Hello beautiful people of Flight Rising! Welcome, new players! May the fourth be with you (sorry, couldn’t resist).
I’d like to share multiple tips & tricks for earning in-game currency. Our economy is diverse enough to provide a steady income even if you can’t or won’t spend too much time online. Personally, I’m not a huge fan of the Coliseum - everyone’s go-to treasure factory - but thanks to diversifying my efforts, I make a million treasure a week even when I’m not playing very actively.
This guide assumes you are familiar with the basic activities of the game and all areas of the site are accessible to you. If you’re confused, use Naga’s newbie guide! I will, however, explain the unofficial lingo and abbreviations as I go. KT = thousand treasure, to start with.
This guide also heavily relies on selling stuff to other players and assumes an item is worth as much (or as little) as one is willing to pay for it. We will be mostly ignoring any objective value the game sets up for items and dragons, i. e. Marketplace (MP) prices, hoardsell prices, and breed or gene inheritance odds. To learn how much an item is worth, look up its cheapest Auction House (AH) listing.
Golden rules:
Rare = expensive
Check the AH first
Watch the announcements
Trading with the game
Let’s first cover the activities that don’t necessarily involve dragon capitalism.
Fun fact: your Account Settings include a Total Treasure Earned stat. This stat doesn’t count trading with other players, only the treasure you personally got out of the game. Congrats on contributing to inflation! :)
Fairgrounds
What can I say? It’s an easy way to make money by procrastinating. After the novelty wears off, just focus on Glimmer and Gloom to make your daily 75 KT within 15 minutes.
Paladingineer offers an exhaustive Fairgrounds guide here.
I made a nice little tool for powering through G&G in Very Hard mode.
Familiar bonding
Don’t neglect it. At first, the profit may not seem like much. But in three months, when your familiars start awakening, you will get a Gilded Decorative Chest or two every day (and several cheaper treasure chests). A lot of people advise selling the chests on the AH, but I prefer to open them and sell (or use) the contents. Either way, expect at least 80 KT of average daily profit.
Chests are based on item rarity. Iron chests will award 1-2 star apparel and familiar, while gilded will award 1-4 star. (source)
If you have more familiars than you have dragons (as you should!), here’s a tip. Open a dragon’s profile in one browser tab. Open its Choose Familiar page in another tab. Make sure both tabs fit on your screen. Click Bond in the first tab. Before clicking OK, use the second tab to switch the familiar. When you click OK, another familiar will be ready for bonding. (Sounds confusing? Here’s a screenshot!)
Crim
Don’t neglect her either. When you have a sufficient item pool, she can yield you 1-2 KT per hour, and it does add up. But be careful: she may scam you out of an expensive item! Never give her apparel or Eliminate/Rally/Ambush/Berserker stones. Check the AH before giving her anything else. You can even buy junk on the AH for her. If you’re new, the sheer variety of items can be overwhelming, but you will eventually learn what is junk and what isn’t.
While Swipp trades are the same for everyone at a given moment, Crim trades are personally randomized for you.
Training and exalting dragons
This has been covered multiple times. To reiterate the basic steps: Eliminates are Coli exclusive. Unless one drops for you, you’ll have to buy it off the AH. I don’t care if it reaches one million treasure, it is worth it because it makes training 2-3 times faster. Chain yourself to the Fairgrounds, resort to the Sedona build for a while, cave and spend $5 on gems, whatever, but get at least one. Hoping to get one as a drop? Avoid the Volcanic Vents, Crystal Pools, and the Mire.
Curious about alternative Coli builds? Pyatiugolnik's got you covered.
Training your first Coli team? The first 10 levels are going to be a nightmare. Ask around your flight for help (be nice!). An experienced user can get your team to 10 within half an hour. That is, unless they’re your progenitors (those aren’t tradeable). Don’t use your progens on your first team. Don’t. Mine are exalted with equipped Eliminates and Rallies now.
A team of two can start training fodder and earning you money as early as level 17 in the Volcanic Vents.
Buying your fodder as hatchlings? Mind their age: the older, the better. If the prices are tied, the AH will display the oldest hatchlings first.
During a big Dominance battle, join a mercenary initiative (ask around your flight, they likely have one) and sell your leveled fodder to the conquesting flight for twice the regular exalt payout. Watch the Flight Rising Discussion subforum for the weekly [DOM WATCH] thread every Saturday to know about the upcoming battles.
Keep an eye for the daily exalt bonuses listed on the front page!
How to use a Mire Flyer:
How to use a Ghostlight Anticitank:
Trading with other players
Marketplace sniping
Certain items are rare and desirable. The treasure MP has a chance to restock every 5 minutes, and it offers random items in limited quantities (unlike the gem MP, whose stock is constant and unlimited). If you’re fast enough (we’re talking split seconds) to snipe the trendy stuff, you can resell it for much more.
The opposite is also true: the AH price of many items is much lower than the MP price. Keep this in mind if you’re in the market for something.
To learn the MP price of any item, multiply the sell value in the item’s tooltip by 10.
This gets more lucrative when your flight has Dominance. If you’ve got the first place and the 15% discount, you can also flip gene scrolls. Granted, they are (almost) always available to everyone at the full MP price, so list them at a smaller discount than your own to make 10-20 KT profit per scroll. For quick turnaround, choose the newest genes to flip.
So how do you do it? Rollover sniping: between 00:00 and 00:30 server time, the site is unavailable for play, but the MP continues to restock. Leave the MP tab open. Don’t interact with the site or it will log you out! At 00:30:[your favorite second], chop-chop.
