I have decided that if I am going to take crafting seriously I need to start managing income and expenditure and the best way to do so is via a spreadsheet. I have done this before in several MMOs (notably Eve online- spreadshhets in space) and this has been more straight forward as there is no element of chance. You just have to log costs to make and sale price and bingo, you have your profit margin. I am happy with the concept of percentage chance etc and I can easily craete a spreadsheet which I am happy with for components etc however, I dont know how it would work when crafting a limited item using residue. How do you know how much of the item is the sucessful craft and how much is the residue? I crafted a few whips on caly and most successful ones were a global and there seems to be no way in game to see what was residue and what was the item (without stopping after every successful click and writing down how muchg residue remains). You can check the size of the sucessful craft using entropia life tracker but this only works for globals. Any help or advice would be much appreciated.
You are checking your Craft Statististics ? On the Crafting Machine there is a Statistics button - Depending how you craft this can then show you the following. This will also list in the Session Summery the blue prints and blue print values looted in the session.
Thanks Sally but yes I check that. Ill use a fictional weapon as an example as I dont have my figures with me. Say I am crafting a gun which costs 20 PED per click to craft and has a max TT value of 100 PED. I can get a sucessful craft with a value of anything from approx 20 PED to 100 PED. If I dont use residue, it gives the value on the stats page and is easy to track. However, if I use residue, I can get a sucessful craft worth 25 PED which then becomes a 100 PED weapon (using 75 PED residue). The stats page shows this as a 100 PED return. Is there any way to see how much of that 100 PED was residue and how much was the sucessful craft? I can always stop crafting and work out the amount of residue I have remaining and deduce this that way but it would be a real pain in the ***. I may be over thinking this and I am begining to question my own rationale as to why I want to know this!!
Yes this is an interesting one to work out - also if you have ores or resedue in storage the craft machine picks this up as useable and not just the stuff in your inventory. one trick might be to store stuff in the underground - take the matterials your going to craft - go abouve ground and then craft your runs with all the stacks listed / costed - at the end of the run then recalculate. ( as other ores are ug still then you can get the amounts from TT machine ) residue would drop and you would get an amount of resedue used for the whole run - might not be able to break it down further to cost per item but you could average. it would mean running back up and down from the underground - but theres a good place to drop off your duplicate blue prints too also if your doing lots of crafts then I can see this been a pain - as you then need to work out each one manually still - not sure if any one else has any ideas.
Well I guess the first thing is that you can tell how much of the TT comes from residue by noting how much res u have before u craft and how much afterwards. [Edit to add: the only reason u want to know how much residue is used is because each ingrediant including res has its own MU and u need to know how much of each to calculate the actual cost to craft.] I make a lot of L weapons but I do them in batches of 2 to 5 owing to the nature of my business. So I have a spreadsheet for each weapon model. When I go into the crafting interface I select a bp and I record the amount of each if the required resources I have, including residue as well as the MU that I paid for them (I have another spreadsheet for purchases which allows me to easily establish the average MU paid for material X). I use the figures in the crafting interface as that is reliable. I don't need to go hunting through storage and inventory to find the info. Then I craft as many weapons as want. I record the total TT of the created weapons. If I get bonus goodies such as gems I record that too. At the end of the run, I just record the amounts left of each ingrediant including res. That gives me the total cost including MU to produce the weapons. And I can divide the the number of weapons to get unit cost. I can divide unit cost by weapon TT to get MU sale price required to break even on that run. And actual profit is of course sale price - unit cost. However as my craft runs are short and crafting returns are so dynamic, I don't worry to much about breakeven in the short term. Instead I look at my long term cost to craft when setting my prices, adjusting when I see a trend (say due to shifting resource costs). Sometimes I lose sometimes I come out ahead. It took a while but now I am able to consistently profit based on monthly returns. So there's a lot of bookkeeping involved and that takes up time. But that's what I need to do to take the guess work out of it and run a successful crafting business. Regards, KikkiJikki
