Well this got me aggravated today. Because it's so easy to grow stuff to sell and make money I thought I would make it more challenging for myself by insisting on selling finished products rather than raw materials. So I made a bunch of parkas and hauled them off to the nearest outpost to sell.
I had some scrap bear skin to sell. Market Value $2.10, sale price $0.98. Not great but I can live with that.
Then I have a nice normal cotton parka to sell. Market Value $265. Sale price $86.33. What???
So I dig deeper; "item sell price multiplier 0.70". The game is applying a 30% penalty for manufacturing something instead of just selling the raw material -- I assume to deter people from selling clothing of raid victims (which is now pretty irrelavent since most have the Deadman tag and are nearly worthless).
So much for that plan.
So how does everyone else making raising money more challenging/interesting? Smokeleaf is way too easy. Drugs take some work but then some experimenter pawn will show up and consume your stockpile. Animals take way too long to breed (I'm still waiting for my first yorkie puppies to pop out, let alone grow up).
What else should I be manufacturing to sell instead? It doesn't have to be particularly profitable (in fact I prefer that it isn't) but it should be at least more profitable than selling the raw materials to make it.
Taming muffalos, with a 30+ in swamp, I get a lot of money from milk, wool and selling the breeds, lost all chickens to a Frostbite, so muffalos is the money making I am using, also, perfect defense.
Is furniture and sculpture still viable? I doubt weapons and armor would give a good rate of return. What else is there to manufacture, mortar shells maybe?
I think I got a bad trade offer the other day. They wanted me to bring them 1 shock lance for about 550 silver. Otherwise, those are a good place to sell manufactured.
You forget, resources got a fixed value.
While manufactured items got a quality.
When you craft good quality items out of the recources you got an enormous increase of the profit.
Sculptures and furniture are *heavy*. There's no way my colonists could carry two dozen to an outpost... also, growing trees in my tundra greenhouses would take a while. I'm looking for something that will keep my growers busy... rice and cotton seemed like the obvious choices but aren't working out so well in practice
As for item quality, yes, if you have fantastic producers that works in your favor. But my tailors are only at skill 10, so they're putting out fairly ordinary stuff. I'm not getting much bonus yet.
I did notice that I don't have any chemical interest pawns this playthrough, so maybe it's time for me to get in touch with my inner drug lord again.
You could try herbal meds. Advanced meds would not work because of the neutroamine. If you have friendly tribals nearby, they will take the herbal off you.
I personally go with sculptures. Lots and lots of sculptures sold to any passing trader who is willing to buy them and any exotic goods trader I can call to pick them up.
But since you said that's not an option for you: Drugs! They are just crazy effective. Yayo and flake weigh next to nothing but are worth a shitload. Beer is also very good but heavier and not worth as much.
These are the two goods I mostly export from my colony. Except for weapons and apperal that are <50% or not up to my standards of quality.
Bonus tip: not sure if it's still possible but at least back in A16 when you had a level 20 artist you were able to make large silver statues and if they were of quality excellent or better you were able to sell them at a profit. Basically turning money into more money.
Personaly i play mosttimes with Vegetable garden mod.
And i made Grilled steak out of Insect/human meat to sell to visitors. And VG meals stack upto 75.
Hmmm, looking for a mod that provides something worth selling is an option. And yes, I think cranking out Yayo will be entertaining so long as no chemically interested pawns show up.
It would be nice if Rimworld came up with some non-addictive psychoactives for my colonists to play with -- whatever the local equivalent of LSD or peyote is could be entertaining.
"Minor Break: Engie is tripping!"
The benefit of yayo is weirdly enough that a chemically interested pawn can't use too much of it. Sure, he'll sort away up to 6 units per mental break but they don't happen THAT often and you can spare the equivalent of 100 silver if you have like 400 yayo stockpiled. He'll probably get addicted though so he'll continue to consume yayo but this will also keep him happy and you'll never need to worry about his mental health again.
Yeah, I won't have to worry about him again until he snorts too much and his heart explodes.
Hmmm, actually, I'll admit I don't have much in-game experience with this. What is the actual average long term impact of drug addiction in Rimworld? How long can I expect a Yayo addict to survive?
I tried it with a go juice addict once, didnt go very well, even with just enough to not go into withdrawal he built up tolerance pretty quickly and then got braindamage once the tolerance was high enough.
Go juice is kind of a special case though, potent drugs always have strong drawbacks. It might just work out with yayo if you schedule his drug use instead of letting him snort when the game prompts him to, usually theres some time left before he goes into withdrawal.
Hm. I didn't have too many yayo addicts but the ones I had survived for at least 3 years. I never had one die due to overdose because even on binges there is enough downtime for the overdose do go down again.
Brain damage also didn't happen but I think that's a go juice specific thing anyway.
What might happen but I didn't get is liver damage/failure.
In conclusion: I had 2 yayo addicts on joy schedule and they both survived fine for at least 2 years.
Slave trading is very good profit to me.
It need to invest a lot and need to plan your base. You need to build a very very large maze and a sandbag every 2 step to slow the raider down. Try to make a huge maze that take about 1-2 day for raider to reach your base so that they will all down from starving. Try to make a secret hallway to reach any part of your maze to fix those damaged wall and to quickly get out of your base too.
Just in case you get a visit from mechanoid whose don't need to eat. build a kill box at the end of your maze would handle them.
Next is your prison and farm to sustain those hungry prisoner. Using a nutrient paste dispenser is a good way to save cost for your food. If your prisoner get too moody, tame a lot of wolf, warg, snake or whatever that is dangerous you can find in your map and let them inside your prison. Hope they can be friend...
You can check their worth inside the info panel. If their worth is too low because they're old or drug addict, it's better to "uninstall" their used part like lung and kidney for fix price. Don't forget to install peg leg and remove it both just in case of riot.
I know smoke leaf addiction results in asthma. I don't know for the other drugs, except luciferm. My ambrosia addict had a heart attack at a young age, but he was also a smokeleaf addict.
So it sounds like yayo addiction isn't too severe as long as in have a stockpile to prevent withdrawal. Good to hear, thanks!
According to the wiki, tolerance for yayo and other psychite drugs produces kidney failure in about 120 days. I imagine that includes the new tea. Smokeleaf produces asthma or carcinoma in the lungs in about 120 days. Beer causes sirrosis.
Back to OP - for b18 I've also noticed that MV of some materials as well as mat cost for apparel have changed as well as the MV formula. Someone did a pretty detailed Reddit post with spreadsheets on the post profitable stuff. Some of which depends on if you have high level crafter, builder or social. B18 changes some of that but it's still a good start to check out. (I can't find the link atm but will post when i get home later today)
For b18 I updated some of those calcs -parkas are now one of the lowest money per resource apparels. Ifnyou still want to make clothibg, Bowler hat is the highest on a per material basis. Making flake still makes decent amount but if you have a lvl14+ crafter you will make more money with bowler hat on a per growing plot per day basis (cotton vs psychoid). Of course the difference here is that only bulk trader buys clothing but almost every trader buys flake.
If you have a high social. You can make a ton of money buying neutromine and making Wake up. With lvl 20 social you make around 2x what you pay. (Even with the 50% and 150% selling/buying factor). With this you break even somewhere around lvl 8 social? I have a ill 10 social and have about a 15% profit margin.
What I dislike about hats is that they take up so much space in inventory. Otherwise, yeah, bowler caps or tuques would be clearly the way to go. I don't know why parkas get that penalty but it definitely kills their space advantage.
(The idea that parkas have a space advantage over hats says something about the game mechanics being a bit screwed up)
Yes but at some point once you have large enough a storage, it becomes a moot point bc you'll be limited by the purchasing capacity of the trader.