List your auctions for a shorter duration to skimp on the AH fee (the system deducts 1% from your earnings for 1-day listings, 2% for 3-day, 3% for 7-day). Also, if there’s a tie between prices but your item expires sooner, it will be displayed (and purchased) first. Gem listings don’t have a deductible fee.
What to snipe?
Farming and selling Swipp/Baldwin/Hibernal Den ingredients
The Swipp clan (and, to a lesser extent, Baldwin) ask for a lot of different items in return for their goodies. In the future, they will ask for even more items and there’s no way to know which ones. Hence, never hoardsell even if your dragons’ lives depend on it. Better go play some Artifracture. It will really pay off when a Swipp/Baldwin update is released and everyone who hoardsold their stock of the ingredients back when they seemed to be useless junk will want to buy them from you.
Whenever a new Swipp trade comes up (every other hour), click Trade to see if you have some of the ingredients. Then, hit the AH! On average, a single item Swipp wants goes for 1-2 KT. Up to 20-30 KT if the trade was recently added to the game and/or the item is hard to come by (like Mute Swans and Wilting Roses).
Where to farm? Gathering and Coliseum. Take this awesome guide (and Gaia's guide has full info on Gathering drops) and see which items you can comfortably grind or gather for. Price-check them on the AH.
Coliseum items mostly sell well when the trade is new and/or the venue isn’t Kelp Beds or the Mire (everyone spends enough time there to farm the stuff they need).
Gathering is generally more lucrative, even on lower levels, which are accessible to everyone. Part of the reason is that many players spend all their Gathering turns on Scavenging for Unhatched Dragon Eggs. Don’t. Catch some Black Witches and buy the damned egg with the profits. (I’ve actually been especially unlucky and Scavenged a single egg in 30 levels. I hate my stubborn self a little.)
We do have a full list of Hibernal Den trades and they are the same for everyone. Don't hoardsell this stuff!
18 months and a whole page of full stacks of each Mire junk item later, I’ll grudgingly admit that you can occasionally hoardsell the items you farm in virtually unlimited quantities. On the other hand, Mute Swans, Wilting Roses, and Black Witches can still fetch you a nice profit, and they were my original examples last year.
Breeding dragons
Yes, you most definitely can make money breeding dragons, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. I won’t go into the mechanics of FR genetics here, but I’ll recommend this tool for quick reference as it has built-in gene, breed, and color predictors.
Easy way: breed fodder
Breed a Tundra with a Guardian (they have the shortest cooldowns, can eat plants and, as they're different breeds, are able to lay 5-egg nests). Pick the breeders that can spawn a good range of colors and six different genes (e. g. Cherub/Shimmer/Underbelly x Ripple/Facet/Thylacine) to maximize the benefits of daily exalt bonuses. Assay bloodlines first, just in case :D When their children grow up, give them nice names (optional, but never hurts) and sell them on the AH for the fodder floor price. With 15 fodder pairs and 5 unlocked nests, that’s 20-25 KT of daily profit. Here’s a guide with more details!
Fun way: start a hatchery
Q: Why aren’t my dragons selling? They’re not ugly.
A: No dragon is ugly and every dragon deserves a home. Unfortunately, there is not enough lair space to accommodate for every dragon site-wide. This is why we have exalt rewards. Now that we’ve got that cleared up, you’re asking the wrong question.
Q: What kind of dragons do people buy?
A: Those they don’t have already. Duh.
Don’t (they won’t sell, period):
Do:
Q: When do people buy dragons for a lot of money?
A: When demand exceeds supply.
Rare = expensive, remember? But what kind of dragons are rare?
Breed and gene rarity in terms of inheritance odds doesn’t mean there are actually few dragons with those traits. All due respect to the developers of dragon price calculators, a random Coatl is not more expensive than a random Fae: Coatls have been around for long enough to oversaturate the market.
Colors usually don’t reliably affect price. Make no mistake: if they aren’t pretty, the dragon won’t sell at all :D But don’t bother checking if a color combo is “rare”. I’m sorry, but nobody cares unless you stumble upon that one user with a dream dragon in these exact colors. Expensive colors are those that are both rare and desirable.
What is desirable? The failsafe option would be triples (all three colors are the same; also called XXX) and doubles (two colors are the same; also called XXY, XYX, and XYY, referring to the color placement), but they tend to be overbred. I warned you against triple White above, yes?
What’s not overbred? Well, good luck discovering, breeding, and scrolling it. But, two words about multitoned colors and genes. Can you believe we didn’t even have Poison and Toxin when I joined in 2015? All colors were predictable. Now, we have wonders like Watermelon Jaguar, Driftwood Capsule, and Copper anything. If you’re looking for your golden goose, I advise that you turn your attention towards this kind of oddities and find an XXY, XYY, or even XYZ combination where all three colors match in a flawless but unexpected way.
The most popular color is Orca, according to this poll. When in doubt, breed Orca, I guess :D
If your hatchlings are pretty but not fancy in any way, just list all of them for 12-20 KT. Anyone can afford that after half an hour playing Artifracture, so don’t bother with a detailed price list. Sell cheaper if you feel like it, but 12 KT serves as an (unreliable) exalt guard because it’s roughly the exalt payout for level 7. If you list your dragons at or below the current fodder floor (check the AH!), they will be exalted and there’s absolutely nothing you can do about it.
While I have your attention: no, there really isn’t any way around exalting. Either be incredibly picky about your dragons and only breed babies that will sell for sure, or be prepared to exalt a lot of your dragons or let them be exalted. Finding homes for undesirable dragons against all odds is an honorable pursuit, but you’ll run out of lair space quickly if you are not, yet again, incredibly picky.
Cynictis, bless their soul, has explained this tacky issue better than I ever could.
Hatchery tips:
Heartless way: breed luxury dragons
Combine everything I pointed out in the previous section in a single dragon! An XXY Obsidian Imperial with Glimmer or Opal is the iPhone X of Flight Rising. Buy two of them; don’t forget to assay bloodlines. Whenever a new gene comes out, give it to the pair on day 1. Rent a nest to get matching eyes (e. g. Shadow nest for purple-range Glimmer). This minor detail goes a long way. Boon the nest (hatch it instantly using a Boon of Fertility). Sell each hatchling for roughly the price of the gene scroll (150 to 900 KT). Actually, boon multiple nests on day 1 until you run out of space and luxury dragons to regene and breed.Acquire an Ancient Lair so you have some space left for dragons you actually like.
Other stuff you can sell
First generation (parentless; also called Gen One, G1) dragons. Yep, these Basic-gened guys you get out of Unhatched Eggs. Now, it’s a lottery and you’d be better off just selling the egg. But if you’re the betting type, the rewards can be great because a G1 with any given colors is rarer than a non-G1. A White/White/Lemon G1 once sold for 110 K gems! Most are ugly beyond repair and you’ll have to exalt (or keep) them, though. The giant mass hatches of Kaitii, HenryTheArcher, and Zetore are really thought-provoking if you'd like to watch RNG in action. If the RNGesus smiles upon you and you hatch a G1 with a double color, three close colors, or rare eyes, consider running a forum auction to get the best deal. Here’s how.
Food. Sell (and convert, while we’re at it) the food that drops in the Coliseum areas you frequent. That way, you won’t lose your stock of possible crafting ingredients. Always list for 1 day. No need to undercut, just match the market. Check for similar food type, stack size, and food point value, like this. Don’t bother price-checking a specific food item as long as you’re sure it’s not a crafting ingredient. Smaller stacks will make you more money (just like IRL!) but take more of your time to list. You can expect up to 10 KT per stack of 200 food points. Plants are the cheapest, the rest fluctuates.
Other Coliseum drops, obviously. Occasionally, you will get familiars, apparel, skins, and battle stones you don’t need yourself, and even Unhatched Eggs.
Baldwin goops. Never stop transmuting. Stock up on Green Sludge, Green Ooze, and Green Goo to sell during elemental festivals. They’re used in the festival-exclusive accent recipes. Hold onto everything else: when a new recipe is released, the apparent junk may spike. I’ve seen Gold Muck reach 50 KT, it was glorious.
Crafted items from Baldwin. Oh, how the tables have turned. This guide used to go as far as saying "whenever you craft an item, you’re losing money". Now, brewing high-level items overnight is one of my favorite sources of income. Level your cauldron, and your wallet will thank you! Choose wisely, however.
Better not trade with Swipp for profit: for most items, you'll barely break even. Just sell the ingredients.
Retired stuff. This used to apply to all monthly Festive Favors, but, as of Brightshine Jubilee 2016, not anymore. Read the explanation of the JoxBox Apocalypse here. By all means, use your festival currency to buy a few spares if you can, and keep an eye on the AH prices in case they spike, but don’t sweat it.
If the prices do spike, it's usually immediately after the festival, as counter-intuitive as it may seem.
Festival accents, old and new, are very hit-and-miss. Most never gain popularity and all fluctuate wildly. I’ve seen Icarus jump from 1000 G to 70 KT and back in a matter of weeks. My advice is, get the ones you want for personal use and don’t bother hoarding duplicates.
Another bad investment is the items that do retire but are given out for free upon release. (Loga, Third Anniversary Vista, Celebration Sage apparel…) Seriously, it just never works out. If you’re looking to sell them, sell them on day one.
The only truly good investment seems to be the 2013-2015 festival apparel and familiars (excluding the non-retired bears and crowns), once you can afford them, because they become rarer as time passes. Even then, watch the price fluctuations for a while before securing a good deal.
Anything that is continuously available will become more common and deflate. Sell it now.
Items that are cycled out (only available for a limited time, like Wildclaw scrolls, which are only offered in the gem MP for a few days approximately once a year with no heads-up) are also profitable, but you have to be able to promptly shell out 1000 G or more. Here’s a reference guide by yours truly!
Art - if you can art. Consider making an adoptable (art of a certain dragon breed that you can quickly recolor to match your customer’s dragon’s colors, genes, and possibly outfit; also called YCH for "your character here") or an accent. It can be a steady source of income. And yes, it’s allowed to sell art for real world money.
Don’t underestimate the morally ambiguous but extremely lucrative practice of AH flipping. However, you’ll have to know the market enough to tell the difference between an underprice (flip that!), an unreasonably inflated item dropping to its regular value (leave it be, it wouldn’t sell at that markup), and a misprice (you might want to return those to the seller). Don’t underprice your stuff, but also don’t be mad at those who do: just flip the thing if you think it’s worth it!
Additional notes
On gems
A gem is nothing more than 1000 treasure (or whatever the current exchange rate is, it’s entirely player-determined) in disguise. The only real reason to buy them with real world money is to support the site. You can:
Saving tips
P.S.
I first made this guide before the orange clown happened, and the name didn't sound as obnoxious back then, okay? I'd rather not rename it now.
