How to make money?

[KitTheNameless]

I'm just confused because it looks like the sell price of most crops is less than the purchase price of the seeds, unless I'm misunderstanding. Do I have to cook everything? Are there other good ways to make money? Or specific crops with better sell prices?

[TightWeb]

Check the crops guide for that. Some crops give more yields while others only give you 1. Honey can give you passive income as well. But you will always lack of money anyway

[KitTheNameless]

Originally posted by TightWeb:

Check the crops guide for that. Some crops give more yields while others only give you 1. Honey can give you passive income as well. But you will always lack of money anyway :youjinghe:

I looked at a crop guide and the numbers didn't match up to what I was seeing in my game, so that just confused me more :-/ I don't even know about honey, I guess I haven't unlocked that yet, but I'll start doing that once I do.

[TightWeb]

Originally posted by KitTheNameless:

Originally posted by TightWeb:

Check the crops guide for that. Some crops give more yields while others only give you 1. Honey can give you passive income as well. But you will always lack of money anyway

I looked at a crop guide and the numbers didn't match up to what I was seeing in my game, so that just confused me more :-/ I don't even know about honey, I guess I haven't unlocked that yet, but I'll start doing that once I do.

It's because the guide created on previous version of the game. But it still good enough. You can also check the recent comments on the crops guide about Mysterious Person in Red. If it's early game, you can just go fishing.

[KitTheNameless]

Originally posted by TightWeb:

It's because the guide created on previous version of the game. But it still good enough. You can also check the recent comments on the crops guide about Mysterious Person in Red. If it's early game, you can just go fishing.

Ok, thanks, I'll look at the guide again!

[worstcase11]

1. At the start of the game try to go fishing as often as you can. While you should keep superior grade catches, you can basically sell anything else. (Fish for missions can be bought from the fishmonger, if you are in a pinch but ideally you catch them all yourself.)

What you are mainly aiming for are the three species of Lucky Fish you can catch at any fishing spot in the game with any of the rods. Unless you want to turn them into a wall decoration there is no real further purpose for them. Later on you can keep some fish for cooking.

2. Always check what the Wandering Vendor wants as ‘Bulk Orders’ every season. She will appear in the Ferry stop market only during the 1st solar term and the solstice/equinox solar term of any season. Trade as many of your crops for her plum coins as you can. Then use those coins to buy Spirit Gras Seeds. She brings 50 bags of those every solar term she is in the market (so you can buy 100 bags a season). Sell the low quality Spirit Gras and keep anything that is higher quality for missions etc.

3. Once the Main Hall is repaired, grab the Sect Budget every season. It is easy to forget ^^’

4. Plant Sesame seeds – you will only unlock those once you have opened the Q-Pavillon, while you can use them in Alchemy recipes later on, you will harvest enough to sell off a lot and they grow in any season.

5. Once you have the blueprint, make a few fermentation jars – and upgrade them as soon as you can. Also get a mill/turtle mill and at least one drying rack (facility not decoration) set up. Turn Wheat into liquor, flour, dry Persimon & Chrysanthemum etc. even if you don’t sell the items, you save money, if you make them yourself instead of buying them for cooking.

6. Befriend Song Yantong. Not only does she teach you how to keep bees and get honey, she will also give you a Fermentation Jar recipe for Honey-Jujubes – once you can make those you’ll never need to worry about stamina consumption again.

7. Set up 10 beehive boxes on your farm and grow flowers around them. The more flowers you plant, the more faster the hive boxes fill with honey. With a hive box in the center a 5x5 Flower field (24 flowers, 1 hive box) you can harvest 3 jars of honey every morning with 10 boxes that sums up to 30 jars of honey. As long as you don’t harvest the flowers, you don’t have to water or replant them, which gives you a passive income of at least 3,000 Spirit Stone Shards per day (varying by type of honey and quality, also you might want to keep some for cooking and processing).

8. Some people swear upon using Harvest Talisman from the Wandering Vendor to mass harvest only a few times a year and sleep in between, never tried that myself because that should keep you from completing a lot of the side quest.

[KitTheNameless]

Originally posted by worstcase11:

1. At the start of the game try to go fishing as often as you can. While you should keep superior grade catches, you can basically sell anything else. (Fish for missions can be bought from the fishmonger, if you are in a pinch but ideally you catch them all yourself.)

Thank you! This whole list sounds really helpful!

[worstcase11]

Ah I forget to mention, you can plant the flowers in such a way that the 5x5 fields overlap, (two tiles distance between hive boxes) that way the honey field is smaller but you still get the 3 jar per day harvest. There is a suggestion for a planting pattern in the beginners guide, though it is a setup for getting all kinds of honey, not max. profit.