I'm with shurp on this one. Space is a huge problem in endgame in my opinion. If you have 20+ dudes you already need a lot of space to support them but if you start to exclusively craft bowler hats you'll quickly cover a decently large space with hats since they need one space per hat but are super fast to produce and don't need much material.
Flake or yayo on the other hand require next to no space since you can stack them to 400. The only space you need is for the plants and at least temporarily some space for the leaves until you turn them into powder.
Same is true for wake up but to be honest it takes quite a while to produce one unit of wakeup. I didn't calculate any numbers but it feels as it isn't as profitable to just grind wakeup in a money/work sense since neutroamine is quite expensive.
Also there are enough other uses for neutroamine which subtract from profit and production time.
I have yet to reach an end game colony, but my guess would be that boomalope chemfuel farm might be quite profitable.
RE: Spacing. I agree that bowler hats is no where near as space efficient as flake. my point is, in practical sense, the "space-hungriness" of bowler hat has an upper limit so it's not like "as long as your production can keep up you'll need to devote half of your base storing bowler hats". In my current play-thru, 2 orbital beacon worth of space was enough for the most part b/c bulk good traders usually don't carry enough silvers to buy more than that. Is 2 orbital beacon worth of space still alot? sure, but i'm just trying to put its needs into perspective. Obviously if you also need to buy stuff from the bulk goods, that'll change the spacing limit. From purely making $$ perspective, esp if you have a lvl 20 crafter, the difference between making flake and making bowler hats is quite significant.
RE: Neutromine -> Wake up: yes it takes longer to make than flake but in my experience it doesn't make much difference. I remember churning thru a full stack of 400 of them in a couple of days. The key here is that it's dependent on your social level. like i said with lvl 20 social you can buy 4000 silver worth of neutromine and make 8000 silver worth wake up with a very quick turn around. so depending on what your situation is, this could be a good part of your economy. As for the other uses, yes its needed for other stuff but it doesn't decrease your profit margin (50% max).
If you have the climate you can actually make more dosh than you need by just planting a ton of cotton and selling cloth. I even did this on extreme desert while feeding 20 people and a decent number of animals (12+ hauler dogs and 20+ alpacas with a big surplus).
If you have a cold climate, the requirement to heat and light enclosed spaces makes large planting areas prohibitive. You can get a good amount by micromanaging hunting caribou and other animals even on tundra. After that, you're mostly relying on stripped raider drops (if they don't die), thrubmos, scyther blades, possibly stone sculptures since it will take a long time to fully deplete that.
Once you get deep drilling + scanner, any map except sea ice will have tons of resources. Whether it's jade, gold, silver, plasteel etc there's a lot of wealth in that.
So I just noticed something which might explain my original problem and may offer a work around. I was perusing Apparel_Various.xml when I noticed that parkas are under the "Neolithic" heading. Maybe that is where the 0.70 penalty is coming from when selling them to offworld outposts?
It sounds like if I make dusters instead I won't get hit with the penalty. Has anyone tried this?
Both dusters and parkas have the .70 penalty to sell price afaik. I have several of both in storage right now. I keep my tailors (4 benches!) busy cranking out leather products because it piles up fast if you're hunting regularly. Really, I never have a shortage of either and I typically can clean out a trader on those alone if he has no commodity I want.
Drugs are king though. The high stack size makes perfect sense: drugs like heroin and cocaine are INCREDIBLY pure and taken in very small doses (taking more is playing with a loaded gun). My main beef with drugs is doggies and kitties cracking open a cold one and winding up with carcinoma. I don't know if they still do this in b18 but I'm not sure I want to chance Beer production again after the Great Husky Hangover of '17.
As a side note: as a consumer of smokeleaf, I think the penalties are ridiculous. I've never had problems with breathing if I filter the smoke (water pipe), and it's extremely non-addictive. I'm actually on the wagon right now and I stop craving it after 48~hrs. I think the penalty to move and consciousness (esp. consciousness) is enough a drawback without the possibility of addiction, but what do I know.