English is my second language. I’m sorry if I sound clumsy at times! If anything is unclear or if you spot a grammar error, I would appreciate it if you told me!
Please feel free to disagree with me or correct my facts if you have more experience in a certain area! But I hope my playstyle, or me being open about my playstyle, does not upset anyone. I do believe that if something is expensive, it’s because the demand for the thing exceeds supply for objective reasons, and the only way to make the thing affordable for someone is to gift it to them. The FR userbase is a wonderful community of generous and caring people, and I never stop admiring it. If you’re reading this, please consider giving someone (not me omg) an item from their wishlist, complimenting their lair, or generally doing something nice for a stranger!
Oh, and the red icons I used can be downloaded here!
I’d like to share multiple tips & tricks for earning in-game currency. Our economy is diverse enough to provide a steady income even if you can’t or won’t spend too much time online. Personally, I’m not a huge fan of the Coliseum - everyone’s go-to treasure factory - but thanks to diversifying my efforts, I make a million treasure a week even when I’m not playing very actively.
This guide assumes you are familiar with the basic activities of the game and all areas of the site are accessible to you. If you’re confused, use Naga’s newbie guide! I will, however, explain the unofficial lingo and abbreviations as I go. KT = thousand treasure, to start with.
This guide also heavily relies on selling stuff to other players and assumes an item is worth as much (or as little) as one is willing to pay for it. We will be mostly ignoring any objective value the game sets up for items and dragons, i. e. Marketplace (MP) prices, hoardsell prices, and breed or gene inheritance odds. To learn how much an item is worth, look up its cheapest Auction House (AH) listing.
Golden rules:
Rare = expensive Check the AH first Watch the announcementsTrading with the game
Let’s first cover the activities that don’t necessarily involve dragon capitalism.
Fun fact: your Account Settings include a Total Treasure Earned stat. This stat doesn’t count trading with other players, only the treasure you personally got out of the game. Congrats on contributing to inflation! :)Fairgrounds
What can I say? It’s an easy way to make money by procrastinating. After the novelty wears off, just focus on Glimmer and Gloom to make your daily 75 KT within 15 minutes.
Paladingineer offers an exhaustive Fairgrounds guide here.
I made a nice little tool for powering through G&G in Very Hard mode.
Familiar bonding
Don’t neglect it. At first, the profit may not seem like much. But in three months, when your familiars start awakening, you will get a Gilded Decorative Chest or two every day (and several cheaper treasure chests). A lot of people advise selling the chests on the AH, but I prefer to open them and sell (or use) the contents. Either way, expect at least 80 KT of average daily profit.
Chests are based on item rarity. Iron chests will award 1-2 star apparel and familiar, while gilded will award 1-4 star. (source) If you have more familiars than you have dragons (as you should!), here’s a tip. Open a dragon’s profile in one browser tab. Open its Choose Familiar page in another tab. Make sure both tabs fit on your screen. Click Bond in the first tab. Before clicking OK, use the second tab to switch the familiar. When you click OK, another familiar will be ready for bonding. (Sounds confusing? Here’s a screenshot!)Crim
Don’t neglect her either. When you have a sufficient item pool, she can yield you 1-2 KT per hour, and it does add up. But be careful: she may scam you out of an expensive item! Never give her apparel or Eliminate/Rally/Ambush/Berserker stones. Check the AH before giving her anything else. You can even buy junk on the AH for her. If you’re new, the sheer variety of items can be overwhelming, but you will eventually learn what is junk and what isn’t.
While Swipp trades are the same for everyone at a given moment, Crim trades are personally randomized for you.Training and exalting dragons
This has been covered multiple times. To reiterate the basic steps:
- Level or buy one or two level 25 dragons (trainers).
- Leveling will take you about 3 days (i. e. 10-15 hours) if you do it right. Use Culex’ guide. (Follow it to a T. I’m serious!) Use Sylvandyr's tool for precise info on dragon stats required for each venue.
- A leveled dragon or leveling service will cost you upwards of 200 KT.
- In both cases, you will also need to buy a set of battle stones: 3 Berserkers (7+ KT each), 2 Ambushes (15+ KT each), 1 Eliminate (500+ KT ouch), and possibly a Tincture of Dissolution (25+ KT) for each trainer.
- The most cost-effective option is to purchase a Mire or Ghostlight Ruins solo trainer with the levels and stones already in place. Search for the elements and level, check the dragon's bio or ask the seller about the stones.
- Buy adult fodder (ugly and/or cheap dragons bred and/or bought with the intent to exalt them). Go to the AH, search for adults below a chosen price threshold, save the search for later. Here’s my saved search. 6-8 KT is the average fodder floor (AH price of the cheapest adult dragons), but it may fluctuate depending on the past, current, or upcoming Dominance pushes. Experiment with the figure. Try and grab any abnormally cheap adults as quickly as you can, before someone else does: this is called sniping.
- Go to the Coliseum (Ghostlight Ruins, Mire, or Kelp Beds, depending on your trainers’ build) and get those unfortunate ugly youths to level 5-8. 6 tends to be the most cost-effective.
- Exalt! And repeat. You will make 50-100 KT per hour.
