Im really beginning to enjoy crafting but at my level it is horrendously expensive and wasteful, I am for now residing myself to the EP1 on quantity afk grind, letting my crafting skills build while I get on with work elsewhere around the home.
Looking forward I would like to begin to understand how the more experienced crafters in the game think so as to avoid pitfalls beginner crafters make.
When you pick an item to craft, how are you calculating the needed success rate to be sustainable?
How important a BP Quality and Crafting skills in relation to that success rate?
Before getting into a niche how can you tell if it would be worthwhile, like what markers do you look for before you pick items to craft?
What do you look to avoid?
Then as a crafter when you get the ‘formula’ correct how profitable can it actually be?
And any general advice to beginner crafters in terms of DO’s & DON’Ts?
(Im not asking you to expose your edge or markets you are involved in, merely your thought process in what to craft and why)
Your asking for people to give away money making secrets that some have taken years to do.
Wont happen as despite what 1 person who always complains about crafting (name begins with A) crafters even now make a good profit . A wise player called Messi once said 200 years ago sweating when you first start is good as you can spend a lot of time reading learning (and you get beheueeu evade when sweating).
It was said in another thread you could go big ship and repair. Did you ask them?. THat is cheap and easy way to get up crafting skills (cheap but takes a lot of time). Maybe other MS ship owners could have you as repairer all MS owners especially 1 are coool. GL though
No what i mean is ‘real’ crafting skillys engy + others which you can get from MS repairing which OP was directed to in another thread.
Which he has NOT done :). Is no harm in asking a MS owner can i repair on your ship (s). All they can do is say no. As at least 2 stream i highly doubt they would refuse.
In that other thread it was also suggested to do the Monria Daily using a low level BP such as EP1 for cheap crafting skills (which might be what OP is doing…but doesn’t really say).
IMO mothership repair skilling is a waste of time to get your crafting skills up.
Sure it does give you Engineering skills which allow you to unlock BP comphrehension, but thats about it (other than small intelligence attribute gain which is minimal help).
Doing the Monria daily gives you 0.75 pec of engineering for completing 500 success, which can be done for around 30ped with a return of somewhere between 25-35 ped (maybe more if you hit an (L) BP.
It will get you to BP Comphension cheaper than what repair skilling will do as you get no return on repairing other than skills.
Crafting EP1 or other low level BP’s also provide you with the other skills related to the associated crafting category.
Before the Monria daily, repair skilling was the way to go, but everyone suggesting it nowadays is using outdated info and have been teaching new crafters wrong.
I was taught to go repair skilling when i started and I wish my mentor at the time had never suggested it as the way to start crafting.
In saying all this, new players should not get into crafting. Go hunt, go mine, learn about those things first, then attempt crafting.
Crafting is expensive, and can go sideways extremely quickly if you don’t know what you are doing. By hunting and mining, you will learn what people use and what you should be crafting, and the small areas where there are not many people capitalising on and you could take advantage.
I would like to say something about this statement. I don’t think this is true in all cases, repair skilling still has it’s place imho.
Years ago I was trying to level up my Armor Engineer profession so that I could make Zombie (L) armor, which I believe has a 17.5 requirement. It seemed like I was never going to get there. The majority of armors and plates I could craft (I think I was level 14 at the time), were mostly useless and impossible to sell, especially since the changes that were made to armor with Loot 2.0.
Someone told me about repair skilling, I went and tried it and saw that my Armor Engineer skill was going up and the cost actually wasn’t too bad. In the end I only did it for maybe a week and managed to raise my Armor Engineer skill to where I wanted. It was very helpful to me back then.
Now that we have the Tech Gizmos, I would not recommend to someone to go repair skilling like I did, but there are some crafting categories that have no gizmos, namely Tools, enhancers, furniture and Vehicles.
So, if you are trying to raise your crafting skills to a certain level and there are no Tech Gizmo BPs to help you do that, you might want to consider repair skilling on MS, it’s still relevant.
I have to disagree, if you can find a decent niche as new player, then crafting can be a lot better than hunting/mining. Also hunting/mining knowledge is mostly worthless when it comes to crafting. @OP Just stay away from what others/everyone else is crafting, find your niche.
