Launch Guide - How to Make Gold in Shroud of the Avatar

Want to start making gold quickly in Shroud of the Avatar?

Read this guide to learn where to get loot to sell, how to sell, what to sell, where to sell it, and how much to sell it for.

Welcome, lets make you rich!

It can seem hard to make gold in Shroud of the Avatar, but with some key information helping you out, you will have a fat purse in no time. I will teach you how to sell your loot for maximum profit, how to use Public Vendors (called PV for the rest of the guide) and how to craft in a way that makes you gold instead of draining you.

Easy Gold

Unless you’ve got a RP reason not to, go to the Oracle every day and tell her “Test”. Answer correctly and you get 500 gold and 1000 XP for both adventuring and crafting.



If you don’t mind selling them, is your Virtue Banners and Virtue Gear can make you tens of thousands of gold. These can be gotten in quests, but you only get one of each, so be aware of that before you sell them off. Watch the Public Vendors and try to get an idea of what they are selling for, then list in that price range. I would post a number but it might be outdated by next month.

Where Do You Get the Loot?

Somehow you need to obtain assets. The most straightforward way is to go out and get some action. If you are just starting, complete all three of the Outskirts, including the quests.

Don’t run from road encounters, they are full of good materials to harvest. If it’s a skeleton encounter, just stay well away from them if they are more powerful, and strip the rest of the scene bare.

After finishing the Outskirts, do some adventuring in nearby Tier 1 scenes, then get into the Tier 2 Mines. There is one near the start of each quest path. Don’t spend all your time in any one location, there are plenty of good places to get loot, but do swing by the mines off and on.

Mine location spoilers:

The Lost Whiteguard Silver Mine is near Solace Bridge, reached by going into the Whiteguard Foothills and finding the entrance.

The Understorm Gold Mine is near Blood River, reachable from both Longfall Woods and within the town of Storm’s Reach.

Broken Echo’s Silver Mine is near Highvale, an entrance can be found under the lower waterfall in Jaaniford, and one in South Broken Road.

See the bottom of the guide for places to sell materials directly outside of those mines.

Should You Sell The Loot?

In most cases, yes. But here a couple of quick checks to see which items you should horde.

Are you Mage? If so, you should just throw your reagents in the bank and save them for later. Mandrake, Nightshade, Corpse Wax, Sulfuric Ash, Serpent Scales, Garlic, Black Pearls, and Obsidian Chips. You will eventually know which schools you are focusing on, and which reagents you need, you can sell the others off in big stack.

Are you planning to be a crafter? You might want to horde some things relevant to your craft if that’s the case. Carpentry uses Woods and Pine Resin. Tailoring uses Cotton, Beetles, Suet, Animal Hides. Dyes take Barks and Pine Resin. Tanning uses Animal Hides, Suet, and Beetles. Smithing uses all the metals. Alchemy uses Gold Ore and reagents. Masterworking gear uses Silver.

Pick your path, and everything else is a major source of income for you. Sell it!

At some point you may start scrapping weapon loot too. This will get you metal and wood scraps, useful for future crafting endeavors.

What's the Loot Worth?

Take a moment to look at this price guide from the Brittany Mining Company[bmcguild.enjin.com], a guild you will see in game as BMC. While I consider the prices a little on the high side, they are close enough that you can get a very good idea of the value of items.

The BMC price guide is updated regularly, so check back often.

What to Sell Where?

Raw Materials fall into three sell categories; Sell to an NPC, Quicker to Sell to an NPC, and Never Sell to an NPC.

Sell to an NPC

Most weapon drops are vendor trash until you decide you want to start salvaging for wood and metal scrap and the potential for patterns. Stick with selling the weapons for now. The Combat Merchant will usually buy weapons for a bit more gold than the NPC Merchants.

Note: if it is looted from a weapon rack or the ground, and has a value of 0, the vendor won’t buy it, so the only option is to salvage it at a blacksmithing or carpentry table.

There are only a few raw materials with no current crafting use. You won’t find them in the above chart. The ones I know of are the Black Cutworm and the different Borers. You can horde these in hopes that their value goes up when they become useful in crafting, or sell them to an NPC. Particularly in the early game, I recommend selling.

Quicker to Sell to an NPC, but Possible to Get More with Work

These are items like reagents, animal hides, and cotton. The value that players pay is so close to the value that NPC’s pay that in my opinion it's not worth it to put them on a PV.

You could eek out a little more gold from it, but is it worth using one of your ten spots on that vendor, the risk of it being destroyed if it doesn’t sell, and the time and bank space needed to make the stack and list it? Up to you.

However, if you are active in the Trade channels (see below) and have the bank space, saving up stacks of 100 or 1000 of these and selling to players directly will make you more gold than selling to an NPC.

Sell on Public Vendor, to another Avatar, or an Avatar’s Vendor

This is almost all other raw materials as well as fancy loot and crafted items.

Beetle Carapaces, for instance, sell to NPC’s for 32g, but are currently selling to players in the range of 700 gold! So if you get a beetle (from a cotton bush) jump up and down with joy, and go list it on a Public Vendor! If you get Pine Resin, that’s another 200 gold happy dance! (Prices fluctuate, remember to check the price guide[bmcguild.enjin.com] or ask for a “Price Check” in Trade in Discord regularly).

You will sell these on PVs, to Player Vendors, or directly to other players if you are active in the Trade channels. The Discord Trade channel is the best way to find people to sell directly to. Click her for the invite.[www.shroudoftheavatar.com]

Public Vendors (PV)

The best Public Vendors (pictured above) at the moment are in Owl's Head, Ardoris, Resolute, and Aerie. Fill those first before listing on less trafficed PVs. You only get 10 items per PV, so if you're selling lots of stuff move on to Kingsport, Central Brittany, and then wherever you feel like trying.

The best strategy for maximum sales is to list right before the weekend.

To sell on a PV click on the “MANAGE INVENTORY” tab. Drag the item you want to sell into the right panel, choose the quantity, and price for the entire stack.

Try to make your PV listings affordable to lots of buyers. It only costs an extra 10 gold to split a large stack into two smaller stacks. Generally stacks sizes that are multiples of 10 or 100 are more popular because the buyers can easily calculate how much they are paying per item.

Set an alarm to go reclaim items that haven't sold before they get destroyed, which happens 7 days from when you listed them. Give yourself a little time to make the rounds, pulling everything off and relisting.

Flipping items on PVs

One advantage you gain by knowing the prices of items is that you can sometimes find things on PVs for far less than they are worth. An Obsidian Item of Unlearning, for instance, costs 3 COTOs, so is worth over 10,000g. If you see one on a PV for 1,000g, as recently happened to me, you can buy it and immediately relist for a nice profit. I sold that one for 7,000g, and both myself and the buyer were happy.

Update: COTO prices are closer to 7,000 gold each now. You can also check some of those prices directly by clicking the COTO button in the upper right of your screen.

It’s easier to find low priced items during the middle of the week, but you can still score on a weekend. Sort by “Date” and look at the most recent items first. They are the most likely to be a great price. Things that have been sitting on the vendor for almost a week are probably overpriced or not popular.

Using the date method, you can get a rough idea of what things will sell for. If it’s a raw material that has been on the vendor for six days, make sure you sell for less than that price when you are listing.

Player Vendors

Player Vendors, generally referred to just as Vendors, pay the best prices for raw materials. Being player driven, you know there will be some really bad deals along with the good ones. Know your prices, and don't sell to someone that is trying to pay you a stupidly low price.

Player Vendors sit down when they haven't been used by their owner in at least two weeks. If you see them sitting, there is a good chance you can save time and ignore that vendor.

See below for a list of player vendors that were buy raw materials for a good price the last time I checked.

What to Craft for Sale

You have to be careful when crafting for sale, it is easy to lose gold instead of making it if you don’t know your prices or if you list slow moving items.

An easy way to get started is to focus on items made out of granite and clay. These raw materials are only worth 2 -3 gold each, so if you make something and it doesn’t sell you aren’t losing much. These include statues, carvings, marble benches, antique clay pots, etc. You can find recipes for these above many banks on the decorations merchant. Avoid the “Head on Pedestal” recipes for now, they have a few steps and are thus more expensive.

Update: Granite is now 20 - 30 gold thanks to the addition of player made dungeons, which consume huge quantities of granite. It's now worth selling it directly, don't sell benches made from them! Clay is low priced still, so anqitue clay pots have a good profit margin.

If you’re focused on gaining gold, I recommend avoiding gear crafting for the time being. There are major changes coming soon, but at the moment it is hard to make a profit unless you are a high end crafter, and you will spend a lot of materials (which would otherwise be sold) to get your skills to that point.

We have buy orders set up at the S Mart Factorium for timber and ore. There are instructions on the bullitin board that explain the steps needed to turn a profit by milling and smelting for us. If you're a high end crafter please leave these orders for the newer Avatars for now, even though they may be tempting.

Shopping

Perhaps the greatest challenge in Shroud of the Avatar is to not blowing your gold stack on the many great things available to buy. If you have a goal like ownership, for example, hold onto your gold until you reach that goal. After that, spend as you like. But if you’re saving up for something, really save or it will take forever to get there.

When it comes to gear, upgrade when you actually need it or when an extremely great deal shows up. Shop around, people often sell gear for less than it cost them to make. Watch the public vendors, if a +7 piece of armor comes through for 400 gold, it probably cost them at least 4,000 gold to make, it might be worth picking up.

The one exception to this is your starter weapon. Get a new weapon as soon as possible. Buy them from player vendors or PVs, not from NPC stores. Weapons on NPC stores are much inferior to the cheapest player made items.

Storage space at home and in banks

Now that you get a lot deed for finishing any of the Outskirts, (say "Deed" to the main quest giver NPC when you finish), your house will quickly become your primary storage location. Get some containers and breathe a sigh of inventory management relief.

But even with a home, banks are worth it. They are now global, so you can load up your bank before doing a worldwide pre-weekend stocking trade route. Then just pull out what you need to stock at each town as you go. At 100g for 10 spaces, it is worth it. More bank space gives you more flexibility to choose when and where you sell things.

Here's what their signs usually look like. The bank in Soltown is the robot in the Inn.

Locations of Player Vendors who Buy Your Materials

Certain Avatars go out of their way to keep their vendors stocked with buy orders in the new Avatar areas. These have to be updated regularly because they sell out quickly, and it is actually a good amount of time and work for the Avatars who run these to keep them stocked. Special thanks to all of them for helping everyone get on their feet.

Some of them, including myself, have started listing the bigger stacks at a little higher price. It might be worth it to save up five maple wood instead of selling when you just have two. Check the prices to see. The easiest way to see all the order sizes of a partiular item is to click the “Item Name” heading in the “SELL” tab.

If you know the name of the owner of a lot, and he or she only has the one in a town, it is easy to find by talking to the Town Crier and finding that persons name in the lot listings. Push “Set Compass Destination” and a marker shows up on your compass.

Near Solace Bridge:

Town: Soltown
Vendor Name: Multiple
Directions: Looks like a major restocking happened, check them all on the way into town and see which offer the best prices.

Town: Outlander Help Center
Vendor Names: Multiple
Directions: Turn left, run down to the stores by the river. There also may be rooms at the Inn available.

Near HIghvale:

Town: Jaaniford
Vendor Name: Palm Export Buy and Sell
Owner Name: Fiero Steele

Town: Storm’s Reach
Vendor Names: S Mart Mining Camp
Owner Name: Vladamir Begemot (me)
Directions: Directly outside of the mine entrance/exit.

Town: S Mart Factorium
This is my factory and outlet store. Both the factory (the metal building) and the Inn store buy your items, you can’t miss them.

Town: Soryn Fields
Vendor Name: Apollyon the Agriculturer & Buy Sell Crafting Materials
Directions: Both are in the front section of the market, which is left at the docks entrance.

Town: Resolute
Vendor Name: Crafting Materials Exchange & others in same location
Owner Name: Nick Cold
Directions: Run straight, turn right. Directly in front of the Cooking store.

Near Blood River:

Town: Veritas Sanctuary
Vendor Name: Materials
Directions: Next to the crafting pavilion, right next to the Oracle by the docks.

Town: Aerie
Vendor: S Mart
Directions: The Observatory right by the default entrance.

Summary

I hope this information is helpful in filling your pockets with gold. To recap, weapons get sold to NPCs, check your price guide, and sell anything that goes for much more than NPC value on a Public Vendor or to a Player Vendor or Avatar. Don’t spend all your gold in one place!

Feel free to /w Vladamir Begemot if you have questions in game.

See you in the Trade channel!

Vladamir Begemot
S Mart Factorium

[NemesisofdaCancelPigs]

havent seen a player vendor buy anything. ever..

[taj2k]

good to know

[Enthralling Victor]

Thanks Cheesy Fingers! Prices are a bit outdated again, granite is back down to 10-15g, for instance. COTOs are around 200g each. But the basics are the same.

[taj2k]

very good!

[shrinemaidan]

very helpful

[gravidy]

Nice work Vladamir!

[Gvyomar]

Thanks :)

[Kadjia Straten]

Very helpful info, thanks!

[Moghra]

Nice writeup, appreciate it.

[Vanquesse]

As a long time player, I wish something like this was around when I first started out. Thank you for taking your time helping newbies out