I do a lot of farming and deconning as well, you are not going to break even just with the mats received from doing daily writs at max rank. I am able to keep up with 3 characters doing daily crafting writs in blacksmithing, clothing, and woodworking for the mats needed to do them, but am lagging with improvements mats for the master writs that I get, notably mastic (mentioned in another thread here).

I personally do not sell or buy mats, trying to be self-sufficient.

It depends on whether you want to hoard the gold upgrade mats you get from doing your daily writs or not.

If you sell the gold upgrade mats and the raw mats from surveys, you will have more than enough gold to buy refined mats from the guild stores, the trick is to maintain a large stockpile so you don't get caught out, when the prices go up buy whenever you notice good prices on your guilds stores/regular shopping spots.

For example, lets say:

-I sell 200 raw Rubedite ore for 6K, I buy refined at 1200 gold a stack.
-I sell 200 raw Ancestor silk for 8K, I buy refined for 2K a stack
-I sell 200 raw Rubedo leather for 8K and buy refined whenever its cheap never more than 17 gold a piece if I am desperate
-I sell 200 raw Ruby ash for 5K a stack, always sells the slowest, I pay around the same amount as refined Rubedite Ignots.
-I sell 200 Platinum dust for 15K a stack and buy refined for 2K a stack.

Don't pay more than you are prepared too even by a single gold coin, if you buy regularly, the sellers at the stores will learn what sells quick and will restock at the same prices. That does not mean turn your nose up at stuff that is within the average price range, just prioritize cheap stuff first buy the average priced stuff afterwards, even if you don't need it right now to encourage people to restock.

And for me when I say buy, I mean I clear the shelves of all the refined mats at the price I buy at every now and then but not so often as to deny others the chance to buy.

Sell your gold mats at your guilds MM rate or around the mid price from TTC.

But always check what is listed in your guild stores first, if you need the gold now undercut a bit but ensure to price high enough to make re selling less or not profitable, that way you will get a decent amount of gold from someone who is likely to use the mats instead of putting them up on another store.


Once you have a decent stockpile of Refined mats you won't have to worry about getting those all the time, just to clarify I consider 10K of each refined mats starting to get on the low side but that's just me, you should have enough stockpile so that if you feel like it you don't need to buy any for a fortnight.




Alternatively you can ignore selling raw and try your luck refining your survey mats instead to sell the gold mats and sell your excess refined mats and other upgrade mats in addition to the gold ones.

Some who do that, run all their alts on low level crafting mats passing the surveys onto their main who collects max level mats, regardless of crafting level the drop rate for surveys stays the same, the only thing you miss out on by doing lower level writs is a higher drop rate of gold mats and you miss out on Master writs.


Assuming your are not blowing your profits right away doing writs and build up some capital, you can skip collecting surveys and use your accumulated gold to buy raw mats at a lower price in zone or buy the cheaper listing in guild stores assuming you can get their first and refine and sell as though they are your own, the profit is determined by how lucky you are with RNG sometimes you get a lot of gold mats sometimes you get next to nothing, up to you whether you want to risk your gold on RNG, plenty of people do.

Most of those selling refined mats, are the ones buy the raw mats or taking the risk to refine raw mats. Cracks me up a bit one of the people that regularly buys a large amount of my raw mats is the one I buy a large amount of my refined mats from.

If they were not making gold from it they would not be paying the high prices for raw mats, I just prefer a flat profit to one dependent on RNG from refining.



If you do enchanting and alchemy daily writs make sure to learn all the rune words and alchemy traits, this maxes out the drop rate for their master writs, once you do that they will drop as often as gold mats do for equipment daily writs.

Oko, Mudcrab Chittin and violet coprinus tend to be the most expensive mats to fuel the max level writs for enchanting and alchemy always be on the look out for a good price on those, assuming I don't see them first, if I do they will be gone.


Provisioning daily writs, after a certain point with enough characters doing them and hirelings you will become self sufficient with mats, make a stack or two of each of the required food items and you good for a week or two, more or less free gold from that daily writ after awhile.

Consumables tend to take time to sell and have a low profit margin, raw mats prices vary, figure out what mats you need to hold onto for the daily writs and personal use sell the rest either raw or as consumables up to you, personally I don't bother it just builds up in my craft bag.



But at the end of the day once you have enough gold set aside getting mats to fuel your daily writs becomes trivial, you might end up becoming lazy like me and letting your surveys build up for weeks if not months at a time.

If your having trouble saving gold, this is the trick I use:

Pretend X amount of gold 100K a million whatever value you want, that is in your bank, pretend the amount you have set, represents 0 gold.

When you go to take out gold to spend your set amount stays in the bank, over time you move the value of 0 higher and save more over time, only spending what you are currently making not what is sitting in the bank.

Eventually you will find something you really want in the game and have the funds to go buy it.


But if you really want to save gold avoid the gold sink that is housing until your at that point where you have more gold than you know what to do with. If you try to do it before then you will be broke forever.


Up to you if you learn anything from my advice, I do max level daily writs on 36 characters these days, so I do know a bit about what I am talking about, just remember it does not take 5 minutes to set up a lot of alts to do daily writ crafting, it takes a long time don't try to rush or you will burn yourself out.

Next month I will be in the process of rebuilding my fortune after a spending spree recently, its only fake money waste it whenever you feel like it.

