 |
| Money |
As this is one of the most asked questions by both noobs and experienced players alike, I thought I would attempt to make a guide that should help if this is your chosen path in the Entropia Universe. As there are many different techniques and methods, as well as different scales of profit you can potentially make, I am going to split this guide into three parts.
Part 1 will be aimed at new players – both non-depositors and those that can only deposit a small amount to get them started – the techniques I will explain can be used to profit, but it will be on a small scale, and realistically could only be used to fund “play” in the game on a semi-casual basis (e.g. the occasional hunt or mining trip) or top-up a small regular deposit.
Part 2 will be aimed at those that have played for a while and deposited fairly regularly up to this point and have now decided they want to become self-sufficient in the game, no longer having to deposit in order to continue “normal” activities like hunting / mining or whatever you do for fun.
Part 3 will be aimed at those people who want to make money, be it to buy all the uber gear or to make an IRL living from the game.
Firstly, I want to get two common misconceptions out of the way which you need to know prior to attempting to undertake any of these guides.
1. Many people are under the impression if they buy an item, they have “spent” this money. For example, you will see many threads on this forum discussing things like: Person X sent 20,000 peds on a hanger and they need to do X number of flights to get their money back… - This is not the case. What has actually occurred is person X has made an investment. The value of this investment may go up, or down, but let us assume for a moment that it retains its value. Person X has actually only got to do one single flight to make a profit as the value of the original investment is retained. For example, lets say I buy a hanger for 20k, I do one flight and make 20 peds profit on that one flight. I then sell the hanger for 20k. The end result is I made 20 peds profit. Of course in reality the investment may go up or down, for example, if CND is suddenly fitted with a Teleport to the surface, Hanger prices will drop like a stone, but if MA abolished decay on spacecrafts, you could expect to see the hanger prices rise. This process is called Depreciation or Appreciation of assets and has nothing to do with profits until you finally decide to sell the asset.
2. Many people complain that they never profit hunting/mining. –This one really irritates me, as the “universe” is specifically designed to prevent the “average” player from making money this way. Think about it, if the average player could easily make a profit from these activities, where would Mindark make their money? Always remember, any activity where the idea is to profit directly from Mindark themselves is purposely designed to be as difficult as possible for the player. You will notice that the vast majority of advice I offer in these guides is about making money from the community, not Mindark… Before any flaming starts, I am not saying its impossible to profit regularly from hunting or mining etc, but I am saying it is very difficult for the average player to do so. If this were not the case this universe would cease to exist, as Mindark would be declared bankrupt. I will explain how it is possible later in the guide.
Okay, enough of the boring stuff, lets start to make some money. Part one is from fresh off the ship, but any player at any level will be able to use these methods…(please note, I will tell you to do various things like using Mindforce – I will not be explaining how, as there are a dozen other guides available to tell you this sort of thing and I want to try keep this LONG guide as short as possible!)
Part 1
Non-depositors
Ok, here you are, in your OJ’s (orange clothes) fresh off the boat. The first step to making some money is to learn to sweat. There are a million sweating guides on this forum, so I am not going to repeat all those guides, but suggest you read Viagrafalls guide, as it is particularly good and can be found HERE. At first you will find sweating difficult if not a little tedious, but remember this is the starting point to making your millions…
You are going to need huge amounts of sweat if you are going to get anywhere without depositing and you will start off gaining only about 100-200 an hour, but pretty quickly, the amount you manage to succeed will increase and at the time of writing, I know a number of people who can hit 700+ an hour and it presently sells for around 1.2 pecs per unit. 700 an hour will be earning you 8.4 peds per hour.
You will obviously need to find a trader to buy your sweat, but again this is covered in a million other guides…
Another little tip, keep a look out on the floor for fruit or dung (they appear randomly - you wont make a living by collecting them, but they are free and you can sell them! every little helps....
One of the fatal flaws a huge number of new players make is to go buy a gun as soon as they have the cash. Don’t do this, or you will be back to square one before you know it!
