making things for money

[bkc56]

But who is such an idiot to do that after the first week of play?

 

Unsubstantiated sweeping generalizations aside, after more than a year of playing I still find it more convenient to do all the harvesting first, and then sit down at storage and do all the mixing. Mixing on-site just doesn't work as well for me personally.

[Happy_G]

sometimes it is much easier to gather ing first, you can be afkish while gathering ing, i work on homework and other things while im mining, then i click back in to check in every once in a while. but i will be making my 16k steel and 2k iron bars onsite. once im back to the game. o and i make HE's on site too.

[mkiever]

Hi all,

 

sorry to have left the discussion for quite a while.

 

Here are some remarks from me to different points presented:

 

- several people mentioned experience as a goal to make more advanced things.

 

I usually don't like that argument from my background with pen&paper role-playing.

There I (and most people I play with) normally disapprove of actions/spells/etc done

only for the sake of getting experience points. It nearly always looks like bad role-playing to me.

 

- getting rich or why do I want to make money?

 

It is not that I want to get rich.

But very often in the game you need "stuff" (as someone said).

A sword broken, two new sigils, some potions, essences I can't make myself, books, ...

So I just need some gc to carry on adventuring.

I just like to minimize the time spent harvesting/mixing/haggling.

 

- answer to Tico - don't start summoning -

I always like alchemist/magic/thief roles in role-playing so I started using magic

in EL even if it is very unbalanced, yet. It is a loooooooooooong time using magic

until you can attack something using magic alone.

So I am, like you, always broke :-)

 

Some hints don't apply to my character: He is just level 35 at the moment,

trying to specialize in alchemy/potion/magic.

 

Otherwise the posts seem to indicate that

in general raw materials have the best prices.

With the possible exception of fire essences and perhaps steel (or hydro) bars.

All that if you neglect experience, of course!

 

Thanks for your opinions/hints.

Matthias alias Tsungafir.

[simon]

[snip]

Someone with a harvesting skill of 100 is going to harvest that iron well over 2x faster than someone with a lvl 30 harvesting skill.

[/snip]

 

 

Harvesting level doesn't affect harvesting speed, as long as you are over the recommended level and have positive food level. And even if you don't have positive food level the slowdown is minor.

[duckyo]

Sorry if someone has mentioned this but I good way to make money is get your manu level up to you can make leather pants and sell them to Trik and so on...

 

time to go back to school duckyo

 

Leather pants are bought at 40gc each and take 8 food per pants (iirc) that is 6 per pof so...

 

pof cost 12/6=2gc

leather 7*350/75=32.666

thread 10*2=20

 

that is : 2+32.(6)+20=54.666

 

The only way you could make a profit is if you make your own thread, and then the profit is meager. There are no profitable manu items which you can buy ings from #3 and them make and sell. (Only profit is if you make your own bars). Yes, the armors/weapons are expensive but the bars/stones/esses needed to make those items are almost 95% of the item sell value. There is one exception but noone sane buys it =]

 

[edit]

it is possible to make a "profit" on fur pants but that would mean you have to hunt the deer/wolves/beavers yourself. But if you buy the ingredients from #3 at 8 per wolf, 3 per beaver, 4 per deer you would still be loosing money. Maybe duckyo meant that instead =]

[/edit]

Good point but if you make your own thread and have done the leather quest it will be much cheaper to make Leather pants...

[simon]

There is no profitable item to make in manu, at any level and the time it takes to make your own thread/bars offsets the possible profit. The"profit" you get is what you get for the items you harvested yourself and or alched. Nothing that you buy brings you in a profit (even buying steel/iron bars and fe and making you own hyd/wolf bars). The prices for the armors and weapons have dropped so low that it is not even possible to break even if you buy the ings so you are either forced to make your own bars (which can be sold for a larger profit on #3) or just not bothering at all.

