I have found making cowboy hats easy, and profitable early game. I tried drugs before, but they never really felt like they were worth the amount of time it takes to make them?... statues can be profitable, but, cowboy hats are faster.
I make yayo and beer. I enjoy being a drug cartel and with the mods I have on it fits right into our cult.
...stomping the local food market by establishing a year-round influx of produce and refined products made from them, and thus putting the local agriculturists out of work with superior, technological advantage.
Of course I could establish an local education programme to show them how to proper- and abundantly grow their own forage and improve soil-conditions... But where would the profit be if I gave them this autonomy? :P
You want canned baked beans, coconut-milk, berry-wine or pineapple fruit-pies? Come to my place... We are the only ones on this planet able to provide such a high standard of quality! 8)
(Rather a roleplaying approach, granted. But meals are quite valuable if you can spare the food...)
Depends on biome and colonist skills.
Sculptures are an okay method, fit for a mountain ice sheet colony.
A year-round growing zone lets you make FAR more money by selling devilstrand parkas. I like that method because devilstrand is very low maintenance and parkas have the highest price/stockpile density ratio (although storage is less of a problem now that we can have 1 wall tile surrounded by "roof build area" and no walls). Smokeleaf probably makes more, but selling devilstrand crafts earns enough that a typical trading ship runs out of silver.
Devilstrand has such a long time before payoff though. Even if you plant it pretty fast, we're talking ~ half of a year, and even that's only viable in year-round climates.
As building and cooking both level up very fast anyway furniture and food are underestimated as income sources too. Human leather armchairs are no joke, but armchairs aren't bad in general.
Yayo and apparel mostly. Coupla thrumbo horns and occasionally meals but I tend to hold on to them.
I sell everything that isn't nailed down.
Dead man's clothing and any weapon below "normal" is immediately sold. Then it's a combination of sculptures, smoke leaf, stone blocks and human leather products.
pemmican and smokeleaf joints are incredibly profitable and easy to mass produce for tribals (getting convenient, small, high priority stockpiles is absolutely key for efficiency).
Selling clothing/cloth (i sometimes play with a mending mod, but i always play with the ability to break down clothing into a small amount of resources, cuz it just makes sense)
Sometimes i try to set up a yayo/beer production line, but it feels inferior to smokeleaf for growing space/profit. I sell excess art, but also use it liberally all over my base.
Money... i have a problem with storing them, i have 150K+ silver. Just from trading, no deep drilling. Just selling useless junk, not making stuff for profit. I thought that i make some art out of silver, but i hit another problem. How and where do i sell a grand legendary silver sculpture? Its pretty impossible. Well, i can buy lots of gold and make gold art... Money is overrated, it is needed maybe in first year, maybe two. Afterwards you get tons of it, not even trying.
But yeah, smokeleaf (or other drugs in general, but watch out for chemical interest pawns, smokeleaf is pretty harmless), good quality devilstrand clothes, deep drilling chemfuel (or plasteel), art (basically any quality will do), scyther blades and other exotic stuff like thrumbo horn (its worth to hunt them down).
Quote from: Limdood on January 31, 2017, 12:37:40 PM
pemmican and smokeleaf joints are incredibly profitable and easy to mass produce for tribals (getting convenient, small, high priority stockpiles is absolutely key for efficiency).
Selling clothing/cloth (i sometimes play with a mending mod, but i always play with the ability to break down clothing into a small amount of resources, cuz it just makes sense)
Sometimes i try to set up a yayo/beer production line, but it feels inferior to smokeleaf for growing space/profit. I sell excess art, but also use it liberally all over my base.
I like how you can just spam dining room chairs and double beds with a builder --> get art. I have seen pawns walk up to the bed to view the art when leaving it outside a bedroom, pretty amusing.
I hear people use actual artist/sculptures but I don't have much experience with its profitability.
Any abundant resource, craft it, sell it.
Wood? Make dining chairs.
Textiles? Make clothes.
Components/steel? Make weapons.
Silver is not hard to come by once you know what you're doing.
I generally like to start by selling food, you need a good food supply anyway so I just cook tons of normal meals and sell the surplus.
When I can afford it I usually branch out so I have something to sell to all kinds of traders. This means making beer, drugs, food, parkas, sculptures and even furniture. I find this more efficient as amassing too much of a single product makes it impossible to sell it all.
The only things I don't tend to produce to sell is weapons and prosthetic as the materials tend to cost more than what you get from selling them. I also tend not to breed animals as the food they eat is usually worth more than you can get from selling them.