The first thing a true entrepreneur will do is become more efficient at what you can already do. To do this, once you have 15 peds, go to a Trade terminal and buy a FAP 5. This will stop you dying quiet as regularly and increase the amount of sweat you are able to collect per hour. It will also gain you valuable first aid skills in addition to the evade, agility etc you have been gaining whilst sweating and getting attacked. Don’t worry about ever repairing the FAP 5 – it will last ages and works just as well in a knackered condition as it does brand new. When it finally bites the dust, just get a new one. Don’t forget, the skills you gain are worth money too!
The next item to buy is some Mindforce equipment. You will need a Minor focus chip from auction and an Aa Mindforce Implant, as well as an inserter from the TT. You also need some force nexus from a trader. You wont need much nexus, (maybe 200) as you are using a Mindforce Chip that only requires 1 Mind essence per use. Go to a refiner and make Mindforce Essence from some of the sweat you have and the Force Nexus.
As far as sweaters go, you are now an uber and should be able to collect pretty good quantities to sell. Wait until you have 50 – 100 ped and then… you can join the depositors Part 1 guide…
Depositors
Ok, so now we have a little cash flow going, what’s next? I am going to suggest at this point to assign 50% of the money you make to having fun, otherwise you will end up quitting, so split your money in two and buy a gun and some ammo and have a little fun.
Ok, back to business. The next thing you need to do is start a little trading. Sadly to do this at this stage you are going to have to do a little re-selling… this is not a popular activity in entropia but remember you are not here to make friends, you are here to make money!
Use the various market price indicators (My Two pecs, Peauction.com Wiki etc etc) to buy anything you can at below market values, and sell above them… keep an eye out for people who announce they are going to “TT” something and asks if anyone wants it for TT price. Always take these offers when you see them, the item is always worth something to someone, and if you cant sell it yourself, you can always TT it and get your money back.
One tip is to try collecting armour – buy individual parts to make a full set, then sell the full set at a price greater than the sum of its parts. This is also not reselling, as you are providing a service, so will not get as much flak for it!
Another tip is to find players that regularly require a specific item type.. for example, as a hairstylist I am always on the look out for Gel and Hairspray… If someone was willing to buy all the silly little low quantities that were no use to me and then present me with 1000 I would be happy to pay a slightly higher price to save me the hassle of doing it. Many others share this opinion so keep an eye out for them.
Last tip is to keep an eye on forum auctions – from what I have seen the prices can be much lower than what you can get them for in game…
Keep your sweating up too, as at this point, it’s the only guaranteed income!
By following this process, and assigning 50% of your profits to fun – you should earn enough to fund “play” in the game on a semi-casual basis (e.g. the occasional hunt or mining trip)…
As you make more profits, you can move on to bigger items to trade that in turn you can make more money on…
Part 2
So this part of the guide is for people already progressed from Part one, or people who have played a while and want to become self-sufficient within the game (e.g. no more depositing!)
Mindark having been harping on long enough about this not being a “game”, but being a “universe” where you can live out your virtual life… so think of it this way, in real life, can you have lots of fun for free? No! (unless you are a student!) you need a job to fund your fun activities. The same applies in the game. – sorry, universe!
There are loads of professions (jobs) you can take up, but you need to make sure you pick one that makes money from other players, not from Mindark if you want to profit… Some examples are: Beauty, Shop owners (Trading on a bigger scale), Pet trainers and Pilots… There are more, but look them up yourself!
All of these activities are providing a service to other players in the game that they either cant do themselves, or cant be bothered to do themselves. So you do it for them, and charge them a fee. Depending on the difficulty of the task, or the exclusivity of the service you can charge them a lot, or a little for the service. All of these businesses require some form of investment however, so this is why you either followed Part one, or have been playing a while and should have access to some cash…
OK, there is another profession I should mention here - crafting... As its nothing i know about, I got some information from a non-depositor Crafter (who does not want to be named) here is a direct quote which should give you some money making tips on crafting...
"I moved to crafting dew to looting an OA103 bp (unlimited) seeing the market and how well they sold i decided to chip. a week of barter and 28k peds later i had the skills needed to set up as a highly skilled crafter with around 5.5k enginering and high skills in all other crafting areas. After a while of buying ores from auction i found out just how broke i was getting from crafting even with a good bp and high skills. So, I set up many very nice trade deals with 5 big societies. Slowly, I started to see I could make an in-game living as a crafter. As I was paying tt for most my ores and PEauction / my2pecs prices on some, I could afford to comfortably undercut other crafters and still sell at a fair price for all. With (L) bps there is not to much worry of the market becomeing flooded so market prices are steady but even so, I later found out you need at least two good bps to constanly make any money to keep going with. So all you need for crafting is. At least 2 good BPs (limited items or not) Around 5k skill as a min (there are many other crafters with 3-4k that loose a lot) and good trade deal (sorry i wont say how mine works)"
Thank you "The Masked Crafter"
That’s it, its simple really, do your job and earn some cash. Obviously you need to apply business techniques to be successful, but they are yours to decide. You can concentrate on customer service, or compete with others on price, but if you do well, maybe taking on a second job, you can easily fund regular play, maybe even progress to Part 3…
Part 3
Ok money bags, you reached this far, you are doing well! Now is time to use the old “it takes money to make money” line….
Welcome to the serious gamers life. At this point, you will need large amounts of cash, but the potential rewards are far greater. You still have a few choices to make here.. you can play the speculation game, or you can take on a role similar to Part 2, only on a far greater scale.
Firstly, speculation… As you will know by now, the uber items in the game have been steadily increasing in value for some time… had you brought 10 mod faps 4 years ago, you could sell them now and buy a house… the question you should ask yourself, is just how far will the value go… It’s a risky business, but the potential rewards are huge.
Look at Neverdie, he just brought an Atrox egg for $10,000 – at the time of writing we just don’t know if he made the right choice, but he is playing the speculation game. He obviously believe the value of what it contains will be greater than what he paid for the egg. Only time will tell if he is right or not… say for example if it contains a set of armour, its unlikely to be worth the price he paid, but if it contains unique DNA for an uber breed of Atrox, he will make a lot of cash…
So, that’s speculation, if you think the Mod Fap is going to increase by another $1000 this year, then buy one and sell when you think the price has peaked. But I suggest you know the game inside out before trying anything like this!
The other option is land… yes you knew we would get to this eventually! Land ownership pays. There is no argument on this, look at Neverdie (again) he now makes his IRL living because of his land ownership, but it took an investment of $100,000. Alternatively, look at Akoz, from what I hear, the guy never deposited, but has a portfolio of land areas, and runs competitions worth thousands of dollars to encourage more hunters to his lands. In his own words, he got lucky, buying when land was cheap, before the price explosion…
Now day’s, this takes money. No two ways about it, not only to buy the land in the first place, but to buy the dna to stock the lands with creatures. You can fail with land however if you don’t do it right.. yes, exarosaur dna is cheap, but its cheap for a reason, loads of people already have it, and they are just not that fun to hunt… You find and buy DNA that’s rare or exclusive you will bring the hunters… you bring the hunters and your tax income hits the roof.
If you can find land that has shops etc too, all the better, you even get tax on items that sell in the shop!
If all else fails with getting hold of dna – you can always try relying on miners.. hold a competition with entries of highest value deposits screenies posted on the forums.. you get people thinking yours is good mining land, you can still bring in the cash that way!
Ok, finally hunting – you may wonder why I saved this for part three… realistically to make a reliable regular income from hunting, you need to be uber… yes, there will undoubtedly be 100 posts after this one saying how they make regular money and they are not ubers, but you are not listening to them, you are reading my guide.. if you want their advice, I strongly recommend you ask them about how they do it, as they have obviously discovered a system I have not encountered yet…
The reason I say you need to be uber to profit from hunting is simple. It takes efficiency of hunting to profit. An uber with an HP of 250+, a Mod Fap and an A-3 Justifier Mk.II Improved Ancient (with the skills to use it) can hunt with no armour, the most efficient weapon in the game (I believe) and a Fap that gives a full heal for only 1 pec. When you are this efficient it IS possible to profit regularly.
Sure, you may be able to do it with less, but that’s for you to experiment with and decide for yourself, I am just giving you an idea of the direction to go in…
No comments:
Post a Comment
Comment here: