Can a successful/sustainable Crafter give me a break down of their thinking?

[AckerZ]

The thing is, repair skilling HAD it's place, like you mentioned as well as others that you didn't. But for someone starting out today, it is not sound advice to give. No one should start out their crafting career in armor/tools/enhancers/furniture, that's for more experienced crafters so that you don't break your wallet (just like other areas).
If you want to raise crafting skills in specific fields (like ones that don't have tech gizmo's), then sure it could help, but for a new crafter, they should not focus on these fields.

Your advice on the volume of craft's is spot on for a new crafter. Sure there are some other things you will learn as you go, but starting out that is what should be taught. Go for the things that have a high volume, yes there will be more people selling those as well, but thats all part of the demand & supply.
But you will not have problems selling what you craft, unlike the ones that have slim to no sales volume.

I would add to this to regularly check the orders tab, sometimes you can find someone who is actually paying a decent price (Auktuma comes to mind) for components and not trying to just trying to rip you off.
I have made many profitable component runs with quick turn around on these. However do note that most of the orders are lower than what you can usually sell for so you have to have a little bit of luck with timing on this.
But it doesn't hurt to check while doing a crafting run as looking doesn't cost you anything when you are stuck at a terminal.



It doesn't surprise me that you disagree, we don't see eye to eye on a lot of things with crafting. That comes down to experience and what we were taught though.
Sure if you have a large bankroll from the get go, anything is possible. If you have a small bankroll, then hunting/mining is better to start out in. Besides from learning how the game works, understanding what people need and are looking for as they progress is one of the key areas.
You will understand what weapons people actually use as they level up, whether they use amps or not and why, what mobs they usually hunt and what armors/plates they are after. What are they looking for when they browse shops. The list goes on.
Sure you can learn this the hard way, but it is much easier and you learn more by going through these steps as well. Plus you do gain some skills for crafting (weapons as an example).
You don't need to do this to level 100, but its experience you won't get elsewhere so going through some levels helps.



Please just stop and don't give any more details, we don't need another person complaining about crafting on this forum.
@OP - if you go read through the forum for crafting threads, you will know what i am talking about here.



Yes it is a waste of time if you already have that unlocked. Start looking at what components to craft, look at MU's of ingredients, where you can get them from that might be cheaper than AH. Look at orders and what is listed and what you could make a listing for yourself, as its a good way to get ingredients for your own runs while you are logged off.
Look at what sells well in terms of weapons/amp's/armor's and other crafted gear and look at the components used in those. Perhaps you can supply those components to other crafters who make those weapons/amps themselves, etc. Many don't have time to craft the smaller components and will pay someone else for them.
Do your research, read lots, ask lots of questions to different people. Look through the trade channel in game to see what people are selling and buying. Take note of what increases/decreases around events. Look at the AH for other planets, perhaps you can find an area to capatilise on one of them.

Last piece of advice (before Alukat turns this thread into another one of his complaints), track your runs!!!!!
Track TT input and output and your MU for each, what did you buy and what did you source yourself, how many clicks did you do on that run, what your return is (record both TT return and with MU), what you sell things for, what BP's you gained, what skills you gained, what globals you got, what your success rate was, what your failure rate was.
Track everything you do if you are serious about crafting. It will open your eyes as to what really goes on. You will have your own data where you can see what worked and what didn't, your up's and down's....then learn from this.
Over time you will see things change as you progress, you will be able to experiment and see how that changes things. When a new change from MA happens, you will notice it.

Then hopefully you won't become another victim to the crafting game and you will be able to share your own advice on this forum.

Really helpful thank you.

 

[AckerZ]

I'll take a crack at this, though there are definitely more experienced crafters, I think my process is workable and could be a good start for anyone wanting to get serious about crafting in EU.

So first a few 'truths' to get us oriented. I've said some of these things elsewhere and I stand by them no matter what anyone else says:

Axiom #1: The only thing that has ever proven viable with crafting in Entropia in the long-term is Quantity crafting

Axiom #2: If it doesn't give you something that you can sell to another player for markup, don't craft it

Ok so now that we have these first 2 axioms as a starting point for our crafting career, we will ignore any other strategies that don't align with the above.

1. PED Turnover/Cycling (aka volume crafting):
One of the biggest challenges for crafters is that it is incredibly easy to make items, but often times, not so easy to get rid of them (sell them). So before I start, I often look at what the sales volumes are in the past week. The Market History for individual items will be your friend for that. Here's an example using items that all have the same TT value, Widgets:

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Now, having these all side-by-side like this, it's easy to see which ones sell more, and which ones don't sell much. When you look at the history for Widget 1, you can see that in the last week, 4k PED of them have actually sold on auction, this is significantly more than for all the other Widgets. If I was going to get into the Widget crafting business, I would probably just focus on the Widget 1 and ignore the rest.

Here's another example, albeit a bit more complicated because in this one, the TT values are different:

​

The numbers in the 'Sales' column is the total TT amount and doesn't take into account the markup amount. So the TT is the only thing we care about for the math we need to do. Now, the amps shown here are the 6P, 10P, 13P, 17P, 20P, 23P, 25P and 28P, in that order. Which one has had the most volume in the last week? You'll have to go figure out what the TT is for each one and divide the week 'Sales' amount by the TT for 1 of them to arrive at that number. Believe it or not, I have done this before for all amps. It's a good exercise to do, it will reveal a lot about volumes of sales for items and this will help prevent too many failed auctions.

Typically, if something has no sales in the last week, I ignore it and don't craft it, because the risk is too high that I will have failed auctions (the max auction duration at this time is 7 days).

2. Reverse Engineer your crafting career, think long-term:
There is a tremendous amount I could say about this, I could spend 3 hours or more just on this one tip, but I don't have time today so I'll have to just give you some pointers and leave it for you to mull over on your own.

a) Skills don't have the same value. Look over the value of each 'Manufacture' skill and consider which skill you might prefer to work on. In the end, these have value and if you ever get into trouble during your crafting career, you might want to sell some of these skills in order to make yourself solvent again so you can keep going. But if you are working on skills that don't have much value, it might be hard to convert some of these skills back to PED again, so think about that:

b) Think about your long-term plans; do you plan to buy a shop eventually? What would you sell? What's the competition like? What are the margins like? The more competition there is on something, the tighter the margins are. For example the margins on ArMatrix guns are getting very tight these days and there are already a few shops that sell ArMatrix guns cheaper than auction. That would be a tough market to get into. Same goes for Damage Enhancers, and with those I would say it's even worse because the BPs are UL, so those that have BPs with QR 100 are at a huge advantage and there's just no way to enter this market while keeping your crafting returns in the green initially, you will have to invest a certain amount to get started (either by buying QR 100 prints, or by getting your own up to QR 100).

There doesn't seem to be as many Furniture or Tool shops, but these are also low-volume items, which will greatly affect your turnover/cycling capability. All these things must be considered long-term. Do you want to have volume? Do you want to have exclusivity? These 2 things are usually diametrically opposed and cannot be achieved together, you have to chose one or the other.

Another thing that should enter into your long-term planning process is the amount of PED you will be able to dedicate to this. Armors and Mining Amps for example take huge amounts of PED to do successfully. If you don't think you'll have at least 20k PED to dedicate towards your crafting endeavors, you might not want to get into certain markets

So think about where you want to be in the long-term, then knowing that, you can figure out what you will need to do in order to get there. That is how I got to where I am now.

3. Start at the beginning: Components
Almost anything you might want to craft eventually will require some sort of components. Weapons, Armors/plates, Amps, etc... These all require some sort of Component in order to make them. So it makes sense that you might be better off starting with raising your Manufacture Component skills at the start as these skills will be useful to you in the future, even if you don't plan on becoming a Component crafter long-term.

As seen in the previous image above, out of the 3 component crafting skills, Manufacture Metal Component is the most valuable and sought-after, and with good reason. Many of the higher-level Metal Component blueprints are expensive to max out. There are a lot of Metal Components which are needed for many Armor plate, ArMatrix weapon and ArMatrix Amps and so the volumes that you see on things like Basic Sheet Metal reflect that. I personally go through thousands and thousands of Basic Sheet Metal in a matter of minutes when I'm making armor plates for my shops, so it's a pretty reliable thing for anyone to craft, it has volume and it has decent mark-up.

If you were going to take that advice and start making Metal Components, here are the current volumes for all of the Level 1 and Level 2 BPs:

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Some pointers here:

a) If there are no sales in the last week, leave it alone
b) At first, Volume is more important than MU
c) The skills you get will be a function of the cost/click; the higher the cost to click, the more skills you get

You can ignore c) above when you are just starting out, but eventually you will be looking at this more closely in order to achieve certain milestones. Lots of people click Simple Plastic Ruds for the skills and so these are often very cheap on auction since more of them are being made than can be used up for a given time period. So stay away from those as long as your bottom line is more important than the skills you get.

With experience you will eventually understand what the true cost to make these things actually is but as a general rule, the SR will tell you 2 things:

- the percent fails you get (95% SR means on average you will have 5 fails in 100 clicks)
- the long-term average TT returned (if you have an 80% SR BP, you will on average get 80% TT back, long-term, but short runs could be devastating)

I hope this helps.

Legends

Jesus Christ that post needs to be stickied for everyone wanting to get into crafting.

Thanks again Legends!

 

[GxB]

nvm was just a test

 

[Evey]

i haven't been taught anything, i learned everything and became a successful crafter all by myself

Judging by the number of crying posts from you, not even you consider yourself successful, not just ... basically the rest of the people reading this forum.

Great post by @Legends, no big secrets just basic common sense that everyone needs reminded once in a while, thank you.

 

[M Rufen Power]

Great advise @Legends. Will keep what you said in mind.