The only 3 profitable skills are harvesting, alchemy and summoning. The rest of the skills don't have any items which you can buy from #3 and then make them. (Col/com failure rates are too high even at the high levels to turn a decent profit with the new stone/ele/eme prices). As for making leather pants for gc...

 

make and sell 1 leather pants -> profit 5.5gc 10 thread

make and sell 1 leather helm -> profit 4.5gc 4 thread

 

If you want to make money, stick to the 3 profitable skills and don't start manu/craft/pot

[Zanadu]

[snip]

Someone with a harvesting skill of 100 is going to harvest that iron well over 2x faster than someone with a lvl 30 harvesting skill.

[/snip]

 

 

Harvesting level doesn't affect harvesting speed, as long as you are over the recommended level and have positive food level. And even if you don't have positive food level the slowdown is minor.

2x as fast may have been an exaggeration to a degree, however I have noticed a difference in speed on some things when I advanced levels. Something that I picked up on when doing tree mushrooms, since I do not do it often. I was actually getting to where I was cutting the time down by actual minutes. Something that I most likely would not notice with lesser items, but since I only harvest them on occassion and they are already so slow to harvest its noticable. Also noticed when doing projects with higher level harvesters-- Almost every time they will have harvested more ore than me in the same amount of time. If there is a cut off level on speed of harvest, it's not completely based on recommended level. Maybe like mixing and fail rates? Hmm.. not too sure and not even enough patience to clock it. Hmm, maybe piper would be one to test it with since he has a really, really high harvest level.

[Llywar]

sometimes it is much easier to gather ing first, you can be afkish while gathering ing, i work on homework and other things while im mining, then i click back in to check in every once in a while. but i will be making my 16k steel and 2k iron bars onsite. once im back to the game. o and i make HE's on site too.

 

This isn't meant as a bash on EL - as I imagine many other similar games work the same way - but if the general tendency is to harvest AFK, then what is the point of it? It seems like harvesting just comes down to making a lot of round trips to storage - it consumes time and theremore makes resources scarce, but is there any value to making these resources scarce in this way?

 

I'm pretty much just a noob, but it seems to me that just to make 20 steel bars involved about 14 trips to storage between making FEs, gathering coal, gathering food (which can't be stored (except PoF) - so you can't gather it at a convenient time close to storage), calculating the ratio to stock up and bring, and then heading off to the mines to actually make the bars (with my levels/EMU, hauling iron ore is a VERY bad use of time).

 

Would it just make more sense to have an NPC sell ores for around 1gp? That would make them somewhat scarce, but eliminate some of the drudgery.

 

Maybe the idea has been tried and has failed, or maybe there is a good reason not to do it this way. It just seems to me that the in-game economy should exist to enhance the fun of the game, and not simply reward people for having the client turned on and checking on it every 3 minutes. Playing a game should be fun - it shouldn't just be a way to measure how little you value your time.

 

Which isn't to say that leveling can't be fun, or that doing "work" of some sort can't also be fun. However, it just seems like harvesting and hauling is an easy way to make people "earn" their levels/coin - and not something that is really central to the fun of the game. Sure, it makes the game more life-like, but if I wanted to have "real-life" I'd get a second job and get paid in REAL gold...

 

But hey - all-in-all I appreciate that somebody is taking the time to make a good free game with open-source clients that can actually run on linux (I learned about it because I happened to spot it in Gentoo's portage tree while browsing). And this isn't an easy problem to solve - I don't know that any of the online RPGs have solved it (why else would people be paying offshore harvesters to make online-money for them if it weren't perceived as non-fun drudgery?).

[LochnessLobster]

There is no profitable item to make in manu, at any level and the time it takes to make your own thread/bars offsets the possible profit. The"profit" you get is what you get for the items you harvested yourself and or alched. Nothing that you buy brings you in a profit (even buying steel/iron bars and fe and making you own hyd/wolf bars). The prices for the armors and weapons have dropped so low that it is not even possible to break even if you buy the ings so you are either forced to make your own bars (which can be sold for a larger profit on #3) or just not bothering at all.

The only 3 profitable skills are harvesting, alchemy and summoning. The rest of the skills don't have any items which you can buy from #3 and then make them. (Col/com failure rates are too high even at the high levels to turn a decent profit with the new stone/ele/eme prices). As for making leather pants for gc...

 

make and sell 1 leather pants -> profit 5.5gc 10 thread

make and sell 1 leather helm -> profit 4.5gc 4 thread

 

If you want to make money, stick to the 3 profitable skills and don't start manu/craft/pot

 

well said nook1e. I couldn't agree more

[Atlantis]

yep, I agree completely with LL and Nook1e.

I put a few pp in artificial hoping that once you get to level 60-70+ maybe there would be some profit, but no, its either loss to train it or "Can you make this and that for me if I provide ingreds" or another small profit if you harvest *all* ingreds for armors (since the price of a binding is like 7.5k, means you profit around 15k max on a sword, for example)

[Vlad_Tepes]

[snip]

Someone with a harvesting skill of 100 is going to harvest that iron well over 2x faster than someone with a lvl 30 harvesting skill.

[/snip]

 

 

Harvesting level doesn't affect harvesting speed, as long as you are over the recommended level and have positive food level. And even if you don't have positive food level the slowdown is minor.

hmm..so what does harvesting skill do? makes your chance greater for getting rosts, etc?

[Atlantis]

er, no. If you have the reccomended it makes you harv at a better rate, afaik other than that it is just a "bonus skill" like alchemy, that your level does not matter once you get to a certain point. So, it just gives OA xp basically.

[masterpiter]

Higher harvesting skill makes u harvest faster, but only to lvl 55.

After that harvesting speed is the same but u get less random harvesting events, so u harvest faster cous of that

 

eMPi( eBuL harvester)

[smalul]

I have a few comments on this topic:

1. You can make a profit on every skills, but only if you do everything yourself, maybe except for the FPs. If you use "slower" food, you'll have a higher profit. The only thing you lose is time, and it's up to you to decide if the time spent on making those items is worth it. The problem is that in most cases it's just not worth spending hours just to end up with items worth 2000-4000gc.

I have a suggestion here - make things "go faster" - either by lowering cooldown times for the slower food, or by lowering the price of FPs. Lowering the harvest time of the ingredients, or at least make it relative to the harvest level (the higher your harvest level, the faster you can harvest ingredients), would help too. It would also help to have FPs sold in more than one place (Mira in WSC), as it would save long trips to WS.

 

2. This is basically a fighting game. The other skills in the game are only there to support the fighting (to make armors, HEs and weapons). The goal in this game, as I see it, it to raise your a/d skills, while raising the other skills when you need them (need better armor? Raise your harvest, alchemy and manufacturing skills to make the armor yourself). In higher levels, you can gain a nice profit from fighting - not only from the money the monsters drop, but also in the form of other drops, like books and cloaks.

 

3. I have to agree on that prices of items point - in many cases the ingredients are worth more than the final (or next level) items. I think that if the ingredients are worth X, the next level Item should worth at least 10% more, as you have to buy and read books, as well as spend time training your skills. I have to say this problem is partly because of the players themselves - they try to sell an item in a certain range of prices - between the NPCs' buying price and the NPCs' selling price, so both the seller and the buyer would profit from it. I think somewhere along that way something went wrong, and we ended up with the way it is today.

Maybe a review of all the NPCs' prices in the game is in order, but that's up to the admins to decide.

 

4. This is purely a suggestion - maybe the admins should create an economy system for this game. That is - the NPCs' prices won't be fixed, and would be based on the quantities of items they sell/buy to and from players. For example - if the players sells a lot of iron ore to the NPCs, the NPCs would lower the buy/sell prices for iron ore, and the other way around - the less iron ore reserve the NPCs have, the higher the buy/sell prices would be.

