How do you make money?

[JAGIELSKI]

Merchant interface is confusing to me and it's not like there's auction house or anything similar.

[bob_2059]

By default, there's not much. Which makes sense, since part of Wurm Online's economic model is people paying RL money for in-game currency.
It's been a while since I set up a server from scratch, but at least in the past Traders were off by default. An in-game GM can enable them, which then opens up A LOT of currency generating options since Traders will buy items from players.
Beyond that, in "stock" Wurm players can get a rarity drumroll when foraging/botanizing/burying corpses which results in them finding a coin. I'm not sure what the max value is, but several times I have found 1 silver- maybe that's the cap, maybe it's higher. But at least that much is possible.
There are also mods for making money, such as the Bounty mod which rewards a player with a bounty for killing hostile mobs.
If you're playing on your own server and are a GM, just create the coins.

[Michael]

Originally posted by Darkhog:

Merchant interface is confusing to me and it's not like there's auction house or anything similar.

With respect to the previous poster who replied to you, making money requires no mods or other players. It's as simple as activating an item and "selling" the item to the village marker.

The vanilla merchants don't offer a whole lot, but the items they do offer are fairly rare. If you're playing by yourself on an offline server, these merchant items are pretty much the only reason for money at all. (Unless you've enabled deed upkeep in order to give yourself a challenge.)

Now, on a populated server, players would be setting up merchants themselves, and the economy would be mostly player-based, which makes things a bit more interesting. Folks will stock their vendors with different items that you can shop around for. You can make money that way by specializing in a specific craft and setting up a stall of your own, or they could pay you directly for services such as repairing their villages.

[bob_2059]

The vanilla merchants don't offer a whole lot, but the items they do offer are fairly rare. If you're playing by yourself on an offline server, these merchant items are pretty much the only reason for money at all.

You've confused Merchants with Traders.
Merchant: completely useless for solo play https://www.wurmpedia.com/index.php/Personal_merchant
Trader, however is not: https://www.wurmpedia.com/index.php/Trader

There's a reason I mentioned enabling Traders first in my reply :)

[Eyesgood]

Join an active server, build up your skills, purchase a merchant and place the merchant at an established market on the server, load up the merchant with items and check back often. I have made many gold by just looking at the market trends on the server I play on and adjusting the items I sell to meet the demands of the day. It's fun and really doable.