So how do YOU make money in Rimworld?

[The Blind One]

So how do You make money?

1> drugs (beer, smokeleaf, flake, yayo)
2> art
3> food (acting like an uber food delivery service, it's semi decent but caravan intensive)
4> minerals (it's like food but even harder and less rewarding)
5> weapons (hahaha, no you don't, it's worth less than the minerals)
6> armor (still no)
7> animals (actually pretty decent but is very biome dependent on how good it is)
8> sell medicine (lack of neutroamine availability and medicine heavily undervalued)
9> sell industrial goods (lack of plasteel / gold availability for production not to mention high entree barrier)
10> clothing (sounds good but is labor intensive and works best as a sidle hustle, selling old stuff)
11> slaves (nobody buys them and they are undervalued)
12> organ harvesting (cool but the mood debuffs are ridiculous on vanilla and lack of interested buyers, so no)
13> Are there more options? Let me know ...

So far I've found only method 1, to actually be a reliable source of income and a way to trade with caravans. They almost always seem to accept smokeleaf and beer so they are extremely acceptable goods to use for bartering. Hard drugs are worth the most as a way to turn pawn work time into cash but seems highly unethical to me and a little harder to trade with caravans.

Really the only way to reliable make money and barter in rimworld so far I've found is to do the recreational drug business and the other ones as side hustles ... I guess you can go without doing drugs and rely solely on your side hustles but that just leaves you with liquidity problems down the road.

Does anyone actually make decent money doing anything else? Ethically that is ...

I wish fabrication or medicine production was actually more feasible as an ethical way of producing liquidity but the neutroamine and rare resources like plasteel make production hard and it is just not supplied in enough quantities in vanilla to be viable.

Does everyone really just sell drugs lol?

Well I guess you could do art ... especially turn those slaves into art producers ... I guess there's that ... but again ... highly unethical.

[whatamidoing]

I don't really aim to make money as a primary goal. I sell things I don't need, and buy things I do.

[Zim]

Organs and Drugs will always give you a solid income. Later in game (if you own the DLCs) you can have a specialist for crafting and create legendary devilstrand dusters on masse and sell them for a huge amount of money

[ChemPlay]

I don't

[screamingcrane]

drugs, art, herbal meds, clothing aswell

[glass zebra]

Just going through some of the skills left to right (I build my economy on what I am given):
- exotic animals (like tortoises)
- pemmican, survival meals, beer, smoke leaf joints. cooking has no specialist though
- raw meat and leather
- surplus raw plant stuff
- surplus plasteel
- harps, bad armour
- capes
- art
- components, body parts
- hard drugs

Most of the time it's just surplus or busy work being sold. I don't do economy focused colonies that often and expect drop pod gifting to be fixed sometime soon anyway. "Making money" is pretty useless for normal colonies. Just selling what you don't need and buying what you need comes pretty natural without focusing on it. Having what you don't need often just comes from people having nothing better to do.

[Zim]

Tough luck. Insect jelly and animal hides creates a little bit of an income as well. Also I highly recommend getting the DLCs. The customisation options from Idiology are awesome and can completely change the way you play the game. If you want so sell organs just remove the debuff from your idiology. Simple as

[Narrowmind]

So, labor wise, how much do you think drugs is better than clothing?

[Astasia]

I don't. You only need enough silver to make some sterile floors in your hospital eventually, which I get just by selling random junk I get from raids and quests. Sometimes while making sculptures for my colony I trade the junk ones away for resources. Going out of your way to inflate your wealth generally isn't beneficial.

[Harry_Robinson1]

3, 5, 7, 10, 12 and 13, 13 for me is selling cloth and other crops that I grow huge amounts of in sun lamp farms.

[martindirt]

If you really want to make money, and build up your wealth to the skies... (More wealth = more raiders)
Vanilla:
Best way is small sculptures made of wood. Most (still all?) traders buying them. Next one is drugs.

Modded:
Hospitality: run a motel, get guests paying for your junk and for sleeping in extremely impressive bedrooms.

Restaurant (idk the exact mod name, but the one needs cash register).

My favorite: The Forbidden One.
Make a brothel: your prisoners, slaves (thanks the slave system!!), or your colonists hook up and serve guests, visitors, traders for good money.

[RJS]

Originally posted by whatamidoing:

I don't really aim to make money as a primary goal. I sell things I don't need, and buy things I do.

Originally posted by ChemPlay:

I don't

Then why answer?

[Henry of Skalitz]

I sell stuff I don't need and that's enough to cover everything that I want to buy for a long time because I always have a few thousands of silver in stock.

[Yxklyx]

If you want to build up wealth, don't trade. You always get shafted on prices. Your wealth goes down when you buy or sell anything.

[Malthar]

I dont, i just trade surplus items instead of silver, ill usually have around 2k silver at any given time and it stays fairly consistent there

[Mr.Ant]

Chemfuel from rimefeller is my primary source of income half way through my games

Other than that I make tremendous amounts of medicine and herbal medicine

And then I also start selling drugs from my surplus of smoke leaf and beer