How to make easy money for the WildStar new patch

Are you poor? Can’t afford that new hoverboard? Trying to get gold for your mount? Then I have the solution for you! In just under 30 minutes a day you can get your bank account looking fat and plump! Buy happiness, today!

In short, our strategy for making money most efficiently in Wildstar is by taking advantage of the Auction House / Commodity Exchange (AH/CE). I’ve noticed a lot of tips and tricks to saving/making money Wildstar are very nickel & dime sort of things, barely worth the time to read them. Also, a popular rhetoric is to have two gathering professions. I think this is wrong in Wildstar for several reasons I’ll go into later. A few have started into using the AH/CE but not really explained what to do. So here are my personal tactics and tricks.

Setup
First, you need two features from mods. Okay, technically you don’t “need” mods to use the AH/CE. You also don’t technically “need” a keyboard to play this game. Skipping either are bad ideas.

AH/CE Mod – (my current choice is: Supernova) The point of this mod is to make the AH/CE UI much, much easier and faster to navigate. It’s incredibly clunky to navigate by default as you have to filter through dozens of items you don’t care about and a lot of extra UI space and clutter. This adds a beautiful little watch list so you can easily track the items you care about as well as immediately see which of your listings have been outbid.

Mail Mod – (my current choice is: Mail Helper) You want a “take all items” button. Period. I regularly deal with 50-150 transactions via mail at a time, and I don’t have the patience (nor want to spend the time) to click through those one at a time. You shouldn’t either.

I’d also recommend a AH/CE price tracking mod (my current choice is: Commodity Stats) in order to see how stable a price is and easily tell when a profit can be made. Another useful mod is a mass-crafting mod (my current choice is: Hephaestus) that allows you to chain your crafts. It’s pretty tedious to craft these items one at a time if you’re doing hundreds of crafts. You can do without these two if you want to keep your mod count low, but I wouldn’t recommend it.

You should have trade skills available, preferably crafting trade skills instead of gathering. Yes, I know this goes against conventional wisdom. But I’ve used these techniques over several games, and I’ve found that you can always make significantly more money for your time investment by crafting. The advantage of double gathering professions is one of mental energy – they don’t really take any thought, so if you want a mentally-lazy solution, go for double gathering. The time spent harvesting enough materials to make a reasonable amount of money is actually deceptively long. Crafting trade skills also require more patience, even if they don’t require more time, which I’ll explain later.

Further, in Wildstar, there are a lot more raw resources available because of housing plots. Vastly more. In previous games, rare mats had very cutthroat competition (especially on high population servers) and could provide a steady income. Now people can get these difficult-to-gather mats in the luxury of their house. There may be a few exceptions that I don’t know about, but generally speaking raw mats do not sell nearly as well as in other games.

You don’t really need a lot of money to start doing this. The idea is to invest whatever money you have available to turn it into more money as efficiently as possible. I started with 3 gold at level 15, and by 30 I had earned over 20 plat, max’ed a trade skill, and collected several nice-to-have items (amps, FAB kits, updated armor set) with just about 15-30 minutes a day. You can sink as little or as much time as you want into this, which is another reason I prefer these methods. Just like any other investment, the more money you put in, the greater your potential returns (and unlike the stock market, the items you’re investing in here have intrinsic worth – i.e. you can use actually use them).

The Basics
In each transaction, you are trying to make more money than you spend. This sounds both obvious and easy, but it’s important to keep track of. In order to do this, you need to know two things: the amount you’re spending and the amount you’re making.

Your costs are either money (buying raw materials, which I generally would recommend) or time (time spent farming/harvesting materials) or both. Keep in mind that on the AH/CE each transaction costs 2% or 5s, whichever is higher. Because 5s is pretty rough when considering tiny transactions, try to buy in bulk (i.e. currently the limit of 200 items per listing). Basically, every time you’re paying less than 2g, 50 silver per transaction, you’re paying more in fees per transaