Why are products so worthless and materials so valuable?

[Syrchalis]

What I mean is, selling raw resources is much more profitable (and easy) than selling products. This is one of my main issues with Rimworld. I always feel like a miner digging plasteel for the traders, because that's hands down the easiest way to get silver, aside from growing crops maybe. I also sell a lot of steel and chemfuel.

Wouldn't it make sense that finished weapons, clothing and meals, especially PSM's are worth a lot more than their components? Especially so at higher quality levels. This makes high level crafters and constructors (for furniture) more valuable.

I mean sure, converting wood to dressers or beds and getting a 100% profit out of it wouldn't be balanced, but that's because it takes barely a second to construct those. A marble billiard table is a whole different story. Weapons and clothing already take really long.

The whole feeling of being a clothing/weapons manufacturer is not really achievable in Rimworld (without modding for it) simply because sell prices of the products are so low.

But there is also the opposite problem, because buffing selling prices of products will inevitably imbalance the game. The raw materials need to be worth less. Maybe switch the penalty that weapons get from them to the materials instead?

So far the only thing that's worth actually "producing" is chemfuel and drugs, the former being a semi-raw resource anyway (deep drilling). Oh and high quality art. But I don't want to sell art and drugs every game... .

[Dashthechinchilla]

I try to keep my wealth as low as possible, so I don't have a lot of experience. It is my understanding that it is part of the balance system. This way you don't buy resources from a trader and sell the refined products for a profit resulting in a permanent spiral.

[Syrchalis]

I try to keep my wealth as low as possible, so I don't have a lot of experience. It is my understanding that it is part of the balance system. This way you don't buy resources from a trader and sell the refined products for a profit resulting in a permanent spiral.

Yes but wouldn't that be fine? There is work involved and if you have no good crafters you won't make much of a profit and it will take forever.

[jchavezriva]

I totally agree with you there, but i doubt Tynan did this without much thought. Look in the search bar at top right about topics regarding this issue. He definitely has an explanation for this.

[Canute]

I don't see any problems here.
Like you point out "no good crafter", do you get much money when you are learning a job ? :-)
But at the other side, you are geting more then enough silver when you try to sell your masterwork human leather duster.

Until your crafter is good enough for that, you maybe should craft things like smokeleaf joints which don't a high crafting skill to made profit.

Even with meal's you can improve your profit, let your main cook doing the fine meals for the colony, while some other made simple meal's for sale.

[Toast]

The main reason is that raids drop clothing and weapons extremely frequently. In previous alphas you could be swimming in money in a couple seasons just from selling the castoffs of the dopes who came to raid you and there was never any reason to produce anything because of it. That's why we now have the irritating "Dead Man's apparel" marker and the low sell price of weapons and clothing. It's not my preferred solution to the problem but that is why it's like that.

Also, raw materials (mainly crops) used to be even more profitable, but were nerfed. You used to be able to get rich just by growing berries and raw hops for export, so there was little point to the extra work and risk of cooking or brewing. That's now like half as effective. The devs have done a lot of work on balancing the economy. I don't like all their choices--and I hope they aren't finished--but making money is supposed to be a struggle and their choices are in service of that goal.

[Syrchalis]

I think making money should be a struggle, but right now it feels relatively easy and furthermore, a bit one-dimensional. Because essentially you produce resources, partially out of thin air (looking at you trees and crops) and sell those.

It would be way more fun if all or most finished products are worth producing. I don't see why there couldn't be mechanics implemented to prevent raids giving so much money. E.g. they could only have a chance to drop their weapons, their weapons could be badly damaged when they die, or their weapons are always of relatively low quality (that's mostly the case already) and the price rises steeply at superior and above.

It's not like there isn't a way, but the current way (albeit better than early alphas) is kinda saying: Produce stuff you don't want anyway (drugs, art etc.) and sell it, and all the "good stuff" like clothes and weapons where you would have to make a hard choice whether to sell them for a lot of silver or keep them and use them ... well you just keep them because they don't sell for anything.

[Toast]

It would be way more fun if all or most finished products are worth producing. I don't see why there couldn't be mechanics implemented to prevent raids giving so much money. E.g. they could only have a chance to drop their weapons, their weapons could be badly damaged when they die, or their weapons are always of relatively low quality (that's mostly the case already) and the price rises steeply at superior and above.

I agree, and this would have been my preferred way of dealing with the problem.

It's not like there isn't a way, but the current way (albeit better than early alphas) is kinda saying: Produce stuff you don't want anyway (drugs, art etc.) and sell it, and all the "good stuff" like clothes and weapons where you would have to make a hard choice whether to sell them for a lot of silver or keep them and use them ... well you just keep them because they don't sell for anything.

Art and drugs have both gone through multiple revisions. Drugs were a late addition and still haven't quite been balanced yet. This is why we have silly kludges like rolling joints not producing any crafting XP, and cows wanting and knowing how to drink bottled beer. They are clumsy efforts to make drug manufacture less overpowered. Tynan also found that no one was using art because flowers and good furniture were more efficient at improving room score. So those items had their Beauty nerfed and the sell value of sculpture became relatively buffed by nerfing many other things like furniture in an effort to make the Art skill not completely useless. Again not the way I'd prefer to solve the problem but there you go.

