What's the best product to sell ?

[Plom]

I have a big base in an arid biome, I produce hemp, cactus, wheat, and I can extract iron and copper. I can craft dustwich, weapons, first aid, clothes and heavy armors, but leather are difficult to find so I can't do light armor.

I found the katana to be quite good compared to other weapon to produce & sell, in the long run they sell at the same price, the difference is they cost less iron plate so I can produce more and make more money than any others.

I don't want the best method in the game to make money (I already had stolen blueprints and made 200K), I just wanted to know, with my base what's the best I can produce and sell ?

[Stanley]

Katanas and grog

[Stanley]

Originally posted by Panfilo:

People mentioned grog as a money maker but doesn't it require 20 wheat straw to make a single can? That seems like a lot.

Its a lot but there comes a point you have too much of it

[Guts]

The higher the material cost, the more xp you get from making an item.

Also as long as there's hostile humanoids in an area, you can put them in a peeler to get animals skins for leather, making light armor accessible almost anywhere. Keep in mind the peeler has to kill them to get skins.

[Bospor]

if you can crop wheat, than make grog. Lots of money in it

[Astasia]

The advantage of selling more lower price things compared to fewer higher price things, like katana vs wakizashi, is you can more reliably maximize your cat per merchant. If a merchant only has 2000 cat left and you are only selling items valued at 3000 cat, then that's 2000 cat you wont be getting unless you buy some things you probably don't need or want to carry to balance the transaction. Unmodded I think this is fairly important as merchants don't have a lot of cat, so most of the effort in selling things for money is going from merchant to merchant and slowly unloading all your wares. If you are say using a mod that increases merchant cat to 90k then that is going to heavily shift the balance of things.

[Plom]

Originally posted by Astasia:

The advantage of selling more lower price things compared to fewer higher price things, like katana vs wakizashi, is you can more reliably maximize your cat per merchant. If a merchant only has 2000 cat left and you are only selling items valued at 3000 cat, then that's 2000 cat you wont be getting unless you buy some things you probably don't need or want to carry to balance the transaction. Unmodded I think this is fairly important as merchants don't have a lot of cat, so most of the effort in selling things for money is going from merchant to merchant and slowly unloading all your wares. If you are say using a mod that increases merchant cat to 90k then that is going to heavily shift the balance of things.

1 reffited katana sell for 1614$.
1 reffited wakizashi sell for 807$.

If the merchant only have 2000$, then he could buy either 1 katana or 2 wakizashi, which is exactly the same result. Only difference is that you could produce more katana to sell in others cities.

[Astasia]

Those were just example numbers, instead say the merchant has 900-1500 cats left then, that's one more lower quality wakizashi to sell, and 807 more cats you are getting from the merchant. The point is in the base game the bottleneck on how many cats you earn per day is generally the merchant cat pool and refresh rate, so you want to maximize the amount of cats you can get from each one so you don't have to travel that far or to that many merchants to unload. You could mix and match, some katana and some wakizashi, to use the same example, but if you just want to make one thing the wakizashi will be easier to unload.

[Plom]

Originally posted by Astasia:

Those were just example numbers, instead say the merchant has 900-1500 cats left then, that's one more lower quality wakizashi to sell, and 807 more cats you are getting from the merchant. The point is in the base game the bottleneck on how many cats you earn per day is generally the merchant cat pool and refresh rate, so you want to maximize the amount of cats you can get from each one so you don't have to travel that far or to that many merchants to unload. You could mix and match, some katana and some wakizashi, to use the same example, but if you just want to make one thing the wakizashi will be easier to unload.

Yeah no, if you just want to earn those last remaining cents, you could just sell raw materials, no need to craft anything.

Also, in vanilla game a single Hive Village can hold 2 merchants with 18k and 25K each. You can sell a lot of katana there. Following a road, there's plenty of Hive Villages. You don't seem to know where to sell your stuff that's all.

If the merchant doesn't have enough money, I don't see why it would be a bad idea to barter some katanas in exchange for something you can't craft, like backpack, maps, end-game weapons or anything.

[mr_bman]

Stolen frag axes from Squin.

[Plom]

Originally posted by mr_bman:

Stolen frag axes from Squin.

Your base can produce "stolen frag axes from Squin" ?

[kristianjakob]

Hands down.

The very best way to make money through crafting is to produce Heart Protectors. Nothing comes even close to this. But, it is only truely efficient if you can buy the materials needed.

Producing the materials: Iron -> plates is a terrible business.

So, that means setting up shop in one of the town in or around the greater desert area.


For a base.

Producing Grog in it self is not necessarily a super high money maker, it is decent though. What it really does is make farming wheat less logistically challenging. And farming wheat is a pretty strong money maker.

[Guts]

Originally posted by kristianjakob:

Producing the materials: Iron -> plates is a terrible business.

Unless you have a couple iron refineries and you have enough people to man all the stations, that is. I have a save with 20 people just making weapons, and there's enough labor and materials to keep going forever. I agree selling iron plates is bad business, but making them isn't bad.

[kristianjakob]

Tech level 5.

You would need to make automated ore drills from one end of Kenshi to the other before that would be remotly a decent business.

Plate beating, chain sheet crafting and what not will never be a good business.. ever..