[Cardew_78]

Also check your storage. Considering the traveling merchant gives you 11 days to grow the crops for the orders, you don´t really have to keep white and green crops. Only keep 1 stack of blue crops.
When i cleard out my storage in year 3, i made 300+ spirit stones from selling all the unnecessarily stored crops.
No wonder i was always broke.

[KitTheNameless]

Originally posted by Cardew_78:

Also check your storage. Considering the traveling merchant gives you 11 days to grow the crops for the orders, you don´t really have to keep white and green crops. Only keep 1 stack of blue crops.
When i cleard out my storage in year 3, i made 300+ spirit stones from selling all the unnecessarily stored crops.
No wonder i was always broke.

I'm still in the first season, I think, so I don't have that much yet, but I'll keep that in mind!

[Reianor]

Originally posted by KitTheNameless:

Originally posted by worstcase11:

1. At the start of the game try to go fishing as often as you can. While you should keep superior grade catches, you can basically sell anything else. (Fish for missions can be bought from the fishmonger, if you are in a pinch but ideally you catch them all yourself.)

Thank you! This whole list sounds really helpful!

[Gives a long stare.]
Turning wheat into flour isn't going to save you from poverty.
Planting it can though (if you're too poor for the better crops).
A seed bag of wheat costs you 24 shards.
In 3 days it grow into 2-4 wheat crops which sell for 20 each at minimum (if they're all c-grade).
And wheat's not even among your best earners, it's just cheap to seed and gives 250+% of what you spend seeding it back to you in 3 days.
But it's still measly 12 shards per tile per day because wheat is 3rd worst earner per tile among the crops you have available to you at the start.
Turning wheat into flour turns it into ~312.5+%.
Which now means 17 shards per tile per day.
Or you could set some more money aside for the seeding and seed barassica instead which would be slightly over 18 per tile per day without any post-processing.
OR set back even more money and seed anima which earns you over 24 per tile per day, again with no post-processing.

Fishing is a good advice though.
The one issue with farming is that it's a "passive" income. It's good because you almost don't need to actually DO anything to earn it (in this game that is, no offence to any IRL farmers) but it's hella slow. For example a field of 30 wheat (your limit per solar term untill the pavilion shows up) gives you measly 360+ per day.
A field of 30 anima would be ~720+.
I never tried actually fishing for the whole day straight, but I reckon you'd need some hugearse field of good crops to earn more from farming per day than from a whole day of fishing. The "catch", no pun intended, is that fishing would actually occupy that whole day while farming would not.
So seed a field as big as you're comfortable dealing with for the almost free money, and if you find yourself with need for more money (who doesn't?) go cover the rest by fishing.

And that's it, that's the secret to money in this game.
Dunno where you got that ridiculous idea that farming doesn't pay but get rid of it and you'll profit.

[KitTheNameless]

Originally posted by Reianor:

A seed bag of wheat costs you 24 shards.
In 3 days it grow into 2-4 wheat crops which sell for 20 each at minimum (if they're all c-grade).

This alone explains so much. I kept looking at the numbers and thinking (to use this example) I would only get one wheat, so I would be LOSING 4 shards. I did harvest from the same tile more than once for at least some of my crops (not sure if they all give more than one harvest), but it never clicked that I would getting multiple crops from one seed bag and therefore making money.

[worstcase11]

Originally posted by Reianor:

[Gives a long stare.]
Turning wheat into flour isn't going to save you from poverty.

What I meant was that processed ingredients on the market are very expensive ^^' It is much more cost efficient to make them when you need them but as some processing takes a lot of time, specially for the fermentation jars, it is good to start early.
It wasn't my intention to emphazise on the flour, though there are several stamnia refilling dishes that need it.

[Reianor]

Originally posted by worstcase11:

Originally posted by Reianor:

[Gives a long stare.]
Turning wheat into flour isn't going to save you from poverty.

What I meant was that processed ingredients on the market are very expensive ^^' It is much more cost efficient to make them when you need them but as some processing takes a lot of time, specially for the fermentation jars, it is good to start early.
It wasn't my intention to emphazise on the flour, though there are several stamnia refilling dishes that need it.

If you turn 3 wheat into 1 flour you can "save" ~95 shards on buying it (100 - stamina costs for actually making it. Which is either 2.4*2 = 4.8 or 2.4*2.2 = 5.28 depending on how you count).
If you set that as the price of 3 wheat you end up with a great crop that gives you around ~23.66 shards of pure profit per tile per day, with a seed price of mere 24 shards, but it STILL looses in the long run to just simply seeding anima or jujube.

