Artisan Archive
Thread: How dou earn money from swoops/vehicles ?
I was trying to figure this one out too. Everyone wants 90%+ experimented vehicles, but won't pay for them (?). It takes resources that sell for 5-10 cpu to create such things, so why is an artisan forced to take ahit in the walletwhen crafting them just to be competetively priced???
I stopped using my good resources for vehicles. You want to only pay barely 3 cpu for a swoop?Fine. You'll get my best 3 cpu resource-crafted swoop. Expect something in the 50-60% range. I'm saving my uber metals for harvestors & other stuff...
if there are near the village they wont care about quality, most speeders and swoops are shot at regulary. And they get destroyed in 1 or 2 hits.
Pumbak
rubberduck4106 wrote:
I was trying to figure this one out too. Everyone wants 90%+ experimented vehicles, but won't pay for them (?). It takes resources that sell for 5-10 cpu to create such things, so why is an artisan forced to take ahit in the walletwhen crafting them just to be competetively priced???
I stopped using my good resources for vehicles. You want to only pay barely 3 cpu for a swoop?Fine. You'll get my best 3 cpu resource-crafted swoop. Expect something in the 50-60% range. I'm saving my uber metals for harvestors & other stuff...
There's also the whole whether actually using uber metals makes a real difference. It looks like the quality of the swoop only effects the repair costs... they still get disabled with only shot! I know a few people who buyswoops in crates of 25, and don't care about the quality.
If that's the case, might as well use cheap resources!
Well you can flame me but here is my approach.
I have a vendor up in my shop with nothing but Swoops on it. These are labeled as "disposable" swoops. They have just over 1600 HAM.
If you actually consider what it costs to repair these when they get down to 0..............it's about the same cost or slightly cheaper to just delete my disposable swoop and pull a new one from a crate as compared with repairing it back up from near 0 to 1600. This also keeps cash in our ecomony versus dumping it into a repair facility.
Cost of my disposable swoops? $16K each. I can buy grind quality steel and other minerals for 1 cpu. Selling swoops at this price is 2 cpu, plus it gets folks into my shop where they hopefully buy other items. Swoops are such a high volume resource item that you can make money on.......not much per resource but a significant amount per swoop due to the volume. My first day I had this up I sold $1.9 million in swoops. Most prefer crates of 25.
rubberduck4106 wrote:
I was trying to figure this one out too. Everyone wants 90%+ experimented vehicles, but won't pay for them (?). It takes resources that sell for 5-10 cpu to create such things, so why is an artisan forced to take ahit in the walletwhen crafting them just to be competetively priced???
I stopped using my good resources for vehicles. You want to only pay barely 3 cpu for a swoop?Fine. You'll get my best 3 cpu resource-crafted swoop. Expect something in the 50-60% range. I'm saving my uber metals for harvestors & other stuff...
I find selling Swoops to be far more rewarding than selling a chunk of resource for more credits.
Aside from that, there's no hit in the wallet really if you dig it up yourself. Your costs are then constant (harvesters don't scale maintenance and power based on resource quality), and the price of a Swoop will give you a nice return (8000 resource and about 0.5 cpu cost roughly, which is 4000 credits for the materials that sell for 20000 credits = nice profit).
The best way to make money from selling vehicles is to dig up your own resources, don't buy them (unless they're at 1cpu, then you can still make a decent profit).
I do a similar thing...."Budget Swoop"s for 15k on a vendor, then keep a few 95+ quality deeds around if my friends want one or I get a request and the person is willing to pay what its worth. (I got lucky and set a harvester on a super good spot of 1k SR aluminum awhile ago). I throw a few landspeeders on there for cheaper, and a speeder or two.
I harvest my own power and resources, and make a nice profit on the 'Budget' brand... plus I can get them up to about 85% or so which isnt too bad (I have master tailor and some architect so I get a decent amount of experiment points).
I sell them out regularly, quite a few repeat customersand never had a complaint.
Exactly.
TheRealXur wrote:
I sell all vehicles for 5cpu..
If people buy them, cool.. If not, that's fine too..
Means the vendor is storage for me.
