Droid Engineer Archive

Just broke a million with my DE. This is how.

About a month ago I was complaining that I had been hovering around the 100k mark forever, and it seemed I was barely getting enough sales to break even. The only droids I was selling consistently were the Bounty Hunter droids, but they are not money makers, even though I was charging 1000 a stack.

Thought I would try a new appoach. First off, just about then I dinged blueprints 3. At that point, I'm a 1-1-1-3 DE, with Master Merchant, and 0-0-0-1 Architect (also Master Artisan) in order to make the Power Cores myself for the Power Droids, and Micro Sensor Suites.

Okay, I like being independent as an artisan.

Here's the deal. Just for the halibut, I deployed a Flora harvester and started pulling the highest available stuff near my shop, which at the time happened to be hard wood. I sold it on bazaar for 3000 credits per 600, or 5 credits each. Sold well!. Hard wood went away a couple days later, replaced by something else, now it's been doing Wild Rice for a while, all seem to be very high quality, and all sell every day completely out of the bazaar.

The result of just this simple activity?

It pays for ALL my maintenance. Vendors, shop, harvesters, everything.

A month later, CHING, 1 million credits. Now, this is by doing nothing but producing those droids that people actually purchase, with the exceptions like the basic R5 which I don't make anymore, or the Mice droids. It really does pay to go pure artisan BTW. Not having to rely on others to get the job done, for the most part, is really a boon. Also, it didn't hurt to get blueprints 3. Probots, even the nerfed level 2 armor versions, sell like hotcakes! I sell several every day for 8500 each. Surgical droids are also a wonderful seller. I sell mine for 6800 each, with sarcastic personalities, and I can't hardly keep up with the sales. They keep emptying the vendor of this droid.

The moral is, to those who really want to pursue a pure artisanship type character, the rewards are better than you can imagine. The drawback is it's boring as all get out.

Once you get blueprints 4, though, it gets interesting. Now you have to start getting specific types of minerals, and that means travel if you aren't buying them off people's resource vendors. As I made 1-1-1-4 Droid Designer last night, haven't made a single new droid yet, but I'll get there eventually.

No hurry

I still think you can make a good income on those BH droids, Wepps. I am easily selling 150K a week or more in these droids alone. People only need 1 medical droid for the rest of their character's life, they need to buy the seekers over and over as I am sure you are aware from your BH.

Sure I get a LOT of BH droid sales, but there is little profit in it. Revenues yes, but little profit.

I guess that depends on how you get your resources. Mine resources and sell them for 3 to 4 to 1, and you make about the same thing as you would mining the resources to make a seekerto sell for 1K or an Arakyd for 2K. If you have to buy them off a resource vednor, then seekers/arakyds are not worth it. With my medium extractors beefed up to a 7 BER, and a good concentration, I get a lot of resources for my 1200 power and 1350 maintenace a day. And quality doesn't matter on arakyds/seekers, they perform just as well wth grind quaility as uber.

To be honest, another very easy way to pay for maintainance is to do runs of batteries and put them up for 2500 per crate on the bazaar. I'd sell a full thousand run in 2 days.

Dude, I made 1 million credits in like 2 weeks mostly by selling droids. Most of the time I don't have any harvesters out, except if I see some good resource then I harvest it. I just buy from bazaar if I see things at like 2.5cr per unit or less(very frequent in Theed), remember that for us... material quality means nothing.

Basically the trick is: put a store near Theed, be an artisan with 3 in advertising so your store name shows. Put a couple of probots, several crates of batteries, one R2 with weapon crafting and storage, one or two medic combo droids (110 medic rating and food crafting station), some 4 crates of probes and seekers, a protocol hmm... that's about it. Turn on barking too that helps.

After you fill your vendor, go to Theed and yell a catchy ad like 'Droids for sale: medical, crafting, combat, probes, seekers!'. Yell that in front of starport, in front of medic center and in front of cantina every 20 mins or so.

My pricing formula? I add up all the resources the droid needs, multiply by 8, add a % if it requires a frame (double chance of failure) or if it requires specific components or factory runs.

That's about it.

Yeah I came up with the idea of the x8 multiplier on resources for price back in July, and only 1 person so far complained about my prices. Everyone else says they are more than fair, so I make profit on those. For seekers that would add up to 1376 per 10-stack, but I sell for 1k instead, same with Probes, so I end up not making much profit on those.

Still, the other stuff is selling, but mostly I didn't take off until I started selling flora resources. I get tons of regular bazaar business on that, and it turns everything else into pure profits since it pays for my maintenence. Perfect.

I haven't ground out all the experience, and the only thing I do is replace droids that have sold. I have 5 vendors. 1 for probe droids, 1 for seekers, 1 for batteries, 1 for furniture droids (chassis), and the 1 with all the otherdroids on it. All but the furniture droids one is on the planetary map.

Not sure why I bought the +39.7 crafting station though, maybe in anticipation of them fixing that and making it worthwhile to experiment. Who knows. Bad kharma maybe.

I do get a small income from droids but my main income is from the steel that I don't use for grinding. There are always other DE's around that need grinding steel so it's kinda good sales.

Yeah lol, except I never have enough steel lately what with all the BH droid sales going on. I've had 2 harvesters on it for the last week right outside my shop in a good spot, and still I have maybe a total of 5k steel left on me at any given time.

Copper, sheesh I got 10s of thousands of that.

Well, I've got 2 heavies and 1 medium on a 92%spot... that's hard to use up, and if it get's to that all I have to do is to place another heavy or two.