If you want to, efficiently, go down the crafting road just have a couple of crafters in one or more cities in the UC area and use the other xx people as soldiers instead. That will only require tech level 3

[kristianjakob]

This is efficient

If you want to make your living as a thief: well, cats is a no issue

If you want to make your living as a hunter/fighter: Hunt Gut thing nests

If you want to be a drug lord. Buy from the swamp and at least train some useful skills (atletics) for when you cant be bothered anymore

If you want to make your living crafting high end weapons and armor: Set up shop in a city in or around the greater desert area

If you want to make a base: Make a living as a farmer. Cotton is too tedious so the second best option is wheat -> Grog.

Anything else....

[titanopteryx]

Originally posted by Figure.05:

Absolutely misleading top answer. Don't know if it was that easy in 2019. I am on my fourth playthrough and as mentioned by Tommygun; wakizashi is the no-brainer go to reliable cashmaker. Once you get your food production going well (dustwichs, foodcube or gohan) and you get into arms manufacturing; you wont ever have to worry about food or money and can recruit so many people.

Wakizashi is optimal because as mentioned, you can fit allot more on a pack animal than any thing else based on price. Where it went over allot of people's head was the sale price. Allot people mentioned the base price and not the sale price.

Grog is vastly inferior. It only nets around 20k per pack animal and takes Miu (Farm 60) 4.5 crops for someone else to make only somewhere around 20 to 30 units per day. It also fits terribly on a pack animal compared to 1x6 or even 1x7 size weapons.

Or the Hashish which is high risk, requires specific vendor (Thief trader) and annoying bribery dialogue for a meager low value run compared to weaponsmithing. You have to take long tasteless tour of Holy Nation, Borderlands, Shek Kingdom and Empire to offload enough to get the most out of it.

Bandana is a terrible waste of time. It takes up way more room than allot of weapons and caps at meager c975 at Masterwork versus a c1,798 Catun 3 Wakizashi you can make with Weaponbench 2 which is do-able if yout dont waste the 21 Ancient Books available to be bought at the 3 key locations (Scrapyard, Flats Lagoon and Worlds End) and have your fabric and iron plate production prepared in advance. With a Scorchlander like Jewel, you can hit a 100% chance to get MK 1 in a 3-4 days of weaponsmithing from Skill 1 to Skill 60. Thats a c2,187 Sell value per unit. A Pack Bull can hold 60 units. You can sell it anywhere.

Beak Things eggs is also rather stupid. The nest aren't plentiful or respawn frequent. You can raid them using around 2 mercenary groups but that's not reliable because the more you use mercenaries the less available they become because it takes a while (days or weeks) for the game to correctly path them back to their set location or respawn. They only work for 2 days, so if the pathing (which it will) snags on a collision mesh, it will take them even longer to follow you to the Beak Things. And, the Beak Things will likely kill one too many, making repetition even harder. Sure you can do it from literally the first day, but there's better thing you can do with mercenaries. And you have to get heavy mercenaries because light ones wont get the job done.

And if anyone mentions smithing from town, they're either new to the game or like wasting time. Smithing from town is a very big waste of time because collecting the material to smith is not only expensive but unreliable and time consuming to even make it worth it. This is where mercenaries play a role. You steal for money or get 5 other people to mine copper in safer places like Shek Kingdom or Holy Nation, build a perimeter for your town, pay mercenaries with theft/mining income, start a farm, then a mine and start the workshop. It's simple Kenshi business.

Oh, and do I have to mention that the price gets even better with upgrades compared to the silly alcohol, drug, Beak Thing eggs or clothing? So many articles (Including the Kenshi fandom) are either straight up misleading or out of date on this topic. I haven't seen one person across Youtube or anywhere else that can demonstrate a proper rag to riches scheme in Kenshi without low-key cheating or making assumptions. I literally discontinued several playthroughs because I tried all of those schemes mentioned and they all suck compared to arms dealing. Looting enemies and scavenging is another big waste of time by the way. The fact some goofy dork records himself advising to do this and uploads it on Youtube comes to show just how uninformed most people who play this game are. Aside from reselling stolen goods from Armor King or Gin, I see no quicker way to make money in Kenshi other than outright skipping the bull using FCS.

Well at 1,655 hours i find that I do like wasting time. So here's what I did to make money in my Holy Citizen start save. I started in Stack. The thing about Stack is non-human drifters will keep wandering into town, or sometimes female human ones, and get attacked by the guards and get $500 bounties on them for assault. You have to be quick like a ninja to grab them because the guards will try to pick them up to. Then if you turn in the bounty but don't take any money you get 5 rep. So with my initial 15 from the start it took me 17 bounty turn ins to get to 100 rep. By this time I had already hired someone and had them go up to the flotsams and he was waiting there. Now I waited until night. With 100 rep with the HN I had gained the ability to pick up the inquisitor when he was sleeping. This worked on the other inquisitor too but not the phoenix. I think it's because the inquisitors both have bounties and the phoenix doesn't. After picking them up you can just run out of town carrying them all the way down to the squin jail and make 80k in bounty money.

The reason I had someone up at the flotsams is Stack becomes owned by the Shek after this, and if you don't lose your allied status with the HN you very likely will be attacked if you spend much time there. Which you might want to do because suddenly a lot more buildings become buyable. You don't lose rep for turning in the inquisitors by the way. Also don't forget to take their stuff while holding them.

Anyway, at 1.6k hours that's what i did to make $80k.