Guides

I love my dragons. I love my apparel and skins and that shiny stuff over there? I love that too.

However, there comes a time when I love gold-pressed latinum treasure and gems more. If you don't have an underpaid relative to do all the legwork for you the easiest way is to pick a price high enough to make your eyes twinkle. You can always lower it a bit if nobody buys but that's a problem for next week.

If you do have an underpaid relative to do your research for the highest possible price you can tell them to read the rest of this guide. Remember! Effort = Reward

Especially if it's someone else's effort and your reward.

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I. The Short Version of Everything
II. Selling Dragons
III. Selling UMAs
IV. Selling Festival Skins/Chests
V. Selling Food
VI. Baldwin
VII. Art
VIII. Squeezing out the most profit; an exercise in self control and planning.

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I. The Short Version of Everything

LOOK UP THE PRICE IN THE AH/FORUMS/Game Database (cycled out items). That's your competition. You can always price higher and relist or gradually lower the price over time but this is your baseline expectation for what your junk beloved items are worth to other people.

If your exact dragon/thing/whatever isn't listed then look at dragons/things/whatevers that are close--other skins from the same artist/festival, slightly larger color range, G2+, etc.

If you have Baldwin/Swipp ingredients and want to know if it's better to sell them or sell the completed recipe add up the cost of the price of buying all the ingredients plus the time you're awake during brewing and compare it to the cost of the thing it makes. Sell whichever produces the bigger number.

Need gems? Need treasure? Sell in whatever currency you need if you can give up profits but if you want the most profit take into account the current g:t ratio to figure out which currency will pay you more.

Finally, no matter what the price you come up with is try adding 20-50% to it because you could get lucky. Or not. But all that a higher price will cost you is time since you can always offer a cheaper deal later.

II. Selling Dragons

Anything more than the exalt payout is subjective. It's all in the heads of the buyers and sellers.

Generally the most important subjective value is aesthetics. Head to the AH to find dragons with identical colors or branch out to that color range (generally no more than 2-3 colors on either side) to see what your competition looks like.

After that add up the price of all aspects of your dragon. This generally means G1, G2 imp, low id, desirable id, aesthetics, level, battle stones and two letter names (bugged aspect of site now fixed). Once you have a number add 20-50% because you can. Advertise your dragon (signature, sales thread, clan profile, offsite) and put it up in the AH for impulse buyers.

If your dragon doesn't sell in a week or two and nobody has tried to haggle you down then lower the price a bit and advertise. Repeat until you reach the absolute lowest you would accept. If the dragon stays at that low price for a month without a buyer you may have to admit there's no interest. Either continue lowering the price or keep it for yourself since nobody else values it like you.

If you have something totally unique then pick a price you'd be happy to sell at. Heck, double it and see if anyone else likes that price. You can always lower the price every few days or weeks until you find whatever magical price a buyer is willing to pay.

Or if you know your dragon's base price is estimated at "high" but not how high you can always Auction your dragon and let bidders set a price. If you do remember to set a minimum bid of the smallest amount you'd be willing to sell at. This cuts out low bids you don't want to sell at anyway and gives bidders an idea of how much they should look to spend.

General resources:

Average Exalt Payouts
G1 Hoarders v.3
Old Dragon Collectors Association
Old Oaks for 7+ digit dragons
Hatchery Guide
Naomi
Alliance of Glitch Hunters
How to Auction

Leveled dragons:

Either use the AH sort function to find dragons of that level or price L25 dragons and use this guide to figure out what percentage of the way to L25 your dragon is and multiply that the L25 price.

Example:

L25s selling for 250g. You have a L15 dragon which is 19.8% of the way according to the chart.

0.198 X 250g = 49.5 gems. Your dragon is worth it. Round that up to 55g.

Price battle stones in the AH.

Aesthetic resources:

Special Eyes*
Special ID
Dragons with Art/Lore
Alliance of Glitch Hunters

The AH allows you to sort by most aspects people care about. Otherwise, check out Auctions and Dragons for Sale.

Special info for G1s: After searching in the color range of your dragon/s search for g2+ to gauge demand. The more dragons you find in the AH in that range the higher you can price since more people want/breed that combo.

For those dragons who hit multiple aspects bear in mind that your buyer is not going to pay for any aspects they don't care about. Gened G1s generally make back very little of the cost of their genes or their lore. Art tends to retain more of its value unless the buyer wants genes that absolutely do not fit the art. Leveled dragons are iffy. You're looking for someone who wants a leveled G1 (and they're out there) but they have to want yours.

Still, those are all talking-up points when selling a dragon so include them in the price. You can always accept less later if nobody wants that dragon at the price you're advertising.

*Special eyes are now available through vials as well as breeding. Given that the upper price limit for special eyes is going to be the cost of the relevant vial and is likely to be a lot less.

III. Selling UMAs

1. Find the artist's original selling thread to find out what people paid originally. Artists do username changes so check to see if they've changed and if they're still active/still printing what you want to sell.

2. Forum search both the UMA name and the id number separately to see what people are selling/paying.

3. Check prices for other UMAs the artist has done.

4. If nothing shows up there's either no supply or no demand. Find out which by setting an arbitrary price and advertising. I generally add 200g per year to the orignal price since the UMA was first printed unless the artist is particularly well-known.

5. If the artist is still active and reprinting try for 100-1000g above the reprint price as an instant gratification tax.

6. Whether you choose to sell/auction you may be able to get a ping list from GASP. Please follow the directions for sending info for a list to be generated for you.

IV. Selling Festival Skins/Chests 1. Forum search/AH search for both the name of the chest and the skin id. 2. No matches? Try looking for other skins/chests from that festival. [url=https://www1.flightrising.com/forums/gde/1388514]Maki's Festival Guide[/url] has links to every festival summary and tells you which ones came in chests and in the MP/Baldwin. 3. Put up in the AH and put up a thread in Items for Sale which has the name of the chest and the skin posted so people can immediately click on it to try it on their dragon. [code][skin=id number][/code] Sell the chest for some random amount higher than the skin alone. Collectors will often pay more for the chest so that's extra profit. If they only want the skin you can collect the treasure/gem yourself and send them the skin alone.

V. Selling Food

1. The least amount of effort is to hoardsell it all.

2. Next up is using the AH search to sort by food points/type and sort by unit price, lowest to highest and sell everything by the lowest unit price per food point and type. For example all 4pt seafood gets priced the same.

3. Forum sales of #2; no AH tax. You'll need to make a thread, answer responses and send CRs or PAs.

4. The next two are pretty much equal for reward but the effort is greater for forum sales since you'll need to make a thread, answer responses and send CRs or PAs.

A. Go through these guides and sell the items needed in the most commonly purchased amounts. That would be either 1, 5, 10, 50, 99 or whatever the full task/trade/Baldwin recipe needs.

HDen Tasks
Swipp Trades
Baldwin Guide

Anything not in one of those guides gets priced at #2 above.

B. Put up a thread featuring items listed in those guides with or without prices (depending on how often you want to look them up) and a flat sale per food point/type for everything else. People can contact you for specific items and amounts.

5. The most reward comes from individually pricing every food item in the AH and selling them in the most commonly wanted amounts (1, 5, full HDen/Baldwin/Swipp amount, stack, etc.).

VI. Baldwin

Welcome to the math-intensive section.

To figure out which is most profitable to transmute you'd need to take the lowest unit price of every color and material and average the prices based on the % chance of each which you can find in the wiki and subtract the cost of the item you're transmuting. Generally food and trinkets give the best profit ratio but slime gives the largest profit per item transmuted depending on how cheap you got your apparel.

Figure out your cost for apparel/familiars/whatever by comparing how much they sell for in the AH vs. the average return for slime/muck/whatever.

As far as brewable items go, you'll need to price the individual ingredients compared to the price of the finished item and subtract brewing time if you're up for any of it and could be transmuting instead. Use the figures from the first paragraph to estimate profit per 30 minutes to see what you could be making by transmuting.

All the following prices are subject to change based on wh at the AH currently shows.

What the math looks like for Goo using Lowest Auction House price in treasure on January 11, 2021:

45% Green Goo 1,200
20% Yellow Goo 6,500
15% Orange Goo 2,200
10% Red Goo 12,500
7% Purple Goo 7,000
3% Blue Goo 25,000

(0.45 x 1200) + (0.2 x 6500) + (0.15 x 2200) + (0.1 x 12500) + (0.07 x 7000) + (0.03 x 25000) = 3,420 average gross profit. Cost of cheapest food 15t (hoardsell), 1% loss to AH tax gives a per transmute net profit of 3,370 per 30 minutes.

Let's say there's a recipe that calls for 5 Green Goo and takes 2000 treasure and 3 hours to make a widget. 1188 reflects the AH profit minus the AH tax of 1% on a 24 hour auction. (6 x 3370) is six 30 minute intervals that could have been spent on transmuting.

(5 x 1188) + 2000 + (6 x 3370) = 28,160

Now check the AH for the price widgets are selling for. If it's not higher than 28,442 (AH tax!) it's not worth it to make widgets; make Goo and sell it.

Have your underpaid assistant do the research and math on this one because they'll need to do double to figure out the gem prices plus all the other types of transmutes.

VII. Art

It's all subjective so head on over to Art Sales and grade your art against your competition's quality and pricing. For treasure/gem prices check Items for Sale for current buy/sell prices. For gem/U.S. dollars it's a steady 100:1 based on gem prices the site offers.

Other modifiers to your pricing include how long the artwork will take you and how busy you are. Is your queue full? Bump up your prices. Can't find any commissions despite advertising your thread? Lower your prices.

Please do suggest your buyers upload the art to their private cloud storage/physical storage media. "Free" image hosting sites are disappearing and sites used as image hosts (looking at you, Discord) are restructuring their urls so as to be unusable. You don't want to have people you sold art to years ago tracking you down to ask you to find a new host or to email them a file.

***Special Note for Pay What You Want Shops***

I believe there are only three kinds of people who actively buy PWYW art:

1. People who will underpay what it's worth.

2. People who have a budget and hit up every PWYW shop until they find someone who says yes.

3. Anxious people who are hoping and guessing and finally overcome their reluctance to put a "bad" price on your art who would rather you put up any number.

Technically there may be a fourth kind who is so confident in knowing the art market here and are trying to give you a chance that they feel fine pricing your art. Much like unicorns they are rare and mostly imaginary. Help yourself and all those anxious people who would really like to buy your art by placing a number on it. The other two types of people will then either pass you by or hire you since you fit their budget.

VIII. Squeezing out the most profit; an exercise in self control and planning

Knowing when to sell is almost as important as when to buy. Think about when you use/buy things and that's the time to sell.

Eggs: Night of the Nocturne is currently the low point for unhatched eggs of all kinds. Prices generally rise afterwards but high points for selling are when you really want to hatch an egg: Astrologically significant days, international holidays, Leap Day, Site Anniversary, elemental festivals. Sell slightly before/day of depending on the hype.

Baldwin Genes: All those g1s people hatch need genes. Stock up on transmutes, materials and brewed genes before all the suggestions in Eggs above so you're ready once people have scried their hatches.

Battle Stones: Micro-holidays, festivals and pre-NotN prep.

The Event Calendar in the Encyclopedia is a good place to look for various events like the micro-holidays and other site events. Louretta's Chronology is a good place to look up what sort of stuff gets released and what things are coming back based on previous Announcements.

Festivals are a great time to get drops in places you might not ordinarily grind. However, so is everyone else. Check out Maki's Festival Guide 2 weeks or so before every festival to see where everyone else is going to be so you can either grind and sell from there first or what you can buy up cheap during the festival week.

IX. How to get Gems 1. Fast ways: a.) [url=https://www1.flightrising.com/buy-gems]Buy from FR[/url] b.) Trade with other players in [url=https://www1.flightrising.com/forums/ibaz]Items for Sale[/url]. Either items or [url=https://flightrising.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360045766772-Trading-FR-Trades-Cross-Site-Trades]cross-site trading[/url] or services (leveling dragons, brewing, etc.). 2. Daily ways: a.) Bond with your familiars. Along with all the treasure you get 3 [gamedb item=574], 2 [gamedb item=575] and 1 [gamedb item=576]. Iron chests give 1-5g each and Decorated give 10-20. There's at least 700 cheap familiars out there. You're guaranteed at least 8,400 gems through bonding. b.) Your Well Fed bonus gives 250t and 1g per day. c.) Exalt dragons. There's about a 3-4% chance of a gem or two regardless of level or anything else. d.) Max out your Lucky Streak. Glimmer and Gloom is currently the fastest payout per minute. e.) [url=https://www1.flightrising.com/achievements]Achievements[/url] f.) [url=https://www1.flightrising.com/achievements/pursuits/daily]Pursuits[/url] [url=http://www1.flightrising.com/forums/gde/2477115]Guide[/url]. 3. Art. Either skins and accents, traditional art that's been scanned or digital artwork FR players are interested in buying. Talent is sort of optional if you've got a good gimmick and a cheap enough price. Small, humorous doodles or adopts priced between 20-50g are surprisingly lucrative if you check out the [url=https://www1.flightrising.com/forums/adopt]Adoptables[/url] forum. More detailed/skilled/custom artwork pays more (occasionally in RL money) but takes more time, effort and skill. 4. Math. Anything you're currently selling for treasure can be sold for gems. If you can't do it yourself hire an accountant (or use a calculator) to determine which number is bigger to figure out if something should be sold for gems or treasure. [quote=Example]Let's say AH prices for 4 pt seafood run 11,500t per stack and 9g per stack. If the current g:t ratio is 1:1200 it's a better profit to sell your seafood for treasure. If the current ratio is 1:1300 it's a better profit to sell your seafood for gems. Math: 11,500 per stack minus 115 per sale (AH fee for 1 day listing) = 11,385 9g at 1:1200 = 10,800 9g at 1:1300 = 11,700[/quote] It's a minor difference and you may think "it's so small and I want gems so I can take the loss." Reasonable, right? How many stacks of food are you going to sell? That small, one-time loss will start multiplying itself with every sale. Price your time and effort to determine the better price and how long it takes to relist vs. how long it will take to grind out 8 more seafood drops at the above example's prices.