[Dashthechinchilla]

You can train a crafter with a passion to a pretty high level in one year. I hear what you are saying about how making money is too easy in the game because of selling raw resources, but if the final product was more valuable it would be even easier. My tailor gets and keeps a high crafting skill keeping the colony clothed, and it isn't a full time job.

[Syrchalis]

You can train a crafter with a passion to a pretty high level in one year. I hear what you are saying about how making money is too easy in the game because of selling raw resources, but if the final product was more valuable it would be even easier. My tailor gets and keeps a high crafting skill keeping the colony clothed, and it isn't a full time job.

That depends on the numbers entirely. But at the moment selling products is not a viable alternative. I don't want raw resources to be worthless either, I want both to be viable. Right now the balance is quite bad for products, because you need high skill, luck, traders you can sell it to (because not all buy weapons for example) and WORK. The time investment really kills it ontop of the bad value.

[Shurp]

I've edited my version of Rimworld to make clothing a viable trade asset.  All you need to do is create a mod and put the text below in an xml file in the Patches subdirectory.

Note that it's still probably more efficient to just sell the cloth directly, but at least you're no longer losing money when you make clothes, and if your tailor is really good you might actually make it worth while.

XML text:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<Patch>
   <!-- change profitability of making clothing -->
   <Operation Class="PatchOperationSequence">
      <success>Always</success>
      <operations>
      <li Class="PatchOperationReplace">
         <xpath>/Defs/ThingDef[@Name = "ApparelBase"]/statBases/SellPriceFactor</xpath>
         <value>
            <SellPriceFactor>1.0</SellPriceFactor>
         </value>
      </li>
      </operations>
   </Operation>
</Patch>

[ioci]

Because the in-game economy system is not a real economy system.
It has no "demand", but only a relatively fixed sell price and traders' money cap to limit the system from been abused.
Being able to sell 600 units of meat to a village is already an abuse, as the tribe people probably don't have industrial tech to reserve properly such amount of food and besides, they can hunt themselves unless its winter.
The current sell price is kind of Ok, as their are no better solution without "mass" coding. Otherwise you might end up even easier getting a piece(or even full set) of power armor in the second year in-game.

Ideally an average quality of a finished product should already worth much more than its material, while any Dumping Behavior should also be punished. But both of these features must be brought to the game at same time.

On the other hand, you don't pay your artist or artisan any silver for their job, but only food and shelter. It is also kind of immersive if you are willing to consider the extra silver you should have gained from trading was been instantly payed to your pawns as their cut.

[Syrchalis]

Because the in-game economy system is not a real economy system.

Ideally an average quality of a finished product should already worth much more than its material, while any Dumping Behavior should also be punished. But both of these features must be brought to the game at same time.

A more realistic system with demand and supply would mostly affect the resource trading that is so profitable right now, not help out the production side directly. What I mean is - the game doesn't need a "dumping protection" for resources to make finished products more worthwhile. Right now you're losing money AND time/work making clothes, armor and weapons (also furniture) - and that shouldn't be the case in the first place.

[ioci]

Because the in-game economy system is not a real economy system.

Ideally an average quality of a finished product should already worth much more than its material, while any Dumping Behavior should also be punished. But both of these features must be brought to the game at same time.

A more realistic system with demand and supply would mostly affect the resource trading that is so profitable right now, not help out the production side directly. What I mean is - the game doesn't need a "dumping protection" for resources to make finished products more worthwhile. Right now you're losing money AND time/work making clothes, armor and weapons (also furniture) - and that shouldn't be the case in the first place.

The Dumping Protection I would like to refer was not what those mass population societies do in real global trading that relates to both unemployment crisis and economy dependency crisis, but more about the demand of every small settlements in a game. My bad, I shouldn't use that word, it's not correct at all.
Let me try again to explain better in where I failed:
Repeatedly selling same type of product will lower the merchants' buying price for it.

Right now you're losing money AND time/work making clothes, armor and weapons (also furniture) - and that shouldn't be the case in the first place.

I don't think so, the Superior or Excellent stuffs already are selling at a nice price. And legendary stuffs are really profitable. And most importantly, a highly skilled craftman/artist is easy to access, just survive one winter, and I usually get a pawn who master one of these.
The silver are not lost as your dedicated pawnpower needs only foods and they probably can help to defend the colony when needed.
The time, on the other hand, is indeed lost, but instead, the pawn earn exp to higher its skill and the apprenticeship take times. You just need to keep this pawn alive and be patient. Silver will rained.
So, I think this vanilla setting is not that bad, please, give it a chance.

[fritzgryphon]

Dumping protection is an interesting idea.  Regardless of the pricing system, the player will always be able to identify some good that pulls in big profit with little effort.  Also, in the late game it's so lucrative to just dump stuff you don't use.

Dumping protection could be something as simple as the price for a good decreasing proportionally to the total value sold (or bought).  Like:

item_price = item_price * (1-(value_sold / 10000 * demand_elasticity_coef))

So if you sell $20,000 of plasteel, the plasteel price goes down by 20%.  Do this enough, and it becomes more lucrative to make weapons out of it.  Prices would recover (very) gradually over time.  This could be tune-able per item with a demand elasticity attribute.  For example, shirts or sculptures could have a high price but mostly fixed demand, so the prices would fall off quickly if oversaturated.  The player would be incentivized, or even required, to diversify their  resource extraction or make finished goods.

After all, what are these tribes even doing with the million rice you sold them?