Folks will pay an Armorsmith or Weaponsmith 20+ CPU for things. Eventually people will get tired of making no money off swoops and speeders and start using those resources for things that make a real profit.
I keep my vendor stocked and people know they can find them there on demand.
If they don't want to pay the price, someone else will be along shortly who will.
Elyssa wrote:
Exactly.
TheRealXur wrote:
I sell all vehicles for 5cpu..
If people buy them, cool.. If not, that's fine too..
Means the vendor is storage for me.
Folks will pay an Armorsmith or Weaponsmith 20+ CPU for things. Eventually people will get tired of making no money off swoops and speeders and start using those resources for things that make a real profit.
I keep my vendor stocked and people know they can find them there on demand.
If they don't want to pay the price, someone else will be along shortly who will.
I absolutely refuse to sell vehicles for less than the resources required to make them will fetch on the open market.
Well, I certainly agree with you...but there is also value in getting people into your shop. If you visit a shop to purchase something don't you normally check out all the vendors? When they decided to add vendor searching to the terminals the days of general vendor traffic were over. Sure, it's better if someone needs something specificly......but the impulse buy is lost unless you can get people into your shop.
We recently had a shift of some nice copper on our server...961 Shock. Obviously this will make some very nice swoops. I have 3 characters and was able to drop 17 heavies on a 92% spot. I am getting some nice volume. I was also able to purchase recently 3 million units of 796 shock steel. I got this in volume at 2 cpu. When combined with the above copper I get a swoop with a HAM of 2,243. For most people they would consider this a pretty decent swoop. I can sell this swoop for $16K and still make money (granted not much)....PLUS get traffic into my shop. Once there they hopefully will realize I have the best powerups on the server for 8K per crate (80 cpu) and also I make some very nice chef food (normally 20 cpu or higher).
My profit centers are powerups, food, spices, resources. Swoops, due to crazy competition, are just not great money makers. At 5 cpu you sell a swoop for 40K. I sell one for 16K. The 24K difference I should make up in them buying SOMETHING else from my well stocked shop.
I think having the ability to search vendors was one of the major downfalls for us........things got very "price wars" oriented once people could just shop for the cheapest price on things like swoops. Granted quality varies, but I don't see many folks asking about the HAM on a swoop before they buy it, even with a general label on it.
I sell all vehicles for 5cpu..
If people buy them, cool.. If not, that's fine too..
Means the vendor is storage for me.
Folks will pay an Armorsmith or Weaponsmith 20+ CPU for things. Eventually people will get tired of making no money off swoops and speeders and start using those resources for things that make a real profit.
Speeders are an easy money maker..
On my server, Ahazi there have been ample spawns of high SR metals in recent times. Get to the spot early and place 8 or 9 BER 13's and before very long at all you will have a couple of hundred thousand units of metal. At the moment, it's easy on Ahazi but there is now a shortage of high SR non-ferrous metals that will slow down the trade.
I cost it that I can produce a speeder for about 2500 credits and sell for 25000 for a 93-97% speeder.
Easy money if you have the infastructure (harvesters and power) to get set up properly.
I would say your approach of 3-4 days for 120k of metal is the problem.
I have found (sofar) in this crafting game that you have to decide what you are going to sell first, then get your resources appropriatley. So for instance I sell swoops. I need a lot of ferrous metal, and a good chunk of non ferrous. So I survey fnd some decent stuff and drop as many heavy extractors as possible. Now keep in mind that this is my second char, so I am able to drop 10 extractors, but if you don't have an alt for storage, factories and such then scale back a tiny bit. The idea is trow as many heavy extractors at it as you can.
With 2 of my heavys on a 81% spawn of aluminum after 2 days I had 130K+ units, and with 8 on a spawn of iron several hundred thousand units there. Mind you I don't stress too much over quality for swoops, and if I find an exceptional spawn I save it for later. Then I have a price scale that I sell them by based on %, and I label them when crafted appropriatley.
Can't keep swoops in stock this way, really need a third char for more resource retreval, and make 750k - 1.2 mil a day when I can keep then stocked. All that I pay is maint and power.