What is the most lucrative item to craft in the early game?

I recently noticed that Fish Bait sells for more than its individual clam components. Often I'll accumulate common materials trying to earn different mileage goals, so sometimes I'll have a glut of materials to sell. That led me to wonder what the best way was to make money crafting with common materials.

I'm still in the relatively early part of the game, so I probably don't have access to some of the rarer, possibly more lucrative recipes.

So in the early game what's the most lucrative way thing to craft that makes the most profit relative to the total of the prices of its constituent components?

What the most lucrative item to craft in the early game?

Solution 1:

With the exception of recipes that use Foreign Fruit, Bells, or Gold Nuggets, which tend to be less efficient or neutral, almost every crafting recipe I'm aware of is worth about double the value of what you put into it. They don't seem to have correlated the value of a recipe with its rarity at all. However, there are a few notable exceptions that are better than getting 2x the value of the original materials back.

The reddit link has a big spreadsheet, as well as the list just below in the post, but the items that give better than the standard value back are:

• Flimsy Axe (2.2x)
• Flimsy Fishing Rod (4x)
• Flimsy Net (4x)
• Sandy-beach Flooring (2.15x)
• Shell Fountain (2.03x)
• Shell Partition (2.35x)

The flimsy tools don't sell for much still, since branches are normally worth 5 Bells each, so it's debatable whether they're worth going through the crafting animation, but the Flimsy Fishing Rod and Flimsy Net do have the best material efficiency in the game. The shell-based recipes all seem actually worthwhile if you can get the recipe cards.

Once one has played a bit and Nook's Cranny has been built, crafting the Hot Item(s) will be better than anything else. Stockpiling materials until a Hot Item that uses them comes along tends to be the best way to make Bells from crafting. Almost universally, crafting a Hot Item is worth 4 times as much as your original materials.

Also, remember to tap A twice while crafting to speed up the animation.