[Raz]

If you want to make money, stick to the 3 profitable skills and don't start manu/craft/pot

(Harv/Alch/Summon)

 

You can also add to the list of profitable skills train a/d with a big sword.

1 hour serping trolls will get you a fair amount of gc and some decent drops. The same also applies for most monsters.

 

Admittedly you get far less exp - but you do return a profit.

[Lu06]

I make most of my money from Alch and Manu as I don't do much fighting. I sell essences and armor to fighters so they help me out a lot

[LochnessLobster]

I make most of my money from Alch and Manu as I don't do much fighting. I sell essences and armor to fighters so they help me out a lot

 

I suspect that you are selling these armour items at or below what the ingredients would cost. In fact you are making the money on harvest and alchemy rather than manu

[Chosen]

I make my money from Fluff, since I restore once per ~20 fluff (w/o sword) and got +1.2k emu, I can train +8 hours striaght getting 2M+ oa exp, and ~15k gc w/o drops, so somewhere like 50-250k depending if I get NMT.

[RallosZek]

-- Steel bars are not as profitable as given credit to. The materials alone cost more then the bar, like most of the other bars. Top on the cost of fp and if you bought everything needed to make the bar via the market you most likely lost a good chunck of change. If you go the extra mile of turning them into other stuff you might make profit.

 

You confuse economical profit with making money. A steel bar costs me 3.79gc and if I'd sell, I could sell for 42 simply by waving 5k of them in Pillgrim's face. Yes, if I bought the raw materials steel bars cost me 42.78gc. That's one hell of a transport fee, isn't it? Especially when you consider I don't transport the materials to storage.

Aside from that, Feasting pots are valued at 12gc in these prices, but really I buy 1400 feasts for 11kgc, using my potioning skill (and no, not even making feasting pots). It's really easy to make money at high levels and get experience at the same time. You just need to flip the switch that says "if I'd sold this at market I'd have....", cause that really means "if I'd sold this at market, I'd have walked up and down storage at no exp a gazillion times and get gc in return".

[Zanadu]

It's not confusion as certainly I made "some" gc while I was exping. Its simply the arguement of those who say you can make gc with manu. No, they most likely made gc via their alch skill. Break it down further and the profit in alch is via harvesting. You're accounting for your exp as your profit bonus which is not a bad wave of thinking until you get into the fact that you can make more exp via training a/d. In fact I can now profit from training a/d when I do it right.

 

Steel bar is 8 iron.. make an essence with that iron on site and you turned that iron into 56 gc when you replace the coal and fe for silver and tiger lilly and you eliminated cooldown problems so you got even better exp and used an even less food cost and can out put even more product. You can turn anything into profit, although some methods are a bix more taxing than others and some will have a faster profit.

 

Though I don't recommend crunching numbers too much. If you enjoy making steel bars go for it. If you enjoy making swords, make swords.

[nathanstenzel]

Ok. I have seen remarks on making on site (I am always a fan of that), buying ingreds losing you money and the goal being xp instead of gc. A number of others too, but these are the main ones.

 

The most efficient way I can think of to get what you want is to make something you make well and trade with someone that makes what you want. GC is a lost cause in this game usually. That is because people will be buying for less than they sell. A big market Duh.

 

Buying ingreds is a speed thing. You would be more likely to buy only Some of the ingredients (ones that are harder for you to aquire). Buying all the ingreds means that you found someone to do the mixing for you for xp and perhaps a smal fee. Finding ingreds cheap and cheap/free mixers is the favorite way to make money for a few people I know.

 

Currently, thread has failed us....nobody will sell thread for less than the npc....which is just annoying. The best way I have some up with for getting thread is to trade leather helms for them (1 helm/10 thread). I would only get 20gc for the helm from Trik, have no patience for selling them to the market (which would flood the heck out of it) and it gives his the potential to sell it to players and make more than 25gc per helm. If cotton harvested faster (perhaps a triple harvest spot) or the ingreds for thread was 3 cotton per thread, it would probably drop in price since it is less work to make. (crossing my fingers and cursing people's greed)

 

I have no idea what the "city" setup that Entropy has mentioned a few times will do to the economy. Hard to tell. Perhaps there will be citizens and they will buy for more than the npc's will. Who knows....

