Thanks for the tips!
I have a few workers at the moment - one is doing corn, the rest are doing mining.
Quick question - I have processed a load of Iron Ore into the Melted version, but I can't seem to process it further into Iron Ingots? it just keeps failing over and over - is there a requirement before I can do this? I know I can get workers to do it, but it'd be nice to do it manually as well.
Yes exactly mate. You need to some specific quests.
If you've not already done so, on your quest log in the right side of the screen, there should be a little wheel- if you click it, you can customize the visibility and type of quests you can see. Make sure you have the quests marked "Life" checked. These are the green quests. They are all related to life skills.
You need to start the question chain here;
http://bddatabase.net/us/quest/2100/1/
Eventually it leads into quests that unlock how to smelt ingots and make plywood from trees. There are others. You learn shaking, heating, mixing.
Incendar has a guide on how he raises gathering fast around velia:
part 1:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jp_S32ciILg
part 2:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YX_yna75x-Y&t
The basic idea is this:
If you sell your copper or iron directly to the marketplace, you might be able to sell 500 of them for 300-330K - Remember that the auction house takes a 30% cut of your profit.
If you refine those copper/iron/zinc/titanium/lead/tin into shards, you can sell 500 of those for about 800K or more. The fixed prices make sure that the time you invest into processing base materials is rewarded.
But be careful- Sometimes people want a base material. Coal might sell, but once you try to sell processed coal, people might not buy it. Sometimes people need a base material that hasn't been refined.
The best way to try and figure out what is in demand is to check the auction house. You can easily access it with ESC (you don't have to go up to a marketplace vendor to check. you can check anywhere) - search for "ore", "shard", "ingot", "timber", "log"; "plywood" and other generic terms, and then you can see how many are on sale.
Items that sell fast- like most types of plywood or ingots, you can see all the listings have been posted within the last couple of hours. That means the item moves really fast. But you can also see with some items, that the last purchases of those items are 3-4 days ago.
This matters because you can only have 30 listings at once. You cannot put up 1000 hundreds of things to sell at once. you need to clear inventory before you put new stock up (or remove the things that doesnt sell). It adds some strategy and it makes it hard for whales to destroy the market.
As a general rule, you will be rewarded if you choose to keep your items and refine them later. You will make a lot more money if you keep your copper and iron. You might make copper shards. They sell a lot, because people need copper (and zinc) to make brass- Thats what people use to make Grunil. Some people they make hundreds of pieces of Grunil every day full force. People need grunil pieces to try and enchant so they just chug through them fast. this keeps the market in constant supply and demand.
your grunil and tartaris and agerian armors- they sell fast.
So one can be really smart about trying to keep sitting on their materials, and also just sit on them and wait for the right time. it might be six months, or longer. A few months ago, suddenly Fir Timber became the hawt sauce. that was usually really hard to sell.
Right now a lot of the valencia materials are not that hawt, but that can change.
What you could also do is allocate things to your alt. If your main is primarily in Heidel cooking and doing stuff, maybe you want to have another gathering character you position at goat mountain or near a place with pigs or bears or somewhere where the meat/skin/fur/blood/bone/horns are really valueable. Everytime you skin or process an animal you use one energy. so your characters can only process animals as much energy they have.
That is why that getting more energy and more contribution are just as important as increasing your combat level. You guys are doing it right by not missing the importance of life skills. In other games, life skills is like a side attraction- In this game, sorta like SWG (but still different) life skillers are really rewarded.
If you're a good life skiller you can make comparable income to the people who grind a lot hardcore, and that allows you to buy end game armor and weapons if they are placed on the marketplace.
That to me is really cool. because it means that when I am burned out from grinding or dont have much time, I can just relax and do life skills. Later on in the game, when you have 50-100 workers, they process so much for you that you can process 24/7 nonstop without running out of wood/ore/minerals/food to process.
your workers effectiveness goes up by level and rank. White and Green Workers are not worth it. Delete them. Go to to the worker exchange guy in every city and use 5 energy to RNG a new worker. Buy the blue workers. Sometimes you're lucky and get a yellow worker. If you're really lucky you might get a orange one (artisan).
A workers effectiveness increases by 50% at every level. So a yellow worker is 50% better than a blue worker, and a orange is 50% better than a yellow. At every 10 level you can promote a worker. but you should probably wait until they are level 30 to begin promoting them. then if you promote a level 30 blue and he passes his exam, he will be a yellow level 1, and go all the way up to level 30, and then you can promote again to artisian lvl 30 (which is max). But I heard they might introduce legendary workers at some point? That would be crazy!
