A Companion for the Economy[]
This tool is being updated (Feb 09- 09) for build 1.12.45
The Economy of the game is pretty complex requiring you to figure out which structures are need to make the different products as well as what inputs those recipes require and depending on the product this can be a big task. To help you better manage the complexity of the economy there are a number of tools out there, one of which is the exchangeguild.com manufacturing companion which we are covering here.
Keep in mind that pricing has to do with supply and demand and not with the manufacturing cost, so this tool will not help you with buying.
It currently helps you with the following :
- Allows for Quick Pricing
- Tracking of Market Prices for your recipe inputs (the ones you are planning to buy vs make)
- Production Setup allows you to try out the different setups before you actually build them.. remember you only have 10 per server/account
- Project allow you to setup a specific project, define who makes what and how much it will cost, this will help you divide up the profits after the sale.
- Do you have materials lying around in your hull? The search functionality will help you determine which products need it as an input.
So how to get started in the economy, well the best way to do that is try to determine how much time you are willing to spent moving items around and what career path you want to take, because only the free traders get the big cargo haulers so keep that in mind.
After that you have to methods of setting up shop.. you determine what you want to make and determine your location and availability of materials or you select a region to setup shop and look at the resource around to determine what is easily available. Then go to the Auction house and take a look what is for sale and how much quantity, doesn’t hurt to do this for a couple of days to make sure that the items keep getting restocked.
After you have a clear idea of what is available you can start thinking about what product(s) you want to make, easiest way to use the tool to determine what goes into a recipe and see if you can either buy it can make it, keep in mind that you only have 10 structure slots. If you are planning to build something relatively simple you can use the production setup section of the tool to determine what you need and how much you can make. For ships because it takes so many different parts it is not recommended. Unless you are not planning to make the hull or rig since buying them will cut down on the amount of recipes you need to run.
If you know the market prices through the auction house this tool will allow you to help determine what product is the most profitable for you and what structures you will need.
How to start with the tool[]
Start off with the login in button and setup and user id, this will allow you to save your items. And every time you log back in your last market price / production setup and projects will be opened automatically. To create a new user click on the login button and click on ‘add’ this will allow you to create a new user.
The tools divided into multiple tabs:
1. Recipe, after you select a recipe in the recipe list the recipe details will be shown on the recipe tab, here you can drill down to see what is required and will give you a cost price.
2. Market Prices, is where you maintain the products you are planning to purchase vs. making, that way when you select a recipe it will calculate a validate cost price.
3. Production Setup, if you want to try out different setups for your structures you can try it out before you have to build them
4. Projects, more complex items will require multiple people to build this will help you allocate the different steps and will show the overall capital allocated to the different users, this can be used to divide the profits / goods
5. Search. Allows you to select a product and see which other products requires it as a manufacturing input. For more information go to the website and read the manual
In the recipe tab you can drill down into the recipe by right clicking and using collapse/expand or by left clicking in the tree column.
For more details in structures go the manual the tools is available at exchangeguild.com