So if it's not the "Neolithic" tag, then where is this 0.70 coming from, and how do I edit it away?
So far i remember, not 100% sure, the 0.70 thing got added with the worldmap feature.
If you want the 100% price you need to trade with the faction settlements.
Any caravan that arrive with you just give you the 0,70.
Orbital trader full prices too.
Huh? I'm pretty sure I was getting the 0.70 at a settlement... I could be wrong though. If so, that would explain my confusion, ok.
It's still annoying that Rimworld offers so little economic value for manufacturing... from a purely financial standpoint there's little motive to make anything out of the cotton instead of just hauling it and selling it raw.
I don't get why its better selling it raw. I remember selling quite a lot of excellent/masterwork/legendary leather pants and if I remember it had quite a hefty price increase.
As for what I sell I usually just sell excess stuff so everything that I have more than enough of. Plus a little arts so the good statues I place in rooms the rest I sell off but its not very excessive. I don't do mass production lines for trade I just produce lots of stuff that I want my pawns to equip and sell of the excess. Only thing I am selling much raw is leather/wool because I have 40 muffalos and 20 pigs and also kill all the wild animals to survive the winter. Doing 20/60 boreal forest so there drug production does not work for me because I need most of the space for the base and big food/haygrass fields and some devilstrand.
Also usually the traders plus the occasional requested ones are good enough I don't do caravans.
If you are into breeding you could look into boomalopes.
Chemfuel has always been a stable source of income.
My skill 5-10 tailors usually produce pretty mediocre products -- shoddy to normal. Add a 30% penalty on top of the quality penalty... and selling the raw cloth is usually more profitable. But you have a point; if I keep at it, eventually my tailors will get good enough to make really good stuff which will sell well. Thanks for the encouragement!
As for boomalopes, well, I never see them wandering around in the tundra, but I'll keep it in mind if I ever see an orbital carrying some.
Actually, I'll prefer to raise a cat farm since kitty sell a ton of silver (around 100 silver with good social colonist) and they breed like crazy. But sadly in A18, they can't hunt for themselves (maybe a bug, I've report it already https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=36668.0 ) which will burden your colony food supply.
With around 20-30 of them, they will most likely give you around 3 kitties per days. Sadly, you'll need to call for exotic good trader every day to sell the kitties before they run over your colony though ;D
(https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/photo/2015/03/aoshima-japans-cat-island/c06_RTR4RUGS/main_1200.jpg?1425394297)
(Pic: Aoshima island, Japan)
The substitute for cat is Cobra. This nasty snake breed and mature rather slow than the cat but they eat less. The plus is that they can be train to release and they're not having name like cat which help a lot when you need to count their number. They're the only carnivore in the game that can hatch egg too.
I have been using the mineral scanner and finding a lot of jade. One precious minerals cash can get you enough jade for about 8 large sculpture. Traders buy them for about 750 to 1k each depending on quality. Plus you can raid the map for any other useful stuff.
You'll probably make more money if you sell the jade raw and have your sculptors manufacture granite sculptures for 250 ea. The extra time they spend sculpting is offset by not needing to spend as much time mining and caravanning.
I really wish Rimworld would balance the economy so that it would be profitable to *buy* jade and manufacture sculptures with it.
So in my latest game I decided to take another look at this situation... and I can confirm it's definitely a clothing penalty. It's right there on the item information tab. "Sell price multiplier, 70%", don't even need to be in a buy/sell screen with a trader.
Where is this attribute set? And why is it set only for clothing? Because it is annoying that it completely eliminates the added value of a medium skilled tailor who is producing normal goods. The raw cloth/leather/whatever has the same value.
(Of course more skilled tailors can actually make a profit. This game I'm going to stick with it and see how the legendary parka trade works out :)
Quote from: Shurp on December 26, 2017, 07:41:55 PM
Where is this attribute set? And why is it set only for clothing?
