Most effective method of making money?
I want to know what the most efficient way of making money (silver) is, on a sustainable basis. This means no mining all the ores on the map and selling it, it needs to be a method of making money that can be continuously reproduced (until everyone in the colony dies). There are two factors that I believe need to be taken into account when creating the most efficient method:
- How often the goods can be sold (if that's the method) e.g. not all traders want a super sniper rifle but most want potatoes.
- Variation in quality means different items with varying quality will be worth more, I've seen variations in price of crops (not completely sure why)
EDIT:
In the comment below they ask about finite resources. Because they can be traded by AI somewhat means they are infinite in doses. But that doesn't mean you can mine up the entire planet, sell the resources and then buy them. It needs to be a method where you can outright sell or buy and then sell back. This doesn't mean I'm blocking the use of ground resources, it just needs to be sustainable in the long run.
You should sell meals instead of raw food (it adds huge value to it). It is actually possible to sell meals to the traders or visitors from other factions who won't buy sculptures but give fair price for all kind of meals.( and frequency of space traders is reduced highly).
Just keep a high level all-time cook and make him/her cook all the time (keep a forever fine meals job if possible: market value is 25 space bucks). If you don't have a skilled cook who can cook all the time, use someone else to make nutrient paste meals, which also sells for higher value than simple meals and doesn't need high skill level.
As far as quality is concerned the meals sell at same price if not at very low hit points.
This is a screenshot of my colony with all year around growth, Look at the quantity and the wealth of fridge !
Breeding Animals - I can usually sell a small group for about 100 each and you really dont need to do anything other than have a male and female of a species and make sure foxes or panthers dont get to them. They will keep breeding on their own.
Beer - Have a large patch of field dedicated to hops. Have a brewery to transform the hops into wort. Have a large amount of barrels to ferment the wort into beer. This requires time and some effort. The hops have to grow, you have to assign someone to make wort out of the hops, and then it requires more time as the wort ferments into beer. Rinse and repeat.
Art - I usually have an artist creating the most intricate sculptures to sell. This isnt exactly renewable though, since stone is finite and you have to start depending on traders for it eventually.
From the things already said. I always make money also from selling the human meat and human leather (mostly the leather), when a tribe attacks it's always a massacre. And it's much more efficient than to burn or bury corpses.
- You need a colonist who is Psychopath (doesn't care about butchering people)
- You need a freezer for corpses (small is enough) - don't forget double walls, doors
- You need a big freezer for human meat - don't forget double walls, doors, you can have a quite big freezer with just 2 coolers
- Big storage for the human skins (they are ugly)
- Set up the area around the butcher table in a way that only psychopaths can butcher people (so your other colonists don't get mood debuff) //EDIT: You can now assign butcher job to exact person.
Your other colonists will get just -6 debuff that your colony butchered humanlike. So butcher them all at once, it's easy to deal with just -6 for couple of days.
The disadvantage is that it may take a while to get a trader who is willing to buy the human skin and meat. You can more easily sell packaged survival meals made from human meat, but don't let your colonists eat them.
Here is example of the small set-up I have in my current colony with shown area restriction:
