So it seems like every day I see new players who want to get into AFK processing for money and immediately jump to trying to level up trading to make crates thinking that what they need to do and despite no real appreciation for how trading actually works.
This post is just to inform people that they don’t actually need master 2 trading to start making money off their materials, and in fact if you are doing trading inefficiently you will make less money per hour than someone who just sells processed materials (value pack required).
The basics
To see why this is the case you have to know how the math works. As you probably know the higher your processing level the more materials you get per success (until you hit the cap). On average once you hit professional 5 it will take you 2 ore to make 1 melted shard, and 4 melted shards (two of each type) to make 1 ingot (you also get ingots while making melted shard). The same math is true for timber once you reach artisan, however the plywood from the random t1 procs is useful and the math works out to 7.8 timber per plywood. With a +4 processing outfit and a sharp alchemy stone + cous cous I can make ~1600 planks per hour. However the average player should expect to make a bit less.
What to make
In order to make money you want to make things that people actually need. In general the main customer for processed materials are upgraders of alchemy stones (who use ingots to upgrade destruction stones), and very high level traders who buy materials and make them into crates (By high level I generally mean master 10+ where you can make a profit thanks to the scaling of the bargain bonus).
To target these customers you want to focus on materials they actually need, which in the case for traders is steel, brass, and bronze ingots as well as ash, maple, pine, fir, cedar, white cedar, and acacia plywood.
How to sell materials
Often you will see these materials sitting in very high quantities on the market, this is generally because traders will only pay a certain price for the materials otherwise they will just end up losing money. Exactly what price each trader will pay depends on their trade level and how much effort they want to spend finding high % trade NPCS in valencia. In the future the trade %s will be fixed at 100 so you can expect traders will likely only be willing to spend roughly the market minimum. The market minimums are the following:
Minerals:
Plywoods:
Before making any of the above materials I encourage you to check your local market and see if there are processed materials at these prices. If there are not know that you should be able to move your product quite easily.
just to clarify since there seems to be some confusion. You don’t actually need to sell your materials at these prices, but it’s useful to know them so you can check the market and see if materials are moving. In other words if you look at the market and see 50,000 steel at 6297 you might want to consider making something else instead. However if you look at the market and see 50,000 steel at 7K each you know that you can still make and sell steel you just need to sell it for less than 7k
Making these materials you should be able to bring in 1-1.5M for materials purchased off the market place and more if you are using materials gathered by your workers (because you can ignore the market place tax).
It works
Just to give you some additional proof in case the math doesn’t convince you here is a picture of my fiancee’s warehouse. She is a master 20 processor and actively plays the game less than 1 hour per day (her highest character is 56). Almost all her money is purely from processing materials and min listing them on the marketplace.
Conclusion
So in conclusion as long as you have the value pack you should be able to make 1-2M per hour processing materials even if you don’t have master 2 trading. Every player in the game should be using their AFK time to do something productive and processing is one of the best forms of AFK income as long as you can manage to check on your computer every 2-3 hours. Finally I’m happy to answer any questions and clear up any confusion, just ask.