Im asking for help as a new player, I’ve have tried to make the questions as vague as possible so as to not give away secrets. Also I’m not asking about skilling in this thread i’m enquiring about how the more experienced crafters think about the game.
I’ll take a crack at this, though there are definitely more experienced crafters, I think my process is workable and could be a good start for anyone wanting to get serious about crafting in EU.
So first a few ‘truths’ to get us oriented. I’ve said some of these things elsewhere and I stand by them no matter what anyone else says:
[B]Axiom #1: The only thing that has ever proven viable with crafting in Entropia in the long-term is Quantity crafting
Axiom #2: If it doesn’t give you something that you can sell to another player for markup, don’t craft it[/B]
Ok so now that we have these first 2 axioms as a starting point for our crafting career, we will ignore any other strategies that don’t align with the above.
1. PED Turnover/Cycling (aka volume crafting):
One of the biggest challenges for crafters is that it is incredibly easy to make items, but often times, not so easy to get rid of them (sell them). So before I start, I often look at what the sales volumes are in the past week. The Market History for individual items will be your friend for that. Here’s an example using items that all have the same TT value, Widgets:
[CENTER]https://www.planetcalypsoforum.com/forum/index.php?media/widget-jpg.334595/full
[/CENTER]
Now, having these all side-by-side like this, it’s easy to see which ones sell more, and which ones don’t sell much. When you look at the history for Widget 1, you can see that in the last week, 4k PED of them have actually sold on auction, this is significantly more than for all the other Widgets. If I was going to get into the Widget crafting business, I would probably just focus on the Widget 1 and ignore the rest.
Here’s another example, albeit a bit more complicated because in this one, the TT values are different:
[CENTER]https://www.planetcalypsoforum.com/forum/index.php?media/blp-amps-jpg.334592/full
[/CENTER]
The numbers in the ‘Sales’ column is the total TT amount and doesn’t take into account the markup amount. So the TT is the only thing we care about for the math we need to do. Now, the amps shown here are the 6P, 10P, 13P, 17P, 20P, 23P, 25P and 28P, in that order. Which one has had the most volume in the last week? You’ll have to go figure out what the TT is for each one and divide the week ‘Sales’ amount by the TT for 1 of them to arrive at that number. Believe it or not, I have done this before for all amps. It’s a good exercise to do, it will reveal a lot about volumes of sales for items and this will help prevent too many failed auctions.
Typically, if something has no sales in the last week, I ignore it and don’t craft it, because the risk is too high that I will have failed auctions (the max auction duration at this time is 7 days).
2. Reverse Engineer your crafting career, think long-term:
There is a tremendous amount I could say about this, I could spend 3 hours or more just on this one tip, but I don’t have time today so I’ll have to just give you some pointers and leave it for you to mull over on your own.
a) Skills don’t have the same value. Look over the value of each ‘Manufacture’ skill and consider which skill you might prefer to work on. In the end, these have value and if you ever get into trouble during your crafting career, you might want to sell some of these skills in order to make yourself solvent again so you can keep going. But if you are working on skills that don’t have much value, it might be hard to convert some of these skills back to PED again, so think about that:
b) Think about your long-term plans; do you plan to buy a shop eventually? What would you sell? What’s the competition like? What are the margins like? The more competition there is on something, the tighter the margins are. For example the margins on ArMatrix guns are getting very tight these days and there are already a few shops that sell ArMatrix guns cheaper than auction. That would be a tough market to get into. Same goes for Damage Enhancers, and with those I would say it’s even worse because the BPs are UL, so those that have BPs with QR 100 are at a huge advantage and there’s just no way to enter this market while keeping your crafting returns in the green initially, you will have to invest a certain amount to get started (either by buying QR 100 prints, or by getting your own up to QR 100).
There doesn’t seem to be as many Furniture or Tool shops, but these are also low-volume items, which will greatly affect your turnover/cycling capability. All these things must be considered long-term. Do you want to have volume? Do you want to have exclusivity? These 2 things are usually diametrically opposed and cannot be achieved together, you have to chose one or the other.
Another thing that should enter into your long-term planning process is the amount of PED you will be able to dedicate to this. Armors and Mining Amps for example take huge amounts of PED to do successfully. If you don’t think you’ll have at least 20k PED to dedicate towards your crafting endeavors, you might not want to get into certain markets
So think about where you want to be in the long-term, then knowing that, you can figure out what you will need to do in order to get there. That is how I got to where I am now.
