic) and failing attacks will make it harder to progress on the "Bandit" quest paths. Even death penalties (other than gear decay) are disabled for caravans ^ref , but that decay is normal and would apply to defenders too.

In his own words, from June 2022: (at 1:14:52)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4sUTuUAgavE&t=4492s