Making easy money the shady way

A quick and easy way to make as much money as you want, so you can stop worrying about it and enjoy the story.

Foreword

As of December 2017, this guide is somewhat obsolete, as tea can no longer be bought consistently. The method still works fine for making a large profit out of any tea you buy through bargains

This guide details an exploit which can be used in Sunless Skies to make easy, fast sovereigns.
No bugs are involved, this method instead exploits an oversight in game balance. I would nevertheless classify it as an exploit because it's not very fun, and is not how the game is meant to be played. But it IS quick, so you can minimise the misery.

Why am I writing this guide?

1. While publicising game exploits is sometimes considered a bad practise, sunless skies is a singleplayer game. The only person affected by you cheating is yourself. If it were a multiplayer game i wouldn't be writing this
   
2. Currently, the game economy is not too well balanced, and if you try to play the game as intended, you will likely descend into poverty and starvation, or else be stuck grinding honey from titania.
   
3. Money is only a part of this game. Sunless Skies, like most of failbetter's work, is largely about exploration and narrative. Cheating your way to riches may suit you just fine, if you find that the economic aspects are simply an obstruction to enjoying the rest of the game

FBG Is aware of this exploit too, i have mailed them about it in the past. This guide is not any kind of attempt to force them to fix it faster, this is simply for the benefit of players

Preparations and Requirements

1. You need to know where Port Avon is. It is always somewhere in the largest middle ring, its never too far from new winchester.
   
2. You need to have unlocked Mme Lumiere's shop. This is naturally unlocked through the main questline, it's not too hard to do, and can be done within 20-30 mins of starting a new game. but here's a quickstart guide, assuming a new captain:
   
   • Pickup the Fastidious Inspector from New Winchester, and buy 1x bronzewood and 1x stained glass (pawn your weapons)
     
   • Take her up to Port Prosper. its always in a fixed location north-north-east of new winchester, in the outer ring. Drop her off there, and then hand in the bronzewood+glass to complete the tower.
     
   • Head back to new winchester, and pickup a quest to rescue mme Lumiere from Hybras. Hybras is found in the outer ring, usually in the north or east of the region.
     
   • Take lumiere back to new winchester, and pickup the Pernickety Factor there. Transport her to hybras, do her thing, and return to new winchester
     
   • Mme Lumiere will have a cinema screening. Watch that, talk to her afterwards, and her shop will be open.
3. To start the route, you'll need enough fuel and supplies to get to port avon and back (1 of each is usually enough)
   
4. at least 60g startup capital. more is better. Remember you can always pawn your weapons in new winchester,and then buy them back later for the same price. Combat is easy to avoid by just ignoring enemies and steaming on by

That's all the preparation you need.

The Method

1. In new winchester, buy as many Caddies of Dried Tea as you can carry. Or as many as you can afford, if you're short on cash. They cost 60g each. (don't forget to save some money and space for fuel and supplies). Tea can be bought in the Free Winchester Bazaar, although this does require tackety presence.
   
   If the tacketies are gone, the tea might move to another shop. but failing that, you can also buy it in port prosper. Depending on how your map was generated, port prosper might be closer or farther from port avon, but having to go there will slow down your profiteering a little.
   
   
   
2. Chug on over to Port Avon
   
   
   
3. At the Port Avon Dock, use the option "Host a tea-part aboard your locomotive". This will use up one Caddy of Dried Tea, and give you 5x Port Avon Welcome. Use this option repeatedly until all your tea is gone. It will stop showing the exact amount of welcome points you have once it goes over 10, but it's still tracked internally.
   
   
   
4. Move on over to the Cyclopean Ruins, and use the option "Enjoy the picturesque surroundings". This uses up 1x Port Avon Welcome
   This option gives you a very easy hearts check, even starting stats will get you almost to 100%. Getting the rest of the way there is easy with just a little levelling.
   
   Sadly, this is the boring part.
   A success on this option will award 1x Vision of Heaven. This is what you want.
   However, there is an alternative, "Narrow Success" option, which will happen frequently even at 100% success rate. This outcome gives no items, reduces terror a little, and - annoyingly, boots you back a screen, meaning more clicking
   Based on my testing, this Narrow Success option occurs roughly 25% of the time.
   