3. Start at the beginning: Components
Almost anything you might want to craft eventually will require some sort of components. Weapons, Armors/plates, Amps, etc… These all require some sort of Component in order to make them. So it makes sense that you might be better off starting with raising your Manufacture Component skills at the start as these skills will be useful to you in the future, even if you don’t plan on becoming a Component crafter long-term.
As seen in the previous image above, out of the 3 component crafting skills, Manufacture Metal Component is the most valuable and sought-after, and with good reason. Many of the higher-level Metal Component blueprints are expensive to max out. There are a lot of Metal Components which are needed for many Armor plate, ArMatrix weapon and ArMatrix Amps and so the volumes that you see on things like Basic Sheet Metal reflect that. I personally go through thousands and thousands of Basic Sheet Metal in a matter of minutes when I’m making armor plates for my shops, so it’s a pretty reliable thing for anyone to craft, it has volume and it has decent mark-up.
If you were going to take that advice and start making Metal Components, here are the current volumes for all of the Level 1 and Level 2 BPs:
a) If there are no sales in the last week, leave it alone
b) At first, Volume is more important than MU
c) The skills you get will be a function of the cost/click; the higher the cost to click, the more skills you get
You can ignore c) above when you are just starting out, but eventually you will be looking at this more closely in order to achieve certain milestones. Lots of people click Simple Plastic Ruds for the skills and so these are often very cheap on auction since more of them are being made than can be used up for a given time period. So stay away from those as long as your bottom line is more important than the skills you get.
With experience you will eventually understand what the true cost to make these things actually is but as a general rule, the SR will tell you 2 things:
the percent fails you get (95% SR means on average you will have 5 fails in 100 clicks)
the long-term average TT returned (if you have an 80% SR BP, you will on average get 80% TT back, long-term, but short runs could be devastating)
Depends on the item, i made so much profit of items which even had a N/A in the yearly ^^ It’s still possible that there’s quite the demand but simply no supplier for a year.
and ofc, It’s risk vs. reward.
Sure, but my advice here is aimed at a new crafter/player, and I think in most cases, you are speaking of items crafted using rare and expensive limited BPs or higher-level things.
I think in general, my whole narrative about volume over mu will hold true for newer crafters with few crafting skills and knowledge about the economy, and the game.
anything that has N/A in the yearly history, because, many people, like you, go with low quantity of sales or N/A for a month and then every crafter considers it a dead craft while the demand for it increases over time.
This can hold true for pretty much every craft.
The tricky part is ofc to figure out how quickly the demand builds up. And then just go with rotation, personally, i have about 100 different crafts on my list, most of them with rather low demand but due to rotation still getting quite constant sales on a daylie basis.
I think i may be giving too much details now :LOL:
If you’re not going to share the details, then why even mention it?
I have experimented with this for a lot of things and the conclusion I came to is just that, you need to do a lot of experimentation, which means a lot of failed auctions. So, for that reason, it would not be good advice to tell a new crafter that they should try to craft things that have no weekly/monthly sales and put them on auction and see if they sell. And this is why I chose to stay away from that and focus on those strategies that have a much better chance of working out for a new crafter.
I don’t understand why you can’t just give me a thumbs up for my post, it is very sound advice, it is the culmination of several years worth of crafting experience and I spent a couple of hours on it, making screenshots to provide visuals for better understanding etc…
Instead you insist on finding the one thing that you can disagree with and argue about, I don’t know if it’s an effort to try to put yourself above me and show that you somehow have more knowledge, or you just are unable to appreciate something valid and positive and absolutely have to find fault with it. Or maybe you don’t like that I am actually helping others figure out ways to craft in a sustainable way, who knows.
It’s ok for others to know more about crafting than you, and it’s ok that other people have good advice to give about crafting, deal with it.
Of course there is, I never said that this post was the be all and end all about Crafting in EU, now did I?
It’s just a little bit of advice for someone just starting out crafting, that is all. And it’s damn good advice. I wish I had a mentor or soc mate that could have taught me as much as that post has in it, when I first started.
. A wise player called Messi once said 200 years ago sweating when you first start is good as you can spend a lot of time reading learning (and you get beheueeu evade when sweating).