Small post with some info I think a lot of people brush aside.
When judging how profitable a money-making activity is, it almost always needs to be broken up into parts and viewed as separate activities. And once you’re actually doing these activities, you’re benefiting from combining as many of them as possible.
This should be easier to illustrate using an example:
You’re buying T4 Planks with buy orders for 180 silver a piece, paying 1.8 silver per plank to set up a buy order. The average sell price for these planks over a week is 200 silver a piece.
You’re crafting T4 Bows from the planks you’ve bought, paying 1000 silver in taxes and using 32 planks per bow. You’re selling these bows for 10000 silver, paying 300 silver in market fees.
How much money do you make per bow sold in this example? One might say it’s 9700 (what you get from the sell order) minus 181.8*32+1000, which comes out to 2882.4.
And that would be correct. But that doesn’t necessarily mean we’re making money efficiently on every step of the way. We could be losing money buying planks and then earning more crafting from them, which still nets us profit in the end. If you want to make money, you’d sooner or later have to look at every link of the chain separately, then eliminate the weak links where you’re better off just buying the product off the marketplace.
Back to our example: you could sell the planks for 200 silver (192 after tax), earning 12.2 silver per plank, so you’re earning 12.2 silver per plank bought, and 9700-(200*32+1000)= 2300 silver per bow sold. However, by combining these activities, you’re saving on market taxes as you won’t need to set up sell orders for planks and then additional buy orders for these same planks, meaning you’re making 2882.4 silver per 32 planks bought/bow sold, instead of 2690.4 silver if you separate these activities completely. This comes from saving on market fees, but you will have other reasons to combine activities. One of them is easier realization of the product: it’s often easier to sell completed items, rather than all of their separate parts.
This applies to every activity, be it transporting from other cities, refining materials yourself, growing food on your islands, using laborers instead of selling journals on the market and so on. If its a link in a chain of production, it needs to be evaluated on its own and, if it’s too weak, thrown out for you to spend more time on the strong links, earning you more money per hour in the end.
Today we’re going to be talking about crafting. We’ll talk about crafting for the normal marketplace for now, not Black Market.
In this post I will try to give an example of how to start making money from crafting with an investment of less than 50k silver. I am based in Thetford, so the example will take place there, using city crafting stations with 50% taxes (far west stations).
We will not be using focus points in this example. I will expand on focus points in later posts, for now just forget about them.
I will assume you have premium already, but even if you don’t, all that’s going to be changed is the market sell fee (4% instead of 2%), so this post should still be useful to you.
Preface/Disclamer
I think the most important thing to understand about market gaming in any online game is that it’s a PvP activity. You’re always competing with all the other people doing it. In Albion, if you chose to craft for profit, your competition isn’t limited to other crafters from your city. You will also be competing with people doing trade runs from other cities and with people selling their loot from dungeons, hell gates or ganks/camps. Don’t get discouraged yet, there’s a place for you in this market machine, just don’t expect that place to fall into your hands on its own.
Do not expect to make much money selling the exact item from the example below. The money making part comes from crafters spreading their attention over all the different gear, and if many people are crafting the same item its price and your profit will drop. Don’t worry though, there are enough items in this game for everyone, just don’t give up after the first unprofitable one you check.
Finding your place
Now with the boring stuff out of the way, let’s make some money!
Market can seem very overwhelming at first, but you will only need to know a small section of it in the beginning. Let’s start by choosing what to craft. The easiest way to do this is to look at your gear. What are you using? Chances are, it costs less to craft than to buy off the marketplace.
For this example I’ve picked T4.1 Light Crossbow. T4.0 gear is very rarely profitable as it generally has low demand and very high supply at the moment. T4.1 gear on the other hand is used extensively in hell gates and by gankers or gatherers, making it very desired and often lost by users on death, raising its price as a result. Let’s check the price for our item:
Note: to get this info you need to click the little arrow near the top right corner of the order window.
Average price isn’t often the best indicator, you’d want to look at the flat lines on the curve to see a reasonable price. By hovering over the graph we can see that people have bought over 30 items for more than 13k silver in the past 18 hours, and the current lowest sell order is at 13.6k, so we can expect to sell our crossbows for 13k a piece in less than a day as long as we don’t craft too many at once.
Now let’s look at the material costs. You can check the materials required by clicking on the items icon in the top left corner of the same market window, then scrolling a bit down:
16 planks and 8 bars, let’s check their prices:
263 * 16 = 4208 silver.
340 * 8 = 2720 silver.
Combine that together and we get 6928 silver material cost of a crossbow.
There’s a formula to calculate the crafting fees for an item, but we won’t bother with it for now. Just assume the taxes will be around 20% of the end product price. 3% of the end price will also go to the market fees, together that will be 13000 * 0.20 = 2990 silver.
Total estimated cost to craft and sell: 9918 silver. Total estimated profit per item: 3082 silver.
Good, now we know this will most likely be a pretty good start, but we’ll need to unlock T4 crafting for crossbows first. I recommend buying T3 materials for around 10 crossbows, crafting them and researching them at the station. That should give you enough fame to unlock the T4 node. If not, buy a bit more materials. This should cost you less than 20k silver.
Now that you can craft T4 crossbows, let’s buy the materials. I’ll buy enough for 10 crossbows, but you can start with even 1 or 2.
36820 + 3900 + 1300 = 42020 for 160 planks, 27200 for 80 bars, or 69220 silver total.
Time to craft
Crossbows are from the warrior’s tree, so let’s head to the cheapest forge in town.
Alright well, I said we’re using 50% tax stations so we’ll use this instead:
Oh. Turns out while I was writing this the fees of all forges except one dropped to 17-20%. We’ll use the only 55% one left instead. Other stations are still at 50-55%.
So at 55% tax the crafting fee is 1980 silver per crossbow, which is a bit lower than the estimated “20% of end price” 2600 fee. So crafting one crossbow will cost us 69220 (total material cost) / 10 + 1980 = 8902 silver.
Sweet! But wait, we also have leftover resources we forgot to include in our calculations. City crafting stations normally return 15% of the materials spent. For simplicity’s sake I’ll just sell these to the buy orders, but you can safely think of this 15% resource return rate as a 15% discount on material costs. Also you will probably get more normal items and less good ones, but that doesn’t affect the price as much as you’d think, especially for lower tier items.
Selling our goods
I sold my leftover resources for 5512 + 3410 = 8922 silver. As for crossbows, I’ll just list them all at 13k, 130k total paying 1300 silver market fee for listing them.
Once we sell the crossbows over the next several hours, we’ll get 13000 – 260 (2% market tax) = 12740 silver per crossbow, or 127400 silver for all 10. That makes our profit 127400 – 81398 = 46002 silver, more than 50% of what we’ve spent! At this point we have already made back our investment into learning T4 crossbow crafting and can continue making money.
Note that I’ve bought the materials straight from the market. You can make more money if you set up buy orders for the materials, transport them from other towns, or, sometimes, if you refine them yourself. This adds on top of the profit we’ve already made, and I’ll encourage you to research the prices of the materials once you’re comfortable with doing what I’ve shown here.
Now go out and apply all that you’ve learned today to some other gear!
Final notes
I tried to make this example very basic and simple, while having all the math written out and all the steps listed. This is my first try at writing something like this, so please don’t judge me too harshly for any mistakes, inconsistencies or repetitions, but feel free to point them out in the comments.
I will go into more in-depth concepts in later posts, as well as discuss topics other than crafting, so stay tuned. I’ve also excluded a paragraph from this post that I deemed not worthy of inclusion, it will go up as a separate post a bit later. (Update: it is now up)
As always you can contact me in game (Thulgrom), on Discord (Thulgrom#1425) or on Reddit (/u/Thulgrom). Cheers!
P.S: If you need access to associate fees (30-25% tax on Warrior, Mage and Hunter stations) in Thetford just PM me on Discord or send a mail in-game, I’ll add you asap. And if you want to thank me – just use my stations 🙂 (Outdated, don’t own stations anymore as of 26/07)
P.P.S: if you want to follow the blog and get updates when I post new stuff, you can either like the thread on the forums or subscribe with your email/WordPress account by clicking on the menu button in the top right corner of this page.
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