ArcheAge Making Gold Guide

ArcheAge Making Gold Guide by MisterBlack8

TL/DR: It’s a pvp-free gold making guide.

There’s a lot of ways to play this game. You can go slaughter monsters, players (maybe both at onceif they’re jerks), go wild crafting, siege castles, and do all sorts of stuff.

Me, I like to just make a buck. It’s good to know that I can have whatever I want if I’ve got the gold, and all I need for that is to know how to get the gold.

Fortunately, it’s pretty simple. Nothing that doesn’t work in every other MMO…

Note: This is an F2P game, but you’re just not going to make it far in this game without Patron status. This guide assumes you have it. Fortunately, after this guide, I can’t imagine needing to pay for it more than once.

YOUR DAY’S PAY

You get 10 labor every 5 minutes. That’s 2880 per day. It’s free. After that, you’ll have to pay for it. But, remember that your first 2880 is on the house. So, if you don’t play that often, you shouldn’t fret too much about maximizing your gold/per labor point spent. Because, you can’t even pay for it if you tried, it just comes.

On the other hand, if you spend more than 2880 labor/day, (and you probably do), you’ll need to pay for it. So, get used to checking the AH for the “price of labor”. The rate for one Worker’s Comp / 1000 = your price. It seems to be around 5s per point these days, a far cry from the 1.3s it was back at launch (those were the days).

In other words, if you use enough labor to need labor pots, keep the price in mind.

SEND + MORE = MONEY

If you want to be serious, you need to break out the spreadsheet and calculator. Openoffice works for me, but you can use what you want. If you’re savvy enough, you can program the cells, so you can just enter the price for you materials, the price you’ll get when you sell, and it’ll spit out the profit/labor point set. If it comes out above the going rate, get on with it!

WE GOT A LITTLE CONVOY, ROCKIN’ THROUGH THE NIGHT

The simplest, most straightforward way to make some gold is running trade packs. Go make some, mount up, drive it somewhere, and sell it.

Pros:

• Risk-free: It’s impossible to lose money if you drive far enough. You can lose after labor if you do short runs though.
• Idiotproof: You’ll never need to study the AH prices. Just buy the packs made from cheap stuff, buy certs, and you’re off.
• Low barrier to entry: It’s only a few gold to scramble together mats for a pack. Everyone can afford it.

Cons:

• Time-consuming: It’s not the 22 hours you need to wait to get paid, those 22 hours will pass regardless of what you do. But driving the damn car or donkey…I hope you’ve got something to do in the meantime…and that’s not distracting enough to make you crash. Fuel makes it faster…but that costs money…
• Volume: The donkey’s easy to get, but you’ll never make much money on that alone. You can get bigger trucks…except those are expensive.
• Fluctuations: More popular routes can screw your planning up and cut into your action. It’s no fun if you aren’t getting the full 130%.

THE HUBCAPS AND CAR STEREO BUSINESS

EVE players call it “processing”, I call it “chopping”, but the premise is simple: take unrefined materials, use your labor to process them, and sell the results. From turning fish into DLLE, Quinoa into grain, or flowers into…umm, dried flowers.

Be advised that many items have different conversion rates of labor into the finished product. 10 Barley make 12 Ground Grains, but 10 Quinoa or Beans make 64 Ground Grain. They all take the same amount of labor, meaning that you’ll get a much better return on your labor with the Beans than you will with the Barley..

As for knowing which commodity chops into which, well. remember that spreadsheet I recommended? Yeah, start typing. You’ll need to calculate the labor cost per unit (for quinoa, it’s .156 labor per grain, and at 5s per labor, that’s 78 copper of labor cost you’ll need to make per final unit). Also, don’t forget the 50c cost of a Blue Salt Knife. You can spend the time on a wiki site, but here’s a few tips:

• Ground Grain: Quinoa, Bean
• Ground Spices: Saffron, Poppy
• Medicinal Powder: Cultivated Ginseng, Clubhead Fungus
• Dried Flowers: Jinn’s Tongue
• Chopped Produce: Chili Pepper
• Trimmed Meat: Beef

Pros:

• Convenient: Since you can access the AH from anywhere, you can always look for stuff to buy, process, and sell. The time spent is minimal.
• Cheap: Naturally, almost all of the stuff you’ll buy is small-ticket, a few silvers a piece at most.
• Inevitable: This stuff will sell. People will always be buying the minor crafting mats to turn the wheels of their industries, such as crafting trade packs for gilda star or resource runs.