The attribute is set in Apparel_Various.xml in the definition for "ApparelBase" which is used as parent item for all clothing. And it's not only used for clothing but also for weapons with an even harsher penalty (SellPriceFactor 0.2 for "BaseWeapon" in Weapons_Base.xml).
Yes, I did omit the weapons penalty -- I at least understood the motive there, to reduce the value of loot from raids. But now that clothing from raids is generally worthless thanks to the "D" tag I figured the clothing penalty doesn't make much sense.
Thanks for pointing out where it is! I'll see about editing it so my tailors can start making some money!
I had a look at the market value calculations for cloth parkas to see at what quality it becomes profitable:
MarketValueUnfinalized = NumberClothNeeded * ClothMarketValue + 0.0036 * WorkToMake = 120 * 1.5 + 0.0036 * 24000 = 180 + 86.4 = 266.4
So without further PriceModifications the parka's market value is determined to roughly 2/3 by the material used and by 1/3 by the work put into it.
This unfinalized value is then modified by quality and the SellPriceFactor of 0.7 discussed above and the item's hitpoints: MarketValue = MVUnfinalized * QualityFactor * ItemSellPriceFactor * HealthFactor
(All other modifications to sell price like Selling vs. Buying, TraderType, Social Skill etc. should be the same for cloth and parkas and thus irrelevant when comparing selling raw ressources vs. manufactured goods.)
I will assume full hitpoints (factor 1.0) since the item is newly crafted.
The QualityFactor is defined in Stats_Basics_General.xml:
- Awful 0.4
- Shoddy 0.6
- Poor 0.8
- Normal 1
- Good 1.2
- Superior 1.5
- Excellent 2.0
- Masterwork 3.0
- Legendary 6
Which results in the following market values for cloth parkas (I ignored rounding for simplicity's sake); the SellPriceFactor 0.7 is applied to all qualities so the starting value is 266.5 * 0.7 = 186.48:
- Awful: 186.48 * 0.4 = 74.592
- Shoddy: 186.48 * 0.6 = 111.888
- Poor 186.48 * 0.8 = 149.184
- Normal 186.48 * 1 = 186.48
- Good 186.48 * 1.2 = 223.776
- Superior 186.48 * 1.5 = 279.72
- Excellent 186.48 * 2.0 = 372.96
- Masterwork 186.48 * 3.0 = 559.44
- Legendary 186.48 * 6 = 1118.88
So awful, shoddy and poor parkas are worth less than the cloth used to craft it (< 180), normal quality results in a minimal profit and good or above quality increases the profit margin significantly. A masterwork parka for example has 310% percent the market value of its ingredients.
I have to say I find this plausible. If you are a master craftsman and have an apprentice you are fully aware that there will be mistakes and bad results that will waste ressources and gain you next to nothing. That's okay if he learns and his future work (hopefully) pays for it.
Quote from: Shurp on December 27, 2017, 06:15:46 AM
Thanks for pointing out where it is! I'll see about editing it so my tailors can start making some money!
Don't forget a thing.
While steel/plasteel is more or less limited and weapons don't get so much damaged on combat.
Textiles got an endless supply.
Because of these endless supply, smokeleaf joints allready got nerved as primary trading good.
I think you shouldn't modify much at these numbers, i think its pretty balanced.
If you want that your tailer are geting more out of the material, try the mod Static quality ++.
Then your crafter don't get this big randomness at their product quality.
the realmoney go from thrumbo horns and skyther blades. getting 20+ blades from a single raid - priceless. Parcas can be good too if you have very good crafters who produce masterwork and legendary stuff from thrumbo and llama wool
Textiles require a lot of labor to turn into clothing. I don't think it's unreasonable to expect a profit off of that. Smokeleaf takes all of a few seconds to turn into a joint so should not be worth much more than the material. Parkas should be worth much more than cloth.
Especially out in the tundra where cotton is scarce and freezing colonists abound...