   Click this option repeatedly until you've used up all of your Port Avon Welcome
   
   
   
5. Lastly, steam on back to New Winchester, and sell all of your newly aquired Visions of Heaven at Mme. Lumiere's shop. She'll give you 50g for each of them.

How Profitable is this?

Now, lets do some math.
Each Caddy of Tea gives you 5x Welcome, and thus five chances at getting a Vision of Heaven. On average, 25% of those chances will fail, so that works out to 3.75 Visions of Heaven for each tea caddy.

At a resale value of 50g each, you're recieving an average gross revenue of 187.5g per tea caddy.
Subtracting the initial 60g cost results in a Net Revenue of 127.5g per caddy.
That's a 212% profit!

There is some overhead for the fuel and supplies required for the journey, but not much. 1 of each is 60g total overhead per trip. This is pretty insignificant if you're just working with the starting ship and its 8 remaining slots, allowing 960g profit per trip.

If you increase cargo space, by upgrading the train, installing spacious wardrobes, and a durendal canning system, you can more than double that. Getting 20 cargo space with a parsival isn't too hard.
Keep upgrading your train with new equipment after each trip, and you could easily make enough to buy the Moloch in about an hour

But this method is really, really boring. it involves a ton of clicking without reading on things. It is however, much faster than other grindy exploits like shipping honey from titania, and if you just want to get it out of the way it's the best option.

There's no need to use it to maximum efficiency as described above though. What you can do, and my preferred method, is to simply use this lightly, as a crutch. Take along 1-2 caddies of tea when you plan to pass by port avon anyways, or were running a bit low. Spread it out to supplement your income obtained from playing the game normally, and it can allow you to play things at your own pace and enjoy the story. In this way, you can think of it like turning down the difficulty of the economy

To Failbetter Games

This kind of exploit should obviously be worked on a bit before the game is truly released. Exploits aren't fun, and minimise other parts of the game. I know you guys have dealt with similar things in the past, like the sunlight trading and sphinxstone shipping, in Sunless Sea. This exploit is both faster, and yet more annoying than those due to all the clicking. It's gotta be fixed eventually.

Maybe don't prioritise it for now though. As mentioned it is useful as a crutch to help players through the currently-unreasonably-harsh economy, and it sort of serves as a stopgap until you guys get around to implementing more quests, and trade opportunities. But when the time comes

How to fix this? I know you guys will find a creative way to limit this and stop it overshadowing the rest of the game.
But I have a couple recommendations:

• Hook it into an airs mechanic, much like the Port Avon Village Green, where the options you have available are constantly randomised, and so you'd be forced to take some less profitable choices to make this one reappear. Also add more content to the cyclopean ruins
  
• Reduce the welcome gain from Tea gradually. Allow the people of port avon to grow bored of the novelty of tea, gaining less and less favor from it until this stops being profitable. 2 favor would make it risky, 1 favor would make it a loss. It might also be worth adding other possible trades (in addition to gossip and tea) to allow gaining favor, each with their own diminishing returns
  
• Increase the difficulty on that hearts check. It's kind of silly to have a check which is too easy to fail. And it means that whatever lovely text you wrote for the failure option will never be seen

[messalasfury]

well... sunlight will kill you eventually, going up to the surface without dieing isnt possible at a certain point. sphinxstone isnt endless. Tradeing on the surface is made super annoying on purpose so ya dont really wanna do it... think thats the point, they make these boreing $ grinds possible but make it so ya dont really want to do it lol

[Lordly Cinder]

Very reasonable none should judge.

[SigilEaten]

After the prospects and bargains update i dont find the economics too harsh. At the moment i think i will get too much money to spend when i accomplish the grave study at the traitors wood which requires tons of retries and finding ammo at bargains.
Still, i agree that this tempting way of getting a lot of money with dumb repetitive grind should be fixed before release.

[jgtogi]

Also thanks for the info.

[jgtogi]

How is this an exploit? You have a five steps process which allows you to get a 200% return on profit for one item. This sounds about on par with other trading games out there including some of the trade routes in Sunless Sea. Granted maybe it shouldn't last forever like the stone blocks or honey trade that was in Sunless Sea but it isn't really an exploit. You aren't getting infinite money or something with this you put in time and get paid for it.

[gkender]

Solid guide!