How to make money in Crossout, the proper guide

[faijeya]

There are a lot of old advices on the forums.
Listen to me and I'll tell you the truth.
More than that, I'll tell you when to disregard it.

There are four main methods of earning coins in Crossout.
They all are perfectly legal and actively partaking in the coin economy actually helps the devs earn money (if you care about it), so that's it.
However, all of them, except for the first one, will hurt your wallet if you don't do the math.

Do the math, each time, every time.
https://crossoutdb.com is your best friend, alongside with Google Docs, Gnumeric, Excel, Calc or whatever you like.
If you don't want to do the math (after all, you don't play a vehicular shooter for some spreadsheet fun) or are incapable of doing it, you will lose your toy money to someone who did. Just buy the coins then and have fun, it's a game after all.

Methods are listed in the order of increasing investment (time and coins).
Obviously, the more you pour in, the more you can get out, probably.

1) Resources selling.
1.1) Sell crates. All of them. If you like playing lottery, chances are you won't like the market at all. That's easy money while someone still buys them. A sucker is born every minute, so it's not like it'll go out of fashion soon.
1.2) Sell fuel. Put the fuel barrel under the cabin. While you reach your daily 60k quota, you'll get about 50 fuel. 30 coins in two days is quite a hassle-less way to earn initial capital. May be rendered less profitable if the fuel prices go down for any reason as unlikely as it is.
1.3) Sell copper. You will need at least 25 coins to rent a workbench, so it's not like hoarding it will help. I'd suggest to stop selling copper if you have about 100 coins, though it's up to you.

2) Speculation.
2.1) White modules are dirt-cheap. In fact, they are usually cheaper than the cost of x100 scrap divided by 100. You set buy orders for radios or radiators for 0.01, get them, scrap them and sell for 0.02 or whatever the price of scrap is. It's a sad way to scrape for coins, but it is there. Rendered not profitable once the cost of x100 scrap drops below 2 coins.
2.2) Fast-moving materials (scrap, copper, fuel, wire, chips to some extent) quite often do have drastically different prices for x10 and x100 packs (x100 and x1000 for scrap and fuel). It may be profitable to buy twenty ten-packs and sell them as two x100 or vice-versa. Mind the 10% sales tax.
2.3) The margin between selling and buying prices of an item may be more than 10%. If the minimal selling price * 0.9 is bigger than the maximum buying price, that may be your chance. Buy low, sell high. Caveat: it usually happens on slow-moving positions. You've got the item for cheap usually because someone despaired to sell it at a high price. Now you're in their shoes.
2.4) You may be able to guess what prices will go up and what prices will go down. While there's no way to short in Crossout market, you can still buy low. The value of these predictions, of course, varies. If you feel that lucky, disregard paragraph 1.1.
2.5) If you've got a lot of money, you can try to monopolize the position. Someone has bought all normal season crates this Thursday and ramped up the prices. Not sure if there's any profit, but it's impressive.

3) Casual crafting - you do own the scrap and copper you need for a craft.
3.1) Always calculate your blue craft break-even point.
If you've sold the scrap and copper outright, you'd have some money to the tune of 40 gold (with the prices at the moment of writing, of course).
Obviously, you'll need to have better profit with an item to justify all your efforts.
Ok, you do the math: (0.9 x 4.5 x selling_price_x100_scrap + 0.9 x 0.5 x selling_price_x100_scrap + 5 + white_items_cost) / 0.9
I assume you don't bulk-buy the workbench space and that you don't rush the production. If you rush, add 5.56 to the result.
That's your break-even point, if you sell at this price, you'll have exactly the same profit as if you've sold the resources.
Choose your craft objects for sale to have current selling price sufficiently high above your break-even point. The market may and will move and you're likely to get into a bidding war which may drag you far below what you expected.
Yep, everything on the engineers' white and blue workbenches and more than a half factions' blue recipes are pure loss at the best circumstances.
3.2) With purples you're likely to buy your wires anyway.
As you've seen, most blues are trading below your break-even point. So don't craft them, buy them. Set buying orders, be patient.
And even if you do have enough hard-earned copper to craft 6 blue items and then a purple one, better spend it all on crafting 3 purples. After all, you have rented the bench for 5 items minimum.
The math is as follows: (0.9 x 2.5 x selling_price_x100_scrap + 0.9 x 1.5 x selling_price_x100_scrap + 7.5 x buying_price_x100_wires + 20 + blue_items_cost) / 0.9
Once again, be really picky about what you want to craft. A lot of purples are sold at loss nowadays.

4) Dedicated crafting - you buy the scrap and copper you need for a craft.
4.1) Your blues break-even point is significantly higher than the casual crafter's. Not only you have to buy all white items you probably do not have, the copper and scrap have 10% more value to you.
Also, chances are you want to rush - to cover that sweet buying order (that was automatically set by the system when someone wanted to buy X items per Y cost, but X-n were available) - don't. It was profitable, but not anymore.
Rushing was also a way to get more sales in the same period of time. Now it is likely just to increase your losses.
So, (4.5 x buying_price_x100_scrap + 0.5 x buying_price_x100_scrap + 4.5 + white_items_cost) / 0.9
And you've got just a handful of blue recipes that will give you any profit. Rush profit is out of question at the moment of writing. Move to purples.
4.2) With the purples you're mostly on the same page with casual crafters.
You need to set: (2.5 x selling_price_x100_scrap + 1.5 x selling_price_x100_scrap + 7.5 x buying_price_x100_wires + 20 + blue_items_cost) / 0.9.
That means you're just 0.25*2.76+0.15*72.7 = 11.6 gold behind and usually it is negligible.
Advices set in 3.2 stand. And if you want to rush, just add 22.2 and see if you get profit. You may.
Still, purples are a dying market too. Do not invest too much into a workbench.
4.3) Artisan and paint containers are a buyer's market with huge margins between selling and buying prices. As the workbench is really expensive, you'd do much better if you just speculate on them (see 2.3). And you'll probably do even better if you won't touch them at all.
4.4) If you do gold stuff, you know the market much better than me. Godspeed.

If you want to take a break from crafting and selling, liquidate any module you don't use, even at loss.
The market is deflationary at the moment, so your coins buy more every day.
Of course, it's a bet that the prices won't go up, but if you spent enough time on the market in this game and know the overall market audience, it's probably a safe bet.

You may be tempted to try to play on the daily price fluctuations (things are sold and bought cheaper at the prime-time), but that's fickle at best.

Don't get too invested in the market, because if you like playing glorified spreadsheets, you can do it at work for much better money.

Thank you for reading.