Eliminates are Coli exclusive. Unless one drops for you, you’ll have to buy it off the AH. I don’t care if it reaches one million treasure, it is worth it because it makes training 2-3 times faster. Chain yourself to the Fairgrounds, resort to the Sedona build for a while, cave and spend $5 on gems, whatever, but get at least one. Hoping to get one as a drop? Avoid the Volcanic Vents, Crystal Pools, and the Mire. Curious about alternative Coli builds? Pyatiugolnik's got you covered. Training your first Coli team? The first 10 levels are going to be a nightmare. Ask around your flight for help (be nice!). An experienced user can get your team to 10 within half an hour. That is, unless they’re your progenitors (those aren’t tradeable). Don’t use your progens on your first team. Don’t. Mine are exalted with equipped Eliminates and Rallies now. A team of two can start training fodder and earning you money as early as level 17 in the Volcanic Vents. Buying your fodder as hatchlings? Mind their age: the older, the better. If the prices are tied, the AH will display the oldest hatchlings first. During a big Dominance battle, join a mercenary initiative (ask around your flight, they likely have one) and sell your leveled fodder to the conquesting flight for twice the regular exalt payout. Watch the Flight Rising Discussion subforum for the weekly [DOM WATCH] thread every Saturday to know about the upcoming battles. Keep an eye for the daily exalt bonuses listed on the front page! How to use a Mire Flyer:
- Make sure your trainer is Arcane. (Preferably before buying or training them.)
- Send the trainer and two fodder dragons to the Mire.
- Refresh until you only see Unicorns/Cerdae, Croakers (any), Psywurms (any), Common Podids, Mistwatch Shellions, and/or Salve Kamaitachis (i. e. the venue’s magic users).
- Haste for 5 free Breath.
- Rally for 3-Scratch kills.
- Scratch 5 times and then you can Eliminate the survivors.
- Next battle, Rally then Eliminate.
- There are two stat distribution variations: 117 Strength and 119 Strength. The 117 version is sturdier but you will have to use Scratch+Eliminate instead of Rally+Eliminate for two monsters: Mossy Cerdae and Brilliant Psywurm.
How to use a Ghostlight Anticitank:
- Make sure your trainer is Water or Nature.
- Send the trainer and two fodder dragons to Ghostlight Ruins.
- Refresh until you see at least two of the following: Carrioncorn, Nightmare, Pronghorn Stomper, Wendigo, Infestation Hound, Wraith Hound, Greybeak Reaper, Shatterbone Vulture, Tatterwing Carcass, Tengu Caller (i. e. the venue’s physical attackers).
- Rally. Rally. Anticipate.
- With any luck, you can start Eliminating now.
- Next battle, Rally then Eliminate.
- My Anticitank is 115/76, but there are other stat distribution variants.
Trading with other players
Marketplace sniping
Certain items are rare and desirable. The treasure MP has a chance to restock every 5 minutes, and it offers random items in limited quantities (unlike the gem MP, whose stock is constant and unlimited). If you’re fast enough (we’re talking split seconds) to snipe the trendy stuff, you can resell it for much more.
The opposite is also true: the AH price of many items is much lower than the MP price. Keep this in mind if you’re in the market for something. To learn the MP price of any item, multiply the sell value in the item’s tooltip by 10.This gets more lucrative when your flight has Dominance. If you’ve got the first place and the 15% discount, you can also flip gene scrolls. Granted, they are (almost) always available to everyone at the full MP price, so list them at a smaller discount than your own to make 10-20 KT profit per scroll. For quick turnaround, choose the newest genes to flip.
So how do you do it?
- Synchronize your system clock with Swipp.
- Set up a timer, a clock widget, a browser extension - anything that will alert you whenever the clock’s about to hit a five-minute mark.
- At the exact right second, hit the Apparel (or Genes) link in the MP itself in order to refresh the list of items rather than the entire page.
- The exact right second for you may be anywhere between XX:00 and XX:03 depending on your connection speed. You don’t want to refresh earlier than the MP itself restocks. Experiment.
- Your thing stocked!? Click Buy, press Tab, press Space.
- Wait a few minutes before listing the thing on AH so you’re not immediately undercut by another sniper.
- Undercut the lowest AH price by 10-500 T. Please not more because you won’t just lose your own profit, you’ll also crash the market for the item as other sellers start undercutting you. And not 1 T because it irks some buyers.
- Don’t list more than two of an item (one for T, one for G) at a time, we now have a handy button to relist them as they sell.
Rollover sniping: between 00:00 and 00:30 server time, the site is unavailable for play, but the MP continues to restock. Leave the MP tab open. Don’t interact with the site or it will log you out! At 00:30:[your favorite second], chop-chop. List your auctions for a shorter duration to skimp on the AH fee (the system deducts 1% from your earnings for 1-day listings, 2% for 3-day, 3% for 7-day). Also, if there’s a tie between prices but your item expires sooner, it will be displayed (and purchased) first. Gem listings don’t have a deductible fee. What to snipe?
- New apparel and genes immediately after release. The feeding frenzy only lasts a day or two.
- Wing decorations, tail decorations, and extras like flowerfalls or lanterns.
- Black, white, red, and gold colorations.
- Four and five-star rarity.
Farming and selling Swipp/Baldwin/Hibernal Den ingredients
The Swipp clan (and, to a lesser extent, Baldwin) ask for a lot of different items in return for their goodies. In the future, they will ask for even more items and there’s no way to know which ones. Hence, never hoardsell even if your dragons’ lives depend on it. Better go play some Artifracture. It will really pay off when a Swipp/Baldwin update is released and everyone who hoardsold their stock of the ingredients back when they seemed to be useless junk will want to buy them from you.