 

Back to the whole item swap thing....

consider the idea that you need some rings and can provide BR. Someone else needss BR and can provide rings....swap.

Now, consider the idea that you need rings and provide leather helms. Someone else needs leather helms and provides feran horns and bones. A third person needs feran horns and bones and provides potions. A fourth person needs potions to increase there success rate at rings. Ding Ding Ding! Trade circle. I have never heard of anyone in this game being as smart with business as a Ferangi. lol

Anyone wanna make a bot that will trade ingreds or finished goods? lol Now That would be interesting!

[KarenRei]

Lets sum up:

 

Buying ingredients/mixing at storage/using FPs: For experience only. There's generally no profit, and often a loss. There's a market for it because, hey, buying experience? Why not?

 

Harvesting ingredients to sell: The payment is really for transport costs.

 

Manufacturing on site: The benefit is reduced transport costs. The small amount of walking time gives you time to get your food up by eating free food instead of FPs.

 

Agreed?

 

As for the suggestion of NPCs adjusting their prices based on supply and demand: a warning! It better be immune to this trick:

 

1) Harvest many of an obscure item.

2) Sell, small numbers at a time, flooding the market to lower the price.

3) Buy in bulk, in a single transaction, at the low price. Price jumps back up high.

4) Jump to step 2.

 

In short, you average selling at a moderate price (starts high, ends low), but buy all of your items at the low price.

 

This can be circumvented by wise coding. Bulk transactions must produce no different result than individual transactions.

[Lu06]

I make most of my money from Alch and Manu as I don't do much fighting. I sell essences and armor to fighters so they help me out a lot

 

I suspect that you are selling these armour items at or below what the ingredients would cost. In fact you are making the money on harvest and alchemy rather than manu

 

I don't buy any ingredients and when possible, I harvest fruit and sell it to fund cooked meat for making bars.

[Happy_G]

Anyone wanna make a bot that will trade ingreds or finished goods?

depending on the item i am willing to do this, mostly just with a few essences like FE's and sometimes HE's

[RallosZek]

It's not confusion as certainly I made "some" gc while I was exping. Its simply the arguement of those who say you can make gc with manu. No, they most likely made gc via their alch skill. Break it down further and the profit in alch is via harvesting. You're accounting for your exp as your profit bonus which is not a bad wave of thinking until you get into the fact that you can make more exp via training a/d. In fact I can now profit from training a/d when I do it right.

 

Ah, but a/d only levels your a/d and your oa.

It's nice you can train a/d profitable, however, you're always dependent on other people for the things you need to be able to train and as such pay full price. Plus you reduce the game to 1 or 2 skills (fighting/harvesting). If the latter doesn't bother you (and many it doesn't), then it's all good. But I always gotta laugh at the people complaining that they NEED to harvest for days, to be able to train again. Self-inflicted pain there.

 

Fact remains, you can level any skill, without loosing money and even gaining money. Whether that's a profit, cause you could've sold x for y, is a different matter of accounting. The difference is invested time to level that skill. Oh and I don't make bars with cooked meat :lol:, too impatient for that .

 

I make my money from Fluff, since I restore once per ~20 fluff (w/o sword) and got +1.2k emu, I can train +8 hours striaght getting 2M+ oa exp, and ~15k gc w/o drops, so somewhere like 50-250k depending if I get NMT.

[shoq @ 3]: Selling: Full Steel & Iron Plate Sets - NMT Cloaks - BP & FR Cloaks - Tit Chains - Tit Longs - Stars & Uni Meds - PM me please.

 

Wasn't aware, fluffies drop full steel, iron and fr cloaks. Guess I better update my drop list.

Edited December 5, 2006 by RallosZek