Cons:

• Volatile: If someone decides to list a lot of stuff at a lower price than yours, yours won’t sell until his does. Fortunately, there’s a way around that…see later in the guide.
• Turnaround: It does take time to finally sell off your stuff, especially since you’ll be buying and selling in bulk. If you’re short on cash, it could be a while to turn your stacks of crafting mats into gold.
• Limited: Sure, you’re moving 10k each of spices and grain per day. But, you’re making coppers on each. It’s still not that much.

ROBBING THE LAZY

The downside of working for a living is just that…you have to work for it. What’s the fun in that? Instead, you just might get lucky, and make a big score. All you need to do is find something that was left behind.

Specifically, this is “scavenging” on the auction house, you just look for items that have low minimum bids. Search the AH for auctions that are ending soon, and see if there’s a chance. You just might land a really nice item for dirt cheap.

Pros:

• Low Risk: Either you get an item at a great deal, or you are outbid and get your money back.
• Convenient: Just press P, check it, and see if there’s anything coming up soon. You may want to mark your clock for an item that’s ending in a few minutes, because you’ll have to compete for it.

Cons:

• Competition: You’re not the only one doing this, so be prepared for some eBay-like auction ninja-ing.
• Turnaround: If you snag a nice item like a housing plan or something, it make take a while to find a buyer for it.

GOOD, HONEST, AND FAIR PRICE GOUGING

The fact is that most MMO players might not be lazy, but they sure don’t like losing time. If they go to the AH to buy something, they want it now, not later. This means that if you can keep the prices high, and keep the best offer as yours, eventually your stuff will sell at a profit.

This is the method you’ll need to use alongside your chopping, as you’ll benefit from a high price of whatever it is that you’re ending up with to sell.

There’s a little more to this than a simple pros and cons list. Specifically, you’ll need to pay a lot of attention to the AH, and make sure that you’ve got the best offer at all times. If someone lists for you at a lower price, you have to do something about it:

1. If it’s small, you can ignore it. Someone undercutting your price by a lot is no big deal if you’re offering thousands of Ground Spices and the undercut listing is twelve.
2. If it’s big and a big cut (much lower price), buy it. You’ll then have the best offer again, and you’ll make a profit on what you just bought if you can keep that price up. Remember the 5% AH cut, meaning that you can’t buy it without taking a loss if it’s a smaller price cut than that.
3. If it’s big and it’s a small cut, relist it. Don’t put your whole stock up at once, keep some in reserve so you can undercut again if someone tries to chisel you for a copper. If you’re selling at 2s and someone puts up a large block at 1.99, be ready to screw him right back at 1.98. If this price is high enough above what you paid for your stuff (and it should be), you can afford the losing deposits from ending your auctions early.

Pros:

• Own the market: The longer you can get and enforce a high price, the more you’ll make as you’ll be making money off every unit that the AH cluster sells of that particular good.
• Low Labor: It’s 1 labor to collect an AH sale. That’s it.

Cons:

• Subject to demand: You still have to sell the stuff. When you eventually sleep, the market’s price will have recovered from you sabotaging it, meaning that you can be in for a loss if you’ve still got a lot of goods left unsold when you do.
• Requires attention: You’ll be pressing “P” a lot, as you’ll have to keep an eye on the market for your good, and to make sure you’re in the lead at all times.
• Requires knowledge: You’ll need to get a good idea of what’s in demand, and what a good price for it is. You may want to make friends with the big guilds, figure out what they use for their large pack runs, and see about controlling the materials for them. If they’re not making packs for you and your guild, you might as well make a buck off them.
• Requires bankroll: You can’t do this if you’re poor. You’ll need enough cash to buy a big block of goods if someone undercuts you enough, and if you run out of cash to enforce your high price, you’ll be stuck with an empty wallet and a bag full of goods that you can’t make profit on.

Well, there you go. There’s a lot more to it to this, but you’re now well on your way to having enough money to be that guy in your guild who can just go and buy things people need when they ask them. Who doesn’t like having the rich aunt or uncle around?