SeeleyCat that is impressive. Seem to remember your name from dragonvale community boards. Backflip has another winner here (at least so far!)
Yes, I used to play Dragonvale, but recently deleted it because with Seabeard I don't have time to play more than one game. I'm a huge BackFlip Studios fan, and basically play only their games. BackFlip makes high quality products, with almost no paywalls, and they are very generous with the premium currency. From a business standpoint I have a tremendous amount of admiration for a company that is so highly profitable, while giving away so much of their great games for free. (For those looking for games to try, I highly recommend Dwarven Den and Spellfall.)
I have the full compliment of trading characters, shops and traveling companions. As I've said earlier I've completed the current game. BUT I still can only manage about 1k to 1.5 k a day. The more money an item yields the longer it takes to sell. I've started producing more complex items to sell, but I'm really not a fan of having and item take hours and hours to produce. I started playing this game either the last few days of January or the first few day in the beginning of February. This game relies on you spending up big time and just as you accumulate a reasonable amount of coinage you have to spend even more for the same thing you just built for a lot less.
Nexxuz, I started in December. Basically I just took care to use resources (storage, time, raw materials, etc.) as efficiently as possible. This includes being aware of opportunity costs. For example, elsewhere in this thread it was recommended that yellow paint was the best use of corn. Instead, I almost always make fish chowder out of corn. Not only is the profit higher, but it leaves those two yellow mushrooms free to join four red mushrooms (that would have been wasted) to make two mushroom soups. Making paint would "cost" the profit lost from the two mushrooms soups. As another example of making the best use of offered resources, I kept a general idea of how long it takes for things to respawn, and how long they "keep" so that I could balance making sure I wasn't leaving resources uncollected / unused, with managing my limited storage space, limited processing facilities, and limited RL time. I'd suggest you go quickly around in the morning and uncover berry bushes and shake trees (being sure to leave enough space for an apple to fall), but only pick up when you need/want to, because they will remain there. On the other hand, mushrooms, logs and cowleaf only last out there for a while (perhaps six hours?), then they're gone. So, if you think you can process it relatively soon, pick it up when you see it. If you can't, think twice before picking it up, making sure you leave space for what you need most (or for what is most profitable.) (To my knowledge fish don't "keep" either. So if you only fish at night, you will have lost the profit potential of the morning fish.) In general, I attempted to keep all my profit centers active at all times. A couple of months ago I posted that I found upgrading the cooking stall helpful because I could just throw a lot of stuff in there, get it busy creating additional value, free up space in my inventory bag for other things, then leave to go on with real life. Some guy responded that that was "silly", because he had a warehouse, and why get an extra cooking stall when it just takes a few seconds to hop from island to island. The answer to that is because hopping from island to island throughout the day is an inefficient use of real-life time. It just won't work for me. Instead I played a bit first thing in the morning (often while exercising on my elliptical machine), got stuff busy cooking, did a bit more processing and stuff on my lunch break, then by the evening when I had more time to play I already had a bunch of stuff made and sold. Anyways, that explains a bit of how I did it. Hope it helps.
Nexxuz, don't be afraid of producing more complex items that take longer. Let that time work to your advantage. Go off to work or school or bed or whatever while they're processing. (Also, you can use badges to lessen both the processing and sales time.)
My wife just reached the end of the quest line and was like, "What the heck!!!" Of course, this is a testament to how fun the game is. You have left them wanting more
This is what I do when I need a huge sum of money like some construction projects, but it's too time consuming. I do the corn chowder / mushroom soup combo too. Mostly because I don't have time to keep collecting the small fish sold, so items that takes longer to make and longer to sell fits well with my schedule, and it's far more profitable. The only fish I dump to the seafood stall these days are fish that takes min 1 hr to sell. The other one that doesn't make sense is making blue paint, when you can pair the berry with two strawberry for fruit punch, and use the blue apple to make grog/tropical punch. Also before they allow food to sell faster, I used to avoid selling the pancake... 5 hours of holding up space in the food vendor is simply not worth it, wait for someone to make an offer -- characters in this game seem to love pancakes and they almost always offer more than the vendor, and even if they offer a few coins less, you're still profiting... Since I consider the cost of pancake to be 55 coins, you have 25 coins profit margin to pay with (in reality, the pancake itself is pretty much free, since the only real cost was the wheat, which you paid 20 coins to pick, so the three wheat costs you 5 coins....-- but I calculate the cost of selling the wheat, egg and milk separately, which would give me 55 coins, vs turning it into pancake, and selling it for 80 with 25 extra coins profit). So you just have to weight it out. Some things may sell for much more if you process them further, but if the amount of time it takes to cook and sell is blocking you to cook/sell many things, the time is too expensive. N
I do try to do tis at night. Thank you for such a detailed account of what to do in the above post. I have some questions but will have to ans that post later.
I totally agree. So it's both a balance and a time management thing. Before we had badges I had three slots in my cookery (working consecutively) and three slots at my fish monger (working concurrently). Before I went to bed at night I put 3 corn chowder ingredients into the cookery, and 7.5 hours later (2.5 hours each) when I awoke I would have 3 completed corn chowders. These I put into my warehouse until I went to bed the next night. Then I'd put the 3 corn chowders into my fish monger stall and 5 hours later before I awoke they would all be sold. Before going to bed I'd probably also have also put ingredients for new corn chowders into the cookery as well. Rinse, repeat.
For the next four days I'm doing to be teaching a class with ultra long hours, so you may not see me around here. I'd be happy to answer any questions on Monday. Would really enjoy seeing more discussion of strategy in general here.
I agree I love discussing strategy. I will answer you other post on my Tuesday, your Monday. Here is just one question; to make yellow paint are you using pearls to buy the yellow mushrooms, because I can't see how you can eliminate them? Pearls are so rare, I hate to part with them until I truly need to. I pick fresh mushrooms, tomatoes, wheat, etc and store them in my warehouse, until needed.
you got 2 extra cookery slots in the restaurant? is it worth it? I have 400 pearls right now, not sure what to buy. I don't want to buy any costumes, because they just speed up things in the game, and I already can't log in often enough to fish, or fight monsters, so speeding things up is a waste in my case. Maybe more cooking slots is useful in my case, i can just dump everything in in the morning. Now I have 3 slots (2 in the restaurants) and 1 in the smuggling den... Buying another one is probably worth it. I wish I can buy extra slots at the microscope, that would be really useful.
i noticed, since i haven't fished for a few days (pretty much since I finished the game days ago... fishing isn't my favourite activity)... I now get only level 1 fish... all the fish i get are almost only rubyfish and pike now...
I have found the most useful things to buy with pearls to be - extra warehouse space and extra space to sell fish at the fishmonger stall. The former to keep more stuff on hand of course and the latter to make money more quickly without having to log in ALL DAY to switch out fish.
To make yellow paint, I just keep searching islands until I get two yellow mushrooms. Honestly, if you go fight rock golems and pick up rock golem pieces and green rock golem moss, my windmill is pretty busy, when you add in flour days. During the other times, I will make red paint with stored tomatoes or purple paint when I have an extra blue apple. If I have one yellow mushroom, I go for mushroom soup, esp now that I have an extra cooking slot. It may not be quite as good $ wise from selling but IMHO it better utilizes all the crafting spots. Feel free to post responses