Quote from: mrm on January 31, 2017, 01:54:07 PM
Money... i have a problem with storing them, i have 150K+ silver. Just from trading, no deep drilling. Just selling useless junk, not making stuff for profit. I thought that i make some art out of silver, but i hit another problem. How and where do i sell a grand legendary silver sculpture? Its pretty impossible. Well, i can buy lots of gold and make gold art... Money is overrated, it is needed maybe in first year, maybe two. Afterwards you get tons of it, not even trying.
I wish I had this problem. I usually always play with expanded prosthetics and organ engineering, every time I got money I blow it instantly on bionics. To fully kit out a single colonist cost something like 150-200k silver... then they run off and die and you start all over again.
Flake, tonnes and tonnes of flake....fields of the stuff. I just plant a stooooooooopid amount and store in freezers, by the time i have the research done I have a silly amount of psychoid stored I setup a few drug labs and go to town, I probably pull 20k+ in my first few caravans.
Quote from: TheMeInTeam on January 31, 2017, 11:26:42 AM
Devilstrand has such a long time before payoff though. Even if you plant it pretty fast, we're talking ~ half of a year, and even that's only viable in year-round climates.Quote
Yes, mostly year-round, but there's only initial delay. Later, you're limited by the speed of your best tailors. You end up getting regular influx of devilstrand. I mean devilstrand apparel, not raw devilstrand.
Crafting high quality clothing and selling it.
Selling alcohol. Beer in vanilla, rum with mods. I would sell luficerium (I'm using a mod that lets me harvest the raw ingredients for it from mechanoids) but I'm having too much fun turning my less than ideal colonists into living weapons. :P
Smokeleaf joints. Just restrict every colonist to "No Drugs" and kill and pawns with "Chemical Fascination" and you're making 1000+ silver in no time.
Excess stuff and stuff made from byproducts - mostly beer, smokeleaf joints, and apparel. Also, useless stuff that drops from space. I tend not to have dedicated moneymaking scheme and not to bother with dead man's clothing.
Flake is actually more profitable than yayo btw, It only takes half the psychoid and is worth more than half the value of yayo, 2 flake is 28 value whereas 1 yayo is 23. Yayo also takes 400 ticks to make whereas flake takes 250, flake is superior.
Sculptures, booze, drugs and clothing, in that approximate order.
I usually start out by selling smokeleaf joints because they don't require any investment - all you need is soil and a crafting spot. I then advance to clothing and sculptures once I have most of my rooms set up. Furniture is also a good place to start because you can make them from any resource you have in excess.
I find beer is too much work (plant hops, make wort, wait for fermentation and make sure it doesn't spoil) compared to what it sells for. It's fine once you have a large, effective colony but at that point you probably don't need the minor income you can make from beer.
On study, art is pretty good. More importantly, since you have a high level builder in almost every non-nomad game you do, any time you can grow cloth you can put up some pretty high quality cloth armchairs which have reasonably strong value/material and value/work values. The major downside is that they are heavy, so unsuited for caravanning to other places by yourself.
Still, you very much need a grower and builder anyway, so this should be seen as a baseline and a great way to chew through extra cloth production if your tailor can't keep up.
i like making cloth, i ask my colonists to stop using cloth at is close to 50%, that way i can sell all the used cloth and make sure my colonists never get the warn out appeal debuff.
i also make art. but that more of a lesser income.. since it takes a long time and is less useful then getting good skills in tailor and smiting.
drugs are also useful but they tend to make people addicted.
but once the craters start getting 18+ in tailoring those parkas sell for a lot
This game has more of a problem of lack of interesting and useful money sinks, usually.
During the early game, the very 1-2 thousand silver might be a problem if you play on a more difficult scenario, since calling caravans costs 600 each time in addition to whatever you want to buy (usually some kind of medicines and of course components), but after that, your colony should be producing something in excess and have enough excess loot from the raids to make the merchants max money the real bottleneck.
Smokeleaf is a great moneymaker as it grows fairly quickly, costs nothing to produce, stacks well, sells for a decent amount per joint and can provide advantages (mood boosts) to a colony with a large stockpile of it.
When the climate permits, I also craft devilstrand clothes for my colonists. Devilstrand dusters aren't as efficent as parkas for selling, but they make great apparrel in reasonably temperate enviornments and have a good armor rating. My colonists replace them at 51% durability, and after that I sell the worn-out ones for a fair amount.
Other than that I mostly get by selling raider clothes and weapons. The problem is that there's nothing to really buy. Neurotamine is a decent money sink but it's not enough. With EPOE installed the situation is a bit better since I need a constant influx of steel, plasteel and gold, plus glitterworld medicine for all the surgery. Besides that I can craft anything I need while I try to figure out where to put my mountain of silver.
If in a year round growing biome, selling simple meals to exotic goods traders is incredibly lucrative since A16. I usually get around 19 silver per simple meal (Social skill 12-14 pawn).
Most exotic good traders show up with no more than 3k silver, so you unload around 150 meals (or more if you want any items off the trader, makes buying bionics very cheap) and clean them out, and before you know it, you have 10k silver and no longer need anything.
If you can grow a bunch of corn outside, this is the most efficient way to produce mass simple meals as I described above. I just set my builders to keep making simple meals until I have 900 so I always have enough for eating and selling. You will probably need a larger cooler to store this many meals, but it pays for itself in a single visit from a trader.
It's not the densest way to make money (You can only stack 10 meals, so about 200 silver per stack), but once you have everything set up, it requires no micro at all and is why it's my favorite way to make money. You can even make this work for tundra biomes, but it usually takes a full year to get enough base development to have enough hydroponics going to support this.
Chess tables and armchairs.
Neither of them require a crafter to produce, and they sell for a decent amount.
It depends on whether I can get a sizable farm going. In the past, I usually will just sell Beer. Now though, Smokeleaf seems to be a better choice.
If with mods, I used to make Sake since rice was very easy to produce quickly.
Art pieces also go for pretty good prices if you have a very good sculptor. An Excellent quality and above one will yield pretty good profits.
I sell rice grown in hydroponic bays. With sunlamps and good temperature you get a full harvest every 2 days, and they sell to requested bulk goods traders for about 1.3 silver per unit. Rice takes a long time to spoil, and doesn't need any processing. Since my colonies use nutrient dispensers, i sell whatever excess i happen to have stored.
I need cloth and medicine.
I grow some cotton and medicine.
I use it for what I need.
I don't think to remove or disable the growing zones, so my colonists keep growing more and more herbal medicine and cotton.
I then sell all my cloth and as much medicine as the traders will buy from me.
I order often two ore more caravans at same time, when they are hostile together. They fight on my market place. I can get their stuff, heal the wounded and become either new colonists or better standing to the factions. *g*
Quote from: Guilty Omelette on February 02, 2017, 12:16:57 PM
I sell rice grown in hydroponic bays. With sunlamps and good temperature you get a full harvest every 2 days, and they sell to requested bulk goods traders for about 1.3 silver per unit. Rice takes a long time to spoil, and doesn't need any processing. Since my colonies use nutrient dispensers, i sell whatever excess i happen to have stored.
If you turn 10 rice (you are selling for 13 silver) into a simple meal, you can increase your profit by 46%, selling simple meals for 19 or 20 silver to exotic good traders. If you set up a critical priority stockpile for rice surrounding your cooking station, on top of stools, a cook can absolutely CRANK out meals in no time at all since he doesn't have to move to do cooking.
I grow and sell marijuana.
I tend to sell a lot of leather armchairs. I've always got a lot of excess leather as a byproduct of meat consumption and at least one person who is great at building stuff, so it's a great early-ish boost. Once my colony is relatively advanced, money becomes a non-issue anyway... just selling looted goods and failed crafting projects (in the quest for legendary gear) becomes more than enough.
Any tips for ice sheet ? I sell sculptures but it's only a so-so profit. Setting up a second hydroponic room only to make faster profit would require over twice the power (I grow mostly in gravel), twice the battery management (solar is 50% effective in summer) and the cost of hydroponic tables, ughhhh. Currently there are only 4 tables in my greenhouse so I'm not terrified of mortars.
Quote from: PotatoeTater on January 31, 2017, 09:11:55 AM
I make yayo and beer. I enjoy being a drug cartel and with the mods I have on it fits right into our cult.
What mods are you using? They sound fun.
Quote from: b0rsuk on February 05, 2017, 11:53:24 AM
Any tips for ice sheet ?
The only colony I've ever gotten rich with on ice sheet was psychopaths only. Human leather armchairs and yayo/go-juice from hydroponic psychoid was how I made money... aside from just the usual raid loot and spare gear from trying to craft legendaries.
Every other ice sheet colony I've made just struggled up the tech tree in poverty eating gravel-grown potatoes and trying to build a ship by trading raid loot for building materials.
Selling slave. Specially sex slave. The younger they're the more price to get.
The annoying part of ice sheet money making is that only exotic traders buy sculptures. Parkas, for example, are bought by combat suppliers, bulk good traders and exotic traders I'm pretty sure. My current colony in 5501 had 3 pirate merchants (2 ships) and a weapon supplier. So I'm sitting on money but I don't know how much money.