And that's before we ask the important question - how much flour would you actually NEED to buy? I'm guessing it's NOT 10 per day, is it? So most of our wheat will still be sold with about ~18 shards of profit per tile per day.

Stamina food sells for roughly 2 shards per stamina point.
Cheapest food you can buy costs you 2.2 shards per stamina point. (50 stamina for 110 shards at the snack stand)
Crafting it yourself would take half an hour + some stamina. I dare say if you can't cover that 10 shards worth of difference in half an hour then you're not playing the game right.
(FFS spend it fishing or something)

What we're left with is mostly just quest cooking. Because cooking for the sake of just replenishing stamina is, surprisingly, a waste of time.

That said, there IS one aspect of cooking and post processing I can't quite account for.
It's quality upgrade. If you take C-grade wheat and make B-grade flour, then use B-grade Flour to make A-grade food than that's different math. But I've no knowledge of upgrade rates so I can't say much about that.

My main point is that while you gave the OP some good advice you didn't say a word to dispel their main issue - the false impression that crop growing is somehow not a decent source of income. You may have even made it worse by not pointing it out to them outright.
It IS one and it dwarfs both crop processing and cooking which are minor boosts at best (if boosts at all, I'm looking at you, ridiculous cooking balance). Or at the very least near the begging of the game they are, there might be some superior recipes somewhere later down the line but I've yet to stumble upon such.

[Cardew_78]

Also a warning about a to efficient playstyle. The main questline has 2 parts, where you have to be at a specific cultivation level. While the first time (enter foundation) should not be a to big gap, i am currently near the end and need to reach core cultiavation. Sadly i just entered late foundation and still need 270000 cultivation.
So its not bad to "waste" 1 or 2 solar terms just for making money and do not directly spend the shards for upgrades. Better use them to buy crops with higher profit margin.

[worstcase11]

Originally posted by Reianor:

Originally posted by worstcase11:

What I meant was that processed ingredients on the market are very expensive ^^' It is much more cost efficient to make them when you need them but as some processing takes a lot of time, specially for the fermentation jars, it is good to start early.
It wasn't my intention to emphazise on the flour, though there are several stamnia refilling dishes that need it.

If you turn 3 wheat into 1 flour you can "save" ~95 shards on buying it (100 - stamina costs for actually making it. Which is either 2.4*2 = 4.8 or 2.4*2.2 = 5.28 depending on how you count).
If you set that as the price of 2 wheat you end up with a great crop that gives you around ~23.66 shards of pure profit per tile per day, with a seed price of mere 24 shards, but it STILL looses in the long run to just simply seeding anima or jujube.

And that's before we ask the important question - how much flour would you actually NEED to buy? I'm guessing it's NOT 10 per day, is it? So most of our wheat will still be sold with about ~18 shards of profit per tile per day.

Stamina food sells for roughly 2 shards per stamina point.
Cheapest food you can buy costs you 2.2 shards per stamina point. (50 stamina for 110 shards at the snack stand)
Crafting it yourself would take half an hour + some stamina. I dare say if you can't cover that 10 shards worth of difference in half an hour then you're not playing the game right.
(FFS spend it fishing or something)

What we're left with is mostly just quest cooking. Because cooking for the sake of just replenishing stamina is, surprisingly, a waste of time.

That said, there IS one aspect of cooking and post processing I can't quite account for.
It's quality upgrade. If you take C-grade wheat and make B-grade flour, then use B-grade Flour to make A-grade food than that's different math. But I've no knowledge of upgrade rates so I can't say much about that.

My main point is that while you gave the OP some good advice you didn't say a word to dispel their main issue - the false impression that crop growing is somehow not a decent source of income. You may have even made it worse by not pointing it out to them outright.
It IS one and it dwarfs both crop processing and cooking which are minor boosts at best (if boosts at all, I'm looking at you, ridiculous cooking balance). Or at the very least near the begging of the game they are, there might be some superior recipes somewhere later down the line but I've yet to stumble upon such.

Very well, why don't you start a new game and try to get through the first two years without using any processing facilities? But with doing all side quests and quest board quests that require them of course.

And btw. you are wrong in one point: stamnia recovery can even go up to 120 stamnia for 140 spirit stone shards, which is roughtly 0,86 to 1 if you eat the meu at the inn.
Though I still prefer to take cooked snacks into the mine during the first few seasons.