How do you get rich?

[Syrchalis]

Hey everyone,
for me a big part of playing Rimworld is to get rich (not necessarily in silver). At least I make that a side-goal every time I play and it comes with lots of benefits. I usually do not just go one route to get rich, however I've found several methods that work better than others. I'm interested in hearing what you guys do to get tradeable items or silver.

I have lots of wool producing animals, I make some drugs (unfortunately that always seems so tedious and barely profitable... maybe I'm doing it wrong) and I sell everything from raids that I don't need. Sometimes I make sculptures or cloth dusters too. What ends up breaking the economy for me though is just one simple thing: Plasteel. The moment I get deep drills I just swim in stacks of plasteel and that stuff sells for more than Devilstrand (12 to 14). Yes I have a lot of mods but until recently I had none that made getting plasteel easier. Now I have minimize everything and I can reposition my deep drills, making it even easier to get it. Though the 1 component and 25 steel I lost per drill wasn't a huge deal to begin with.

Is there a better way to get rich? Because for me honestly nothing compares to selling plasteel. It is just that broken. Once I have 5-7k of it every trader basically gets robbed of every good item they have and all their silver, and all they get for it is 300-700 plasteel.

I ask because I want to try something different. If plasteel is THE answer I will probably just edit the def and make it worth a lot less.

[Canute]

Since you use allready mod's, try out Prisone Ransom.
Capture and patch up the raiders. Once they are full healed ask their faction for a ransom.

[sick puppy]

i heard chemfuel is als easy money
but to me, nothing compares to early game smokeleaf (without chemically interested or fascinated pawns)
with chemfuel you have still lots of limits, but with smokeleaf you can produce as much as you want, you can keep them for a long ass time, they dont take up much space, are easy to craft and if you run out of time before they turn you can freeze them and continue in your freezer
more traders accept joints than plasteel i believe, so that's another upside.
if you do have druggies and you not only want to produce money but in the long run also something that is worth something, go for sculptures. i always make the middle ones, but once i have a double flame artist i just put him to sculpt all day long until he is a god and then change to large statues with expensive materials. also, i start with making wooden statues. no need to risk shit. if you are low on wood because you are in the middle of a barren wasteland, go for rocks, maybe steel.

by the way, the easiest thing you can do to stop robbing traders is playing on a higher difficulty, as it also changes the exchange rate. i assume on the lowest difficulty you can even rob them with a few recently hunted and butchered animals or raw smokeleaf

ps: if you change the difficulty, not only will you have a harder time trading, but due to your high emphasis on wealth you will very soon face very strong waves of enemies. trust me on this one: dont invest in gold but in guns

[Vlad0mi3r]

Plasteel is limited in its availability once you run out, you run out. unless you are prepared to go and settle other map tiles but that would be a different story all together.

If I'm playing vanilla I will go with drug production. Usually Joints as you can fit 3 crafting spots into the same area as one drug lab.

Modded games defiantly Joints as I use the Smokeleaf Industry mod which adds more than just Joints to the game.

[Syrchalis]

by the way, the easiest thing you can do to stop robbing traders is playing on a higher difficulty, as it also changes the exchange rate. i assume on the lowest difficulty you can even rob them with a few recently hunted and butchered animals or raw smokeleaf

Well I tend to play on Intense, or at least Rough if I am just getting started with Rimworld again after a break. Crashed ships are really annoying, but otherwise I rob traders on Intense all the same. Sure I need 500 instead of 400 Plasteel, but it still works well.

Also I never ran out of Plasteel before, not even remotely. There is just so much underground, so it doesn't even matter if you're in a mountain map or a flat one.

I'm a bit surprised you guys are actually going with drugs. For me at always felt so tedious to produce them and they don't really sell all that well. However, I don't really have large fields usually. My fields are mostly full of devilstrand because I like making clothes out of them for my colonists (and with my mod also hyperweave).

Does anyone know if yayo or even the other drugs (wakeup and gojuice) work better, maybe in certain situations? Do you guys use hydroponics?

[Albion]

Plasteel is awesome but a finite resource, so I tend to hoard it like a dragon instead of gold. Turn it into power armour and charge rifles.

Anyway, the best way to make money? Sculptures, drugs and devilstrand.

If you have a good wood supply you can crank out a ton of wooden sculptures quickly with decent artists and two tool cabinets for the workspeed bonus. Especially if they are hooked on luciferium and/or wake-up. Bonus points: keep the best quality statues and brighten up your rooms, better mood increases work speed even more.
If you have good artists and a good negotiator you can even make silver statues and sell them for... Well... Even more silver. In this case you are independent from the wood source and can do this in a desert or on an ice sheet too.

Drugs: my personal favourite is psychoid, specifically yayo. It's easily the best weight to value ratio in the whole game as well as value per stack (except for luciferium). You need some work planting and harvesting and need to designate space to grow the stuff but you will harvest a ton of it. Make the critical psychoid leaves stockpile right at the work spot of the drug lab and put the bill on "drop on floor" and your crafter will turn those leaves into gold in no time. Bonus points: make a animal area that doesn't include your drug stockpile except if you want some drugged dogs.
Also: flake has a better leaves to money ratio but takes more work to make. I still prefer yayo so my crafter can do other things.
Smokeleaves work similar but somehow I prefer psychoid. Never actually calculated the difference in work to money though.
Beer is another great commodity. However it requires a lot of storage space, quite a bit of work and if the temperature is wrong all your work is spoiled in the barrel. I learned to hate solar flares...