Whenever a new Swipp trade comes up (every other hour), click Trade to see if you have some of the ingredients. Then, hit the AH! On average, a single item Swipp wants goes for 1-2 KT. Up to 20-30 KT if the trade was recently added to the game and/or the item is hard to come by (like Mute Swans and Wilting Roses).
Where to farm? Gathering and Coliseum. Take this awesome guide (and Gaia's guide has full info on Gathering drops) and see which items you can comfortably grind or gather for. Price-check them on the AH.
Coliseum items mostly sell well when the trade is new and/or the venue isn’t Kelp Beds or the Mire (everyone spends enough time there to farm the stuff they need).
Gathering is generally more lucrative, even on lower levels, which are accessible to everyone. Part of the reason is that many players spend all their Gathering turns on Scavenging for Unhatched Dragon Eggs. Don’t. Catch some Black Witches and buy the damned egg with the profits. (I’ve actually been especially unlucky and Scavenged a single egg in 30 levels. I hate my stubborn self a little.)
We do have a full list of Hibernal Den trades and they are the same for everyone. Don't hoardsell this stuff!
18 months and a whole page of full stacks of each Mire junk item later, I’ll grudgingly admit that you can occasionally hoardsell the items you farm in virtually unlimited quantities. On the other hand, Mute Swans, Wilting Roses, and Black Witches can still fetch you a nice profit, and they were my original examples last year.Breeding dragons
Yes, you most definitely can make money breeding dragons, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. I won’t go into the mechanics of FR genetics here, but I’ll recommend this tool for quick reference as it has built-in gene, breed, and color predictors.
Easy way: breed fodderBreed a Tundra with a Guardian (they have the shortest cooldowns, can eat plants and, as they're different breeds, are able to lay 5-egg nests). Pick the breeders that can spawn a good range of colors and six different genes (e. g. Cherub/Shimmer/Underbelly x Ripple/Facet/Thylacine) to maximize the benefits of daily exalt bonuses. Assay bloodlines first, just in case :D When their children grow up, give them nice names (optional, but never hurts) and sell them on the AH for the fodder floor price. With 15 fodder pairs and 5 unlocked nests, that’s 20-25 KT of daily profit. Here’s a guide with more details!
- If you have little lair space: sell them as hatchlings.
The fodder floor for hatchlings is typically twice lower than for adults (4 KT vs. 8 KT).(With the introduction of Hibernal Den, apparently the new gap is only about 2 KT. Will update this section once things stabilize.) - If you have extra lair space: buy the cheapest hatchlings (the older, the better), wait for them to grow up, resell for the adult price.
- Optional: just level and exalt them yourself.
- Optional: exalt or sell the parents too so you don’t have to feed them while they’re on their breeding cooldown.
- No need to undercut for more than 1 T.
- If there’s a Dominance battle going on, watch the fodder floor! It will rise, and so will your potential profits.
Fun way: start a hatcheryQ: Why aren’t my dragons selling? They’re not ugly.
A: No dragon is ugly and every dragon deserves a home. Unfortunately, there is not enough lair space to accommodate for every dragon site-wide. This is why we have exalt rewards. Now that we’ve got that cleared up, you’re asking the wrong question.
Q: What kind of dragons do people buy?
A: Those they don’t have already. Duh.
Don’t (they won’t sell, period):
- Plentiful and Common breeds.
- Basic.
- Crackle, Gembond, Smoke, Tiger, Stripes, Speckle, Freckle, Clown, Eye Spots, Hypnotic, Current, Smirch, Iridescent+Shimmer together.
- Tertiary colors that would look better as Basic (Thistle comes to mind).
- Triple White, Ice, Obsidian, Midnight, Seafoam, Gold, Crimson, Blood… the list goes on.
- Anything that’s already available on the AH in multiple identical copies.
- Dragons with offspring, especially with unnamed offspring.
Do:
- Skydancer, Imperial, Coatl, Wildclaw
- Anything new. Duh. Nobody has it yet.
- As the novelty wears off, any gene is more or less situational. The deal breakers listed above are nigh-unsalvageable unless you know exactly what you’re doing. Conversely, the most successful genes in the history of FR are Cherub, Butterfly, Runes, and Glimmer: colorful, detailed, and diverse. Here’s a survey that’s kinda old, but hey, food for thought.
- Watch for Primal and Multi-Gaze eyes. They're pure RNG and very rare, so they add value to the dragon.
Q: When do people buy dragons for a lot of money?
A: When demand exceeds supply.
Rare = expensive, remember? But what kind of dragons are rare?
Breed and gene rarity in terms of inheritance odds doesn’t mean there are actually few dragons with those traits. All due respect to the developers of dragon price calculators, a random Coatl is not more expensive than a random Fae: Coatls have been around for long enough to oversaturate the market.
- New genes stay expensive for a while.
- Gem genes stay expensive for longer than treasure genes.
- New genes on breeds with longer cooldowns stay expensive for longer than plentiful breeds with the same genes.
Colors usually don’t reliably affect price. Make no mistake: if they aren’t pretty, the dragon won’t sell at all :D But don’t bother checking if a color combo is “rare”. I’m sorry, but nobody cares unless you stumble upon that one user with a dream dragon in these exact colors. Expensive colors are those that are both rare and desirable.
What is desirable? The failsafe option would be triples (all three colors are the same; also called XXX) and doubles (two colors are the same; also called XXY, XYX, and XYY, referring to the color placement), but they tend to be overbred. I warned you against triple White above, yes?
What’s not overbred? Well, good luck discovering, breeding, and scrolling it. But, two words about multitoned colors and genes. Can you believe we didn’t even have Poison and Toxin when I joined in 2015? All colors were predictable. Now, we have wonders like Watermelon Jaguar, Driftwood Capsule, and Copper anything. If you’re looking for your golden goose, I advise that you turn your attention towards this kind of oddities and find an XXY, XYY, or even XYZ combination where all three colors match in a flawless but unexpected way.
The most popular color is Orca, according to this poll. When in doubt, breed Orca, I guess :DIf your hatchlings are pretty but not fancy in any way, just list all of them for 12-20 KT. Anyone can afford that after half an hour playing Artifracture, so don’t bother with a detailed price list. Sell cheaper if you feel like it, but 12 KT serves as an (unreliable) exalt guard because it’s roughly the exalt payout for level 7. If you list your dragons at or below the current fodder floor (check the AH!), they will be exalted and there’s absolutely nothing you can do about it.
While I have your attention: no, there really isn’t any way around exalting. Either be incredibly picky about your dragons and only breed babies that will sell for sure, or be prepared to exalt a lot of your dragons or let them be exalted. Finding homes for undesirable dragons against all odds is an honorable pursuit, but you’ll run out of lair space quickly if you are not, yet again, incredibly picky.Cynictis, bless their soul, has explained this tacky issue better than I ever could.
Hatchery tips:
- OK first, most of your sales will occur through the AH and the Find a Dragon subforum. Post your babies to all threads where they fit the customer’s request - and only there, don’t be a spammer. A hatchery thread is more of a nice accessory, but it is, if nothing else, a convenient place to store all your info.
- Have a theme. Specialize in something: an animal, a gene, a breed, a color range, lore. A catchy name and/or graphics will also do. Just try to be distinctive in some way.
- Predictable breeding pairs. If your pair has close colors and genes, your customers have a reason to sign up for their future hatchlings and know what to expect. A possible idea is two very narrow ranges and one very wide range (e. g. Obsidian/Obsidian/Cyan x Eldritch/Eldritch/Sunset).
- Clear and short rules. Please don’t write a novel there.
- Comprehensible breeding cards. Include color ranges, breed and gene inheritance odds, hatchling previews, and full-body images of the parents, preferably not overdressed.
- Easily accessible hatchlings for sale. Ideally, they should be in the first post, right after a few paragraphs of rules.
- Nice graphics. At least, a banner. Put it in your profile and your signature and link it to the thread.
- Bump the thread every 20 minutes if you can. (the most essential tip :D)
Heartless way: breed luxury dragonsCombine everything I pointed out in the previous section in a single dragon! An XXY Obsidian Imperial with Glimmer or Opal is the iPhone X of Flight Rising. Buy two of them; don’t forget to assay bloodlines. Whenever a new gene comes out, give it to the pair on day 1. Rent a nest to get matching eyes (e. g. Shadow nest for purple-range Glimmer). This minor detail goes a long way. Boon the nest (hatch it instantly using a Boon of Fertility). Sell each hatchling for roughly the price of the gene scroll (150 to 900 KT). Actually, boon multiple nests on day 1 until you run out of space and luxury dragons to regene and breed.
Other stuff you can sell
First generation (parentless; also called Gen One, G1) dragons. Yep, these Basic-gened guys you get out of Unhatched Eggs. Now, it’s a lottery and you’d be better off just selling the egg. But if you’re the betting type, the rewards can be great because a G1 with any given colors is rarer than a non-G1. A White/White/Lemon G1 once sold for 110 K gems! Most are ugly beyond repair and you’ll have to exalt (or keep) them, though. The giant mass hatches of Kaitii, HenryTheArcher, and Zetore are really thought-provoking if you'd like to watch RNG in action. If the RNGesus smiles upon you and you hatch a G1 with a double color, three close colors, or rare eyes, consider running a forum auction to get the best deal. Here’s how. Food. Sell (and convert, while we’re at it) the food that drops in the Coliseum areas you frequent. That way, you won’t lose your stock of possible crafting ingredients. Always list for 1 day. No need to undercut, just match the market. Check for similar food type, stack size, and food point value, like this. Don’t bother price-checking a specific food item as long as you’re sure it’s not a crafting ingredient. Smaller stacks will make you more money (just like IRL!) but take more of your time to list. You can expect up to 10 KT per stack of 200 food points. Plants are the cheapest, the rest fluctuates. Other Coliseum drops, obviously. Occasionally, you will get familiars, apparel, skins, and battle stones you don’t need yourself, and even Unhatched Eggs. Baldwin goops. Never stop transmuting. Stock up on Green Sludge, Green Ooze, and Green Goo to sell during elemental festivals. They’re used in the festival-exclusive accent recipes. Hold onto everything else: when a new recipe is released, the apparent junk may spike. I’ve seen Gold Muck reach 50 KT, it was glorious. Crafted items from Baldwin. Oh, how the tables have turned. This guide used to go as far as saying "whenever you craft an item, you’re losing money". Now, brewing high-level items overnight is one of my favorite sources of income. Level your cauldron, and your wallet will thank you! Choose wisely, however.Better not trade with Swipp for profit: for most items, you'll barely break even. Just sell the ingredients.
Retired stuff. This used to apply to all monthly Festive Favors, but, as of Brightshine Jubilee 2016, not anymore. Read the explanation of the JoxBox Apocalypse here. By all means, use your festival currency to buy a few spares if you can, and keep an eye on the AH prices in case they spike, but don’t sweat it.If the prices do spike, it's usually immediately after the festival, as counter-intuitive as it may seem.
Festival accents, old and new, are very hit-and-miss. Most never gain popularity and all fluctuate wildly. I’ve seen Icarus jump from 1000 G to 70 KT and back in a matter of weeks. My advice is, get the ones you want for personal use and don’t bother hoarding duplicates.
Another bad investment is the items that do retire but are given out for free upon release. (Loga, Third Anniversary Vista, Celebration Sage apparel…) Seriously, it just never works out. If you’re looking to sell them, sell them on day one.
The only truly good investment seems to be the 2013-2015 festival apparel and familiars (excluding the non-retired bears and crowns), once you can afford them, because they become rarer as time passes. Even then, watch the price fluctuations for a while before securing a good deal.
Anything that is continuously available will become more common and deflate. Sell it now.
Items that are cycled out (only available for a limited time, like Wildclaw scrolls, which are only offered in the gem MP for a few days approximately once a year with no heads-up) are also profitable, but you have to be able to promptly shell out 1000 G or more. Here’s a reference guide by yours truly! Art - if you can art. Consider making an adoptable (art of a certain dragon breed that you can quickly recolor to match your customer’s dragon’s colors, genes, and possibly outfit; also called YCH for "your character here") or an accent. It can be a steady source of income. And yes, it’s allowed to sell art for real world money. Don’t underestimate the morally ambiguous but extremely lucrative practice of AH flipping. However, you’ll have to know the market enough to tell the difference between an underprice (flip that!), an unreasonably inflated item dropping to its regular value (leave it be, it wouldn’t sell at that markup), and a misprice (you might want to return those to the seller). Don’t underprice your stuff, but also don’t be mad at those who do: just flip the thing if you think it’s worth it!Additional notes
On gems
A gem is nothing more than 1000 treasure (or whatever the current exchange rate is, it’s entirely player-determined) in disguise. The only real reason to buy them with real world money is to support the site. You can:
- Sell anything you please for gems. Buy for treasure and resell for gems if necessary. Do it with fast-rotating goods: cheapest familiars and apparel (Baldwin fodder), fodder dragons, gene scrolls. The AH prices of treasure gene scrolls are usually higher in gems, while the prices of gem gene scrolls favor treasure - precisely because players use them as a means of currency exchange. Fodder is usually cheaper in gems.
- Buy gem MP items on the AH for treasure. (Mind their original price and don’t get ripped off!) Usermade accents cost gems to publish and therefore they’re traditionally sold for gems, but message the seller (be nice!), and they may be willing to work out a treasure deal.
- Buy gems from other users via the Items for Sale subforum.
Saving tips
- Use your Vault. Vault every, say, 10 or 100 KT you make. You will trick your brain into thinking you’re broke, and it will stop encouraging impulse buys.
- Your flight has Dom? Spend all your treasure on gene scrolls. You can cash them in with a nice little markup when it’s time to make the actual purchase you were saving up for.
- Use the Items for Sale subforum if you’re in the market for something expensive. You might find a better deal there.
- Use the Dom shops found in Items for Sale to buy genes with the full 15% discount from members of the Dominant flight (be nice! don't buy to resell, leave tips, return the favor if you have the chance).
- Keep an eye on raffles and giveaways. Especially if you’re new. They will either be on the eponymous subforum or on your in-flight forum.
- If you’re new, don’t waste money on familiars and apparel unless you really want to. Catch familiars in the Coliseum, bond with them, get more from treasure chests.
- Running out of seafood? Your Imperials ate it! Those giant pigs will eat meat and even plants, but only if you leave them no other choice. Convert a little seafood just for the Coatls and Ridgebacks after feeding the rest of your lair.
- Collecting familiars? Wait for an elemental festival to get better deals on the drops from the flight-themed Coliseum venues and Gathering areas. Everyone rushes there to farm for festival currency!
- In love with an expensive hatchling? It never hurts to ask for a discount (be nice!).
- In love with a newly released item or gene? Try and wait for the hype to die down. It will take a month at most for those outrageous prices to drop.
- Think twice before giving fancy gene scrolls to dragons with popular color combos. Seek out a ready-made dragon instead, wait a bit if the gene is new.
- Got a sophisticated dream dragon? Save a customized AH search, check it daily, but also check Dragon Search. Even if a dragon isn’t listed for sale, you can ask the owner to sell or stud them out (be nice!). Many dragons are exalted as soon as they grow up, so you want to find and claim them when they’re just born.
- Granted, with so many new genes and colors, identical dragons are becoming a rare thing. But take a moment to consider if that dream dragon you scried at 3 AM would look just as stunning with slightly different colors, so that you have options.
- Apparel slots are purchased for your entire lair, not for a single dragon. You don’t need to remove a gene before applying a new one. Imperial scrolls cost upwards of 500 K gems. This has been a PSA :)
P.S.
English is my second language. I’m sorry if I sound clumsy at times! If anything is unclear or if you spot a grammar error, I would appreciate it if you told me!
Please feel free to disagree with me or correct my facts if you have more experience in a certain area! But I hope my playstyle, or me being open about my playstyle, does not upset anyone. I do believe that if something is expensive, it’s because the demand for the thing exceeds supply for objective reasons, and the only way to make the thing affordable for someone is to gift it to them. The FR userbase is a wonderful community of generous and caring people, and I never stop admiring it. If you’re reading this, please consider giving someone (not me omg) an item from their wishlist, complimenting their lair, or generally doing something nice for a stranger!
Oh, and the red icons I used can be downloaded here!
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