$$$~So you fancy earning some dragon dolla?~$$$
I've been kicking around on FR for long enough to have read over a ton of guides and tried all sorts of methods of making treasure, and I figure I'd try adding my own little nuggets of wisdom in case they help anyone out. I've done fairly well for myself treasure-wise, and want to spread the wealth, if only in knowledge format.
I'll cover the methods and tips I've been using to gather cash, and cover some of the well-known tips and pitfalls (which most long-toothed FR users already know but is essential for the newbies! I made every single mistake back in the day :C).
I'm going to block this all out in the first post, so it's all here, and then look at either sectioning it out in posts below or formatting so its easier to navigate as I appreciate that its a little wordy. So bear with me! I hope it's informative and potentially even entertaining, and that it actually helps people! I'm open to all comments, questions and feedback, either openly within this thread or privately via pm!
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CHAPTERS:-
1. The One Rule.
2. How I Mine For Fish!? (a.k.a: I am new/broke as heck.)
---2a) Fairgrounds
---2b) Coliseum
3. Cheap Tricks.
---3a) Self Control
---3b) Trading Post
---3c) Familiars
---3d) Gathering
---3e) Breeding
---3f) Exalting
4. Happy Holidays, give me all your stuff.
5. Going once, going twice... (a.k.a Get Money, Get Paid.)
6. Working 9 to 5, what a way to make a living.
CHAPTER ONE - THE ONE RULE:
This guide has only one rule and I'll be referring to it often. I can't enforce it, so admittedly it's more a request than a rule, but please... do not be terrible and undermine the economy. :T
No I'm really serious.
Everything works and flows so much better (and everyone, EVERYONE earns more money) if people aren't rubbish and undermine/undercut horribly. Using the auction house and selling stuff is a fantastic way to make money, and is the main crux of this guide, but underpricing/undercutting by huge margins simultaneously fudges the economy, de-values certain items, and ruins it for everyone. PLUS, when it comes down to it, you make less money! Where is the point in that!
There isn't one.
Don't do it. :I
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CHAPTER TWO - HOW I MINE FOR FISH?!:
(a.k.a: I am new/broke as heck.)
So you're new to Flight Rising and have not a penny to your name. Or you've blown the bank on a shiny new gene scroll and are now forlornly looking at your bank balance. This is where you start.
Something I picked up from a lot of guides was that the Coliseum and Fairgrounds are great places to earn treasure initially. (Sadly, I learned all this after I'd been making all the basic mistakes such as grinding the slowest, least profitable fairground games and trying to build a coliseum team without any idea regarding battle stones/stats.) I'll cover Fairgrounds first then Coli:
2a) FAIRGROUNDS:
- The games are pretty fun, if repetitive. Ideally aim for something that you can play over and over and continue to enjoy, preferably for high profit.
Shock Switch is probably one of the best for this. Personally I used to like doing Jigsaws cos they were fun, I killed a lot of time back in the day when I could sit up until 5am, but the time to profit ratio is pretty terrible. Especially if you're as rubbish at Jigsaw as I am. :C
- If you've got a slow computer or are trying to play on mobile, you might have a tough time. To be fair though the same can be said for Coli, you're just not going to have the best experience. :C But keep at it! It's a necessary evil. Sorry.
- Fairgrounds requires some repetitive clicking, less so than the Coliseum, but just a warning.
- Some of the games are pretty bad for flashing/animation too, for those of you sensitive to such things.
Fairground games for treasure gain is slow going, but it can be pretty fun and might not feel like such a grind compared to the Coliseum. Speaking of which...
2b) COLISEUM:
- If you're brand spanking new, check out your flight-only forums for newbie threads. When I joined, Lightning Flight had a thread for newbloods like myself to pipe up and say hello, then they would get outfitted with a handful of swag and a random third adult dragon to set me going. It was pretty awesome, and I'm hoping a fairly common thing that most flights do. This third dragon rounds out your team so that you can jump straight into Coli grinding/levelling if that's what you wanna do.
- Check out Coli levelling/grinding guides. Seriously. I used this one but feel free to check over as many as you like. The guide I linked has a section on how you're going to need some bank to set yourself up a decent Coli grinding team. This is an unfortunate truth, you need money to make money! But once you're set up, if Coli grinding is your bag, it's a great little earner.
- FYI the Coli is more click-intensive than Fairgrounds. A LOT more. BUT It's waaaay more profitable, just simultaneously waaaay more of a pain in the ***. :v The FR team may or may not alter this in the future to be less clicky and more accessible to folks who can't click for hours at a stretch, but as of writing this, sadly not the case.
- It's also intensive on the animations too, but the FR team are working on a way of turning all animations off, so that's pretty rad.
Coli grinding boils down to:
1. Kill a thing.
2. Earn a loot.
3. Sell the loot.
4. ????
5. Profit.
You can either sell the loot from within your hoard itself, or if it's a valuable/desirable item, sell it on the Auction House. We'll cover the AH in more detail later.
The most desirable items for selling on the AH are familiars, apparel, some battle stones (although if you're levelling a team you might need to keep the more valuable ones for yourself) and even some seemingly useless material/other items. These come into play when you check out Swipp in the Trading Post. Users gather up these random items and trade them for even more valuable/rare items which can often only be acquired through these swaps.
I used this guide to see which items I could hoard up in my.. uh.. hoard, to flog on the AH or keep to swap for valuable goodies at Swipp's, and thereby which items I could mass-sell from within my hoard. If it's an item Swipp requires for a trade, you can bet it's worth something to someone!
~~BEAR IN MIND that I always found it handy to keep at least one of each item so that I could get a couple hundred Treasure for a random item at Crim's Collection Cart, also in the Trading Post. This one can be tricky though as she can request rare items that you could get more money for on the Auction House (certain familiars, dragon eggs, battle stones, rare food items, etc), so be savvy and do your research first!~~
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CHAPTER THREE - CHEAP TRICKS:
Some stuff to do on a semi-regular basis to net yourself another couple hundred treasure/potentially valuable loot:
3a) Self control.
Try to not spend every penny you get, as soon as you get it. If you ABSOLUTELY MUST HAVE the Thing, try to save for the Thing, make it your goal. If you bankrupt yourself for each Thing as soon as a new Thing becomes your goal, then you're just going to have to start all over to grind back your base capital in order to move up the ladder and go for the bigger money. Simple enough yeah?
3b) Trading Post.
It's dumb and doesn't get you much money but go do Tomo's Trivia Tablet every day at the trading post. You learn some of the answers off by heart eventually and there are even guides out there containing answers to all questions if you really wanna squeeze every last buck out of the ol' snapper.
In fact the trading post should be thoroughly ransacked every day. Check to see if you can nab whatever Swipp is offering, hit up Tomo, then Crim, and Pinkerton can rarely give out some valuable stuff too.
Remember, EVERY LITTLE HELPS.
3c) Familiars.
Give every dragon in your lair (the ones you're keeping at least) a familiar. Then, every day, go in there and click that ?. It'll net you some spare change, and that amount will go up with each familiar bond level, with a special chest prize at each "level up". These chests can contain some nifty stuff (along with more coins!) so it's worth doing! It's one of the smaller money-makers I still do myself every day. Once a familiar is max level, swap it out, start over.
NOTE: Keep a handful of the rusted chests from the lower bond level-ups, cos they're SWIPP ITEMS!
3d) Gathering.
Useful for feeding your dragons if you're not going near the Coliseum, but you can gather up rare food items and sell them, and/or salvage and dig rare items or more valuable goodies to sell direct from your hoard. There are some really useful gathering guides out there that will tell you what you can gather from certain areas and at what level, but tbh it all boils down to: DIG/SCAVENGE for max profits if you're looking for rares to flog. Scavenge can net you an unhatched egg for the flight of the dropdown you've chosen, which are valuable as all heck.
- I have it on good authority that levelling up Hunting will yield rewards in the form of bejewelled snake food items. These babies are rare and valuable as all heck, so something to bear in mind! And please, please don't convert them to meat, you'll make everyone cry.
3e) Breed dragons I guess!?
I'm... not going to touch on this one very much as there are a whole bunch of dragon breeding guides out there that would cover this one way better than I ever could. Plus dragon breeding ain't my jam, man!
HOWEVER there is some considerable money to be made here. Do your research, make connections on the forums and scope out the For Sale/Wanted threads. But please, for the love of all that is good in the world, OBEY THE ONE RULE. :C
HINT: breeding one species of dragon with another, will give you the chance to yield five eggs, the maximum possible
3f) Exalting dragons.
Again, there are some pretty rad guides out there if you are interested in this. It's a bit of work, but the profits are there if you're willing to knuckle down. I don't exalt that often but I'll break it down to its simplest form:
- To earn the best treasure through exalting you're going to need a solid Coliseum team consisting of two max-level dragons plus one random scrub-dragon earmarked for exaltation.
- So you get these two souped-up dragons, and now you need to find yourself a suitable sacrifice. Some folks breed to exalt, (as with breeding, above, if you're doing this, aim for 5-egg nests for maximum cash!) and others snipe cheap hatchlings on the AH at 4-5 days old and wait until they tick over into 6 days old. Then they grow up, and you can have your merry way with them without having to wait the full 6 days, feeding them etc. Buying adult dragons to exalt on the AH for your own personal gain is a WASTE OF MONEY. Do not do this.
- With the sacrifice in place, run into the higher levels of the Coliseum and roll face for a while. We're talking like, The Mire at the very lowest. Anything less and your scrub-dragon will not gain any experience because the two beefcakes are ruining it by being Too ******.
- Level scrubderg until he's a Decent Level to exalt (surveys say level seven is the minimum, you'll earn about 10kT at level 7 so it's the golden effort-to-payoff ratio. The higher the level, the more $$$ admittedly.) and then send him off to serve the dergy overlord of your choosing.
- If you get really into exalting, I'm told that there are guides out there for building one big mo-fo super-derg who can drag two scrubs along for levelling. If this sounds like your cup of tea, go check that out, it'll certainly streamline the exalting process and speed things up if you know what you're doing!
Thatssssss about it? I'm not even going to go into Dominance and Profit Pushing too much cos it's pretty intense and scary imo, BUT if you want to know more, pipe up within your flight's personal forum and I'm sure someone will fill you in. It's pretty neat and a great mechanic/fab way of bringing flights together and making friends, but personally I find it doesn't have that much personal profit and I am far too lazy for the amount of effort involved. :< I do however highly encourage people to read up on Exalting, Dominance, etc because yeah its actually pretty cool, don't let me being a lazy bugger tarnish it!
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CHAPTER FOUR - HAPPY HOLIDAYS, GIVE ME ALL YOUR STUFF:
People go nutso-bananas for holiday items. It's just a given. THANKFULLY If you're savvy you can cash in on this and supply some of that demand.
If you're new, then you may or may not know that FR holds monthly events, one per month, to honour each flight. It's pretty rad and good fun if you don't mind a spot of Coli grinding. Sadly if you're unable to Coli grind for health reasons, it might not be such a jolly holiday. :C As mentioned up in the Coli section, hopefully something will be done about this by the FR team, but as of writing this, sadly, it's a click-fest.
On the left there at the bottom of the SHOP header is Festive Favours. This opens once a month during these holidays where you can cash in specific holiday items or "currency" to get hold of familiars and apparel which are ONLY available during this holiday. This makes them, naturally, handy little things to hoard up and sell when demand is high after the holiday has ended. The longer you can sit on these items, the more you can get for them usually.
Ergo, the more grinding you can do in the Coli to earn more holiday currency items, the more holiday rewards you can purchase, and the more treasure you can look to acquire in the future. Think of them like weird dragon savings bonds. :3
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CHAPTER FIVE - GOING ONCE, GOING TWICE...
(a.k.a $$$ GET MONEY, GET PAID. $$$)
Finally the meat of the guide, which focuses on the AUCTION HOUSE. *small fanfare*
This is where I made my proverbial FR fortune. I've literally earned my millions here, through doing exactly what I'm gonna type out below and I'm sitting on it like a big fat Tolkien-esque wyvern. It's easy, it's fun, and if you're vigilant and savvy, super profitable.
To begin, check your bank balance.
Yeah it's funny, to make serious money, you need to have a decent chunk of change to begin with. If you want the easiest time of it, you're going to need to buy low, and sell high, but "low" is still like 10-30kT per item. Thats about the long and short of it. Unless you grind the Coliseum religiously, which is very labour intensive, you're going to want to be looking at sniping stuff on the Marketplace.
Keep an eye on the Marketplace while you're grinding up your initial capital, to try and get a feel for how much everything costs at base price. Then, sit on the AH (particularly on the Apparel, Battle and Other tabs (Other is where all the breed change/gene scrolls etc sit) and get an idea of how much MORE they're being sold for over there.
The below is my routine. Initially I was working on the Battle items, which are great if you don't mind making meagre, if reliable, chump change (especially after a registration window when people are either foolishly buying random moves for their dragons OR are trying to buy the basics required for a Coli team), but the money arrives in the tens of thousands on the Apparel section. This is particularly poignant if your Flight is currently benefiting from Dominance discounts in the Marketplace, whereupon you can seriously make it rain.
Remember, buy low, sell high, while still following The One Rule. The process for Auction House item flipping is super easy and goes as follows:
- Spot item on Marketplace.
- Search AH for that item on relevant section, with prices arranged low-to-high for Treasure.
- If the lowest price on the AH is decently higher than the price on the Marketplace, buy that item. I usually only buy one of that item. Buying in bulk is dangerous in case you can't shift them very fast and you're sat on a load of potential treasure, rather than actual treasure. Listing more than one of an item at a time is dumb and a waste of time.
- List the item on the AH, for a 24hr listing, for ONE SINGLE SOLITARY PIECE OF TREASURE LOWER THAN THE CURRENT LOWEST PRICE.
- ^^^^^^^^^^^^ I cannot stress this enough.
e.g: Bought a hat for 8000T. Lowest price on AH for said hat is 13000T. List for 12999T.
It's really not difficult.
- If you're going to be a turd and undercut by hundreds (or thousands, get right out of town) then please close this guide and go elsewhere because you're a Bad Person. :C
YES there will probably be someone doing the EXACT SAME THING as you. I recognize the usernames of certain other entrepreneurial spirits such as myself doing the same as me, day in, day out. This is fine. This is called ECONOMY. It makes the world go round. You're not looking to guarantee yourself the sale, you're looking to be the most attractive out there to capture that one guy shopping for your item at that particular time, whilst ensuring that your item remains valuable and that you're going to get the highest profit margin. That's the entire point. If someone out there is monopolizing the Fancy Waistcoat market and you can NEVER underprice them, move on, find something else to sell. If someone is the comfortable monarch of the Blue Wooly Tail empire, shake things up and potentially usurp their crown. Business is fluid. And yes, there will be people out there breaking The One Rule and being a d*ck but thankfully they're not that prolific. Just.. please don't be That Guy. :C
A tip I can give to stay on top of your game, if you have the time to do this (sadly I don't as often as I used to) is to regularly scope your competition.
Once you've invested and listed your goods, go to the Activity tab in the Auction House. This displays all your current listings, the amount you listed for, and the amount of time they have left before the listing ends.
In a separate tab (yeah you can only really do this at a desktop, but if you're trying to item-flip on a mobile device you're nuts anyway, just saying) open up the AH and search for that item again. This way, you can spot someone undercutting you AND if you feel like it, end your listing early and re-list at one treasure lower than the current lowest price.
Keep it fresh, stay savvy.
Sometimes, some jerk will have undercut massively. Alternatively there will have been a Blue Light Special on that item and a billion of them will have turned up, flooding the market and making it less valuable. You can either go with the flow, re-price and re-list, or you can make a note of the item, and run searches for it later, selling once the price stabilises. If the price never stabilises again (or if it returns to its regular low price, if you've bought during a brief spell where it was more valuable, it's happened to me a bunch of times) then you may just need to cut your losses and sell for as much as you can squeeze out. :T
Particularly try to remember the items that appear on the Marketplace and then instantly sell out/disappear. Because this, folks, means that people want them. And if you can get your mitts on one of these items you're basically guaranteed a decent return on your investment. Also something worth noting is that the Marketplace wipes itself every hour, on the hour, and refreshes with entirely new items, which are topped up with new items throughout that hour.
You may also find that, on your searches, you spot a listing with a hugenormic, gigantic undercut. You can of course ignore it. Or you can buy it and instantly flip it. A rule of etiquette is that, if you spot an item listed for a ridiculously low price, so much so that you suspect it may be a typo while listing, you buy the item and mail it back to its seller with a little note telling them "lol you're a silly". This is often seen when listing super rare items or items with prices that will never go below a certain amount, such as dragon eggs, skins, scrolls etc. Doing this makes you a Good Person. ?
The above steps work for Marketplace items, however the same can go for dragons if you're that way inclined, and all the goodies you find in your familiar bond reward chests, your gathering turns, and your Coliseum grinding adventures.
You can set the prices to low-to-high in gems if you want, and sell for gems rather than treasure. Same principle. Try to research the current conversion rate for Treasure to Gems on the forums though or you might find you've accidentally under/overpriced yourself.
EVERYTHING HAS ITS PRICE. Even if its just a handful of shrapnel via selling a ton of crud within your hoard.
I'm NOT going to tell you which items to keep an eye out for, because that'd be cheating. ;) It's best you get a feel for it yourself, learn the ebb and flow of the market, and make your own mistakes. I've gotten fat and lazy so I'm only really buying the couple of dozen things I know will sell quickly for a profit, but back when I was hungrily and actively working the AH, treasure was rolling in.
I will say though that dealing in dragon scrolls (breed change, genes etc) is pricey and never seemed worth it to me. Unless you've got Mad $tacks when a new gene comes out and you can jump on that bandwagon asap, because they degrade in value extremely quickly. If you have a spare couple hundred thousand treasure knocking around and want to give it a go, be my guest, however I often found that the prices rarely went above a few thousand more than the marketplace price. I could make more money, faster, via Apparel/Battle.
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CHAPTER SIX - WORKING 9 TO 5, WHAT A WAY TO MAKE A LIVING:
If you're a dragon-wrangler with additional skills in the art department, you can if you fancy it, take up your tools and open up an art thread on the forums. Folks on this website love getting images of their dragons, and are happy to hand over their hard-earned dragon-dollars for commissioned work from you if they like your style!
It's a fabulous thing, and I'm lucky enough to have dealt with some genuinely good-natured, friendly people while running my own adoptable thread. I never really earned megabucks through doing it, as it kept me busy and gave me something to do while I was unemployed, but it kept my dragons fed as I ran the Coliseum less and less and ergo was grinding less and less food. Plus, don't forget, EVERY LITTLE HELPS.
Check out the art forums, do some research, and if you can offer commissions or adoptables of dragons, and are happy to do so (and have the time to fulfil your orders and not disappear with the money :C) then I encourage you to give it a try! Of course, The One Rule applies here too, if you undercharge for your work, you're not only making it difficult for the other artists out there (while simultaneously p*ssing them off...) but you're also performing the cardinal sin for artists of undervaluing your own work. Bad ju-ju, man.
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So... that about covers it. I'll be tweaking and formatting this thing as time goes on. If you have any questions that you want answering, shout up and I'll get back to you. :) If I get asked something enough I'll add an FAQ!
I hope this helps, and that y'all can benefit from this without horribly scuppering the AH. :') Use this knowledge for the power of good!
Much love,
~Morti