Half awake at this point probably forgetting to add some stuff but anyway that should be enough to get you started, good luck, with your gold making.

unclesheosnephew wrote: »

It is 100% self sustaining at max level because counting surveys and the mats they return you should never need material. Refine the raw while the temper prices are where they are at. It will help to have a stock pile of mats from them for other things. I buy raw for profitting from refining but when the prices wouldnt sustain buying raw I never needed to buy mats since the surveys each week i go gave me a few thousand weekly of each craft. If your running out its because your doing something else with the mats and just not realizing it

Sadly, it is not self-sustaining at max level.

You get 15 materials back guaranteed plus a 1 in 8 chance of getting a survey which will return about 120 raw mats or 100 refined

15 + .125*100 = 27.5 expected material return.

All of the writs for crafting (cloth/ww/bs) take more than 27.5 materials to do a days worth.

oneskygod wrote: »

bmnoble 2020

Thanks mate that really opens my eyes to the long game of crafting.

I just have one question, why 36 chars ? and not 18 ? I never understood that.

Once again I really appreciate your input

My reason is that when I am working, I only log in each day for the daily rewards on my accounts and do the daily writs on Friday/Saturday/Sunday, with 36 characters I still manage to make the same amount of gold in 3 days as I would with 18 characters over 6 days.

Even when I have less time to play I am still making a decent amount of gold to use and allows me to remain fairly active in the trade guilds I am in all year round.

Also allows me to build up gold quickly in a shorter amount of time, once I have a certain amount build up I can ignore writs completely, like I did this month with the events, will start up again after the witches festival.


4648 gold per character times 36 = 167328 gold from writ quest turn ins

167328 times 3 days = 501984

167328 times 7 days = 1171296

167328 times 365 days assuming I did them every day without fail = 61074720

Then factor in depending on how much I choose to hoard of sell the mats I get, around 1 - 2 million gold in sales on guild stores every week, I only sell on one account though just mail all the valuable stuff to sell, to my main account, don't see the point in being in 10 trade guilds when 5 is enough.

That is before even factoring in raw mats from surveys which I harvest ever few months, if I feel like it.

I could make more re selling but being an Aussie, most of the cheap stuff on guild stores is long gone by the time I get there.

And I do writs so I don't have to spend hours going through guild stores or buying up stuff cheap in zone chat, if I really felt like it I could be almost completely self sufficient, that was the original plan back when I started but I like being in trade guilds.

A lot depends on whether you consider decontruction part of crafting. With the full passive on at least one character, you can get back enough materials from dropped items to supplement the returns from the writs.

That assumes you're doing some non-crafting activity to get the drops, of course. If the only other thing you do is fishing, your mileage may vary.

Grey17 wrote: »

tmbrinks wrote: »

You get 15 materials back guaranteed plus a 1 in 8 chance of getting a survey which will return about 120 raw mats or 100 refined

15 + .125*100 = 27.5 expected material return. All of the writs for crafting (cloth/ww/bs) take more than 27.5 materials to do a days worth.

It wasn't until I had seven or so max level crafters that I started noticing my wood/cloth/ore survey was not sustaining my writ output. Now with 10 fully leveled crafters I'm in the hole for roughly 800-1000 of wood & ore, and 300-500 odd cloth per week dependent on how kinda the RNG is to me with the surveys. Easy to buy that shortfall by jumping on low prices through guild traders.

Violet Coprinus is my bane. I refuse to pay the exorbitant gouging prices offered on the Traders, so Sunday mornings is assigned to do those surveys and hopefully finding enough Violet Coprinus while I am doing that to sustain me for a week. Would be nice if there was a survey drop for mushrooms. Does anyone else have this issue with this item?

Ackwalan wrote: »

Have about 1/3 of your crafter doing level 1 writs. You won't miss the master writs but you will get just as many crafting surveys.

That is something I haven't thought of, but makes a LOT of sense. I stopped at 10 crafters mainly because I could see the gap between material and survey drops was widening with every crafter gaining max level. This thread is a few months old but if you are still reading, do you just do wood/cloth/ore crafting on these other crafters or do they also do Alch, Enchantng ect?

I use this strategy. But I only do lvl 1 equipment writs on my backup characters. For alchemy, provisioning, and enchanting I do max lvl writs. Doing it this way keeps me with enough stock that after surveys and minimal farming I come out ahead.

Mudcrab Chittin and Violet Coprinus need to be added to the surveys. This would help a lot. Violet Coprinus is the reason I pick up the shadowy passive under Dark Brotherhood skill line.

Interesting insight on on how you work your muti-crafters.

This one is interested......

Is Jen, Sherlock, Hodorf, Lucky, Snowstorm, Winkworth and Misti all the same crafting level tier, or are they at different crafting levels so to help to spread out the usage of Materials?

Grey17 wrote: »

Interesting insight on on how you work your muti-crafters.

This one is interested......

Is Jen, Sherlock, Hodorf, Lucky, Snowstorm, Winkworth and Misti all the same crafting level tier, or are they at different crafting levels so to help to spread out the usage of Materials?

They are mostly at the lowest level of materials. Apart from alchemy which everyone has maxed out for master writs - no levelled ingredients there really. Also this one uses saved alchemy master writs to help level a new kitten when there is double xp on. Save the writs, make sure many skill points are into alchemy. The kitten can then craft the saved alchemy master writs for very good xp.

They are also all at different provisioning levels so a range of recipes may be obtained as rewards.

Yours with paws
Santie Claws

Thank-you for everyone's insight. Been very helpfull.