Last but not least: devilstrand. If you are in a biome with lots of growing space and a decently long season (>40 days) this is the shit. Just designate a large growing area somewhere on the edge or even all around your colony. Plant the devilstrand early after winter and you're basically done until until late autumn. It grows on its own so you don't have to worry about it at all until it comes the time of the harvest. Remember that there will be a harvest even if the plants are just like 75% grown. This is important if you have a short growing period or an early cold snap. Just harvest it all before the cold kills it.
You'll end up with a ton of devilstrand you can turn into protective clothes (combined with an armour vest even more protective than low quality power armour) and/or sell it raw or as dusters to the next trader.

[sick puppy]

well the great upside of smokeleaf in comparison to drugs is that you dont need to research it first. it is easier to sow and to craft and also the workspots take up less space. it is perfect for tribal starts when you have lots of hands but little skill or resources.
as soon as i made it through that initial part, i go for flake. sure, it takes a but longer to make and takes up a bit more space but in the end what matters the most is the margin. and that's definitely higher with flake. also, you work more and walk less when making flake in comparison fo yayo. sure, the piles of psychoid leaves can be put right next to the table and a janitor can take it there, but what if two drug labs worm back to back on the flake/yayo? then the yayo producers use up the psychoid leaves way faster because they use more and in less time, which means the janitor has to go get more leaves. and if you dont have a janitor, which is even worse, then even the crafter hinself has to stand up.

the only upside in producing yayo in comparison to flake if you do it only to sell it is if you have a chemically interested or fascinated pawn, he wont get addicted to it so quickly and if he manages to snag one, you still have time to hide away the rest and also yayo has bigger upsides than flake, once the druggie is high anyway, eventhough you tried your hardest

[Jackalvin]

Organs. That and "mystery meat" simple meals.

[sick puppy]

Organs. That and "mystery meat" simple meals.

damn. indeed. organs. always forget this one. i dont usually butcher corpses though, that is dog/warg feed, unless i am swimming in psychos and cannibals like in my first game.

[coldcell]

damn. indeed. organs. always forget this one. i dont usually butcher corpses though, that is dog/warg feed, unless i am swimming in psychos and cannibals like in my first game.

I recently go a Warg and thinking of making a separate freezer just for human corpses, and make sure my Warg eats there. Problem is how do I prevent the debuff from having my haulers see all those corpses? Let's say I have 5 corpses and my haulers are bringing the 6th, 7th, etc. Once they get into the freezer, the debuff multiplies and it stays there for a long time.

[sick puppy]

damn. indeed. organs. always forget this one. i dont usually butcher corpses though, that is dog/warg feed, unless i am swimming in psychos and cannibals like in my first game.

I recently go a Warg and thinking of making a separate freezer just for human corpses, and make sure my Warg eats there. Problem is how do I prevent the debuff from having my haulers see all those corpses? Let's say I have 5 corpses and my haulers are bringing the 6th, 7th, etc. Once they get into the freezer, the debuff multiplies and it stays there for a long time.

easy. make your wargs (or any other pets) the haulers instead of humans.
or if you are late game already and have full time janitors, forbid the corpse fridge for all humans but not for your pets.
another idea is to just let the corpses sit around by forbidding them but this only works when you dont have too many raiders and many wargs, otherwise the corpses wont be eaten in time and they rot and many pawns see them anyway

[Taramafor]

Grow a LOT of food. It's cheap but make enough and you're in the silver.

Chemfuel also sells. Might need to set up growing zones in a desert for this. I managed it.

Cotton also sells for a lot. I had a small farm set up for that and about 3000 got me over 1K silver at least. Healing plants are also a good idea. Not only can you sell the medicine, you can make your own good medkits without having to buy them.

mineral range for finding those deposits on the world map. Head there, farm the giant lump, maybe get some steel and components while at it. Gold and jade will get you in the silver. Plasteel will get you good gear too.

Best part about these is that they carry minimal risk for high reward.

[CucumberedPickle]

Meh. Don't really try and bother getting rich. The more your colony wealth is, the more raiders come and you won't get "[bla bla bla] expectations". Then again, who am I to judge your play style?

[Taramafor]

Meh. Don't really try and bother getting rich. The more your colony wealth is, the more raiders come and you won't get "[bla bla bla] expectations". Then again, who am I to judge your play style?

Why do you think I buy the supplies I need ASAP as soon as I get the silver?

[Syrchalis]

Meh. Don't really try and bother getting rich. The more your colony wealth is, the more raiders come and you won't get "[bla bla bla] expectations". Then again, who am I to judge your play style?

Why do you think I buy the supplies I need ASAP as soon as I get the silver?

I'm pretty sure that doesn't matter, because the game takes the market value of the items and adds it to your actual silver. You only lose the mark-up price of traders on higher difficulties.

My current colony has 100k silver but my wealth in the history is over 3 million, because I have 35k plasteel, 110k steel, 80k chemfuel, 20k mixed food - and more importantly I have lots of expensive legendary statues, weapons, hyperweave clothing for all 14 colonists and other expensive stuff.