Easy money

[MasKarado BR]

what is the best way to make money at the beginning of the game?

[Fel]

There are several easy ways to get money early on.

Making stone knives is pretty easy and nets you a decent amount per knife so if you have a few tens of them it quickly adds up.
If you make a fairly big field and plant both cabbages (leave them on the ground to turn them to rot the next season and use the barn to turn it to fertilizer) and cereal (flax only takes 1 season, rye is planted in autumn) allows you to get a lot of extra seeds each time and they sell for a decent amount of money.

Stone arrows are not a bad way to transform your stones, sticks and feathers into money either.
Making threads then cloth from flax allows you to get a pretty significant increase in price for it, bags and shoes (especially the ones that only take leather and/or fur) are also a good way to make quite a bit of money.
But since they require technologies they are not for the very begining of the game, it's just that they unlock pretty fast so getting to them should not take too long even if you don't really know what you are doing.

[zantariz]

Originally posted by Fel:

There are several easy ways to get money early on.

Making stone knives is pretty easy and nets you a decent amount per knife so if you have a few tens of them it quickly adds up.
If you make a fairly big field and plant both cabbages (leave them on the ground to turn them to rot the next season and use the barn to turn it to fertilizer) and cereal (flax only takes 1 season, rye is planted in autumn) allows you to get a lot of extra seeds each time and they sell for a decent amount of money.

Stone arrows are not a bad way to transform your stones, sticks and feathers into money either.
Making threads then cloth from flax allows you to get a pretty significant increase in price for it, bags and shoes (especially the ones that only take leather and/or fur) are also a good way to make quite a bit of money.
But since they require technologies they are not for the very begining of the game, it's just that they unlock pretty fast so getting to them should not take too long even if you don't really know what you are doing.

You can leave your veggies in the ground to rot and then harvest the rot???

WHAT?? How did I not know this? What a waste of time I've been harvesting them and then letting them rot in storage....


Also, I don't understand the purpose of make Stone arrows... wooden arrows and stone arrows both sell for 7 money a piece and stone just uses more resources (I've been meaning to post this in suggestions, but keep forgetting). So keep your stone for more stone knives and just makes wood arrows with your extra sticks. Or better yet... Small Wicker Baskets... don't both with medium or large or chests or whatever, they all sell for less money per stick. Small Wicker baskets sell for 3 money per stick (same as stone knives, but they make more product for production time). All of the larger baskets sell for less money per stick, which makes no sense since they use the sticks and theoretically take 1) more time to craft and 2) cost more to buy the recipe to know how to make them ... and they sell for less. I assume there will be a complete overhaul of the item prices at some point, but it's probably just not a priority at the moment.

[Fel]

Things that can rot (at the default rate because preserved food rots slower) rots in one season change on the ground, two on your character, 4 in a chest and 8 in the food storage so if you need rot quickly leaving them to rot next to the crafting station in the barn is a pretty good way.
And since cabbages make 4 rots each, they are a great way to get plenty of fertilizer before you get pig (you can even plant them twice a year).

I hadn't even seen that wooden bolts were like that, it's definitely better.
The reason I had not seen them is probably because they are bolts and I only noticed the stone arrows being great for money (instead of feathers directly I mean) was because I was using them with my bow at the time.

With sticks I would rather craft spoons or laddles, same price per stick but lighter.
The spoon/laddle also gives you more exp and technology points per stick.
The only thing that the small wicker baskets are better at is money per second since you can't craft 5 ladles/spoons in the time you would craft one basket, which might or might not be relevant depending on how you play.

[zantariz]

Originally posted by Fel:

With sticks I would rather craft spoons or laddles, same price per stick but lighter.
The spoon/laddle also gives you more exp and technology points per stick.
The only thing that the small wicker baskets are better at is money per second since you can't craft 5 ladles/spoons in the time you would craft one basket, which might or might not be relevant depending on how you play.

Yes. I was makes laddles for awhile... but it takes sooo lonnngg to craft any number of them and in order or earning per time, i think baskets might win out. The other reason I was making baskets is because my resource storage was constantly full and I had over 16,000 sticks and just wanted to use up a bunch of them.

[zantariz]

Originally posted by Fel:

Things that can rot (at the default rate because preserved food rots slower) rots in one season change on the ground, two on your character, 4 in a chest and 8 in the food storage so if you need rot quickly leaving them to rot next to the crafting station in the barn is a pretty good way.
And since cabbages make 4 rots each, they are a great way to get plenty of fertilizer before you get pig (you can even plant them twice a year).

I will definitely use this. I just wish I was aware of this when I had such a shortage of fertilizer instead of having to buy it from NPCs. Now I have a mountain of manure. I have so much manure and rot at this point, I try to cook the about to spoil food ingredients into crafted foods I can sell for good prices.

[Veny]

Define "beginning of the game"...
For me, most efficient seems so far:
- Leather and/or fur shoes. Hunters are gaining level quite fast and leather tech is pretty basic.
- Grains. Any grain - wheat, rye, oat, but especially Flax. Flax seems to be a gold mine because it produces flax stalk (or whatever it is called, it is used for tailoring) but it also produces great amount of flax seeds that are very expensive so you can get all the product AND sell most of the seeds and keep rest and sow it another season.

[yeknod]

Not a good idea. Early game it will be a struggle just to find and buy seeds. Don't leave cabbages to rot. Pick berries, nothing could be easier or faster, and drop them anywhere that is convenient and let them rot. Early game pick raw berries in Spring to rot. Pick ripe berries in Summer to tide you over winter. Cabbages are high nutrition travel food and NPC's can live on them. By year two you need lots of cabbages. For early game money you can't beat stone knives. High value to weight ratio. Best thing is pick the stone around your place in winter when it is easiest to see them on the ground. For the rest of the year use the stone to make knives for income. Sticks are handy everywhere. Stones are most abundant along the shores and near creek beds. Often I will take 20 knives, early game all you can carry, on a trade trip for sale. Make the sale then scavenge materials for 20 more knives around the trade village and sell those also before returning to camp. By the way, old farm hand speaking here, everything that grows or lives should rot. So piles of reeds should rot. Animal carcasses should rot. Logs, lumber, clothes should rot. Why the devs decided vegis and berries and mushrooms can rot but nothing else that grows or lives can rot is a mystery.

[Fel]

You don't need to leave all of your cabbages to rot if you want to keep some of it as food (especially if you grow it both in spring and summer) but they are a significantly better source of rot than berries.
Berries only turn into 1 rot per berry, which means that you need 10 berries per fertilizer but hundreds or even thousands of berries weight quite a bit on top of taking a decent amount of time to harvest.

Berries are of course great for the very first season because you have nothing else to make lots of rot (you can't hunt fast enough to have hundreds of meat yet) but the time investment to harvest them and bring them to your barn is usually not worth it after that first season.

[danilo.schoeneberg]

"How can I make quick money fast" is a fancy way of asking "How can I beat the purpose of the game".

At the very start, money isn't hard to come by, but it takes up a lot of time as you have nothing in the way of facilities. The "easiest way" is making stone knives as stones can be picked up pretty much everywhere (especially in clusters around spruce trees), but it is time consuming and you cannot carry much early on.

My "standard approach" is to make stone knives until I have about 1.000 quid, which should take no longer than 2 in-game days. That alows you to buy the large pouch and large simplye backpack from Matylda in Denica (you could combine it with the 40-log delivery to Dargobert) or Karolina in Hornica (if you fancy hacking your way through a dozen of wolves before you even get there).

Those two items raise your carrying capacity to 64kg, which will make building and collecting raw materials much easier and will also allow the ruble to roll.

[Shrez]

I make tons of money with Mead.

[Fel]

I don't think mead can quaify as "begining of the game" since it requires tier 3 tavern which is at the very end of the production technology and takes several ingame years to reach even when specifically min-maxing to unlock it.
Those tier 3 recipes are definitely great for money, even if you no longer have much need for it by the point you can make them.

[mjt1447]

Work the copper mine and make copper knives. It unlocks at smith one. Good money.

[Edmund Greyfox]

Turning cabbages into Rot to save on fertilizer isn't really the best deal. It takes 10 rot to make 1 fertilizer. 10 cabbages at 1.4/ea (price in my current game) gives you 14 . Fertilizer costs 7.5. That means you can sell 10 cabbages, get 1 fertilizer and 6.5 more in cash.

Where things break down is when you realize that you need 2.5 fertilizer to grow those 10 cabbages. That being the case, you can't just sell your crops and buy enough fertilizer to replant all of them without losing money. You need a "free" source of rot like berries or manure from pigs to actually break even. If you have lots of excess cabbage then it makes more sense to just sell it and buy fertilizer instead of letting it rot though.

[danilo.schoeneberg]

10 cabages result in 40 rot, therefore you can make 4 units of fertilizer from 10 cabbages.

[Edmund Greyfox]

Originally posted by danilo.schoeneberg:

10 cabages result in 40 rot, therefore you can make 4 units of fertilizer from 10 cabbages.

You get 4 rot per cabbage? I thought everything rotted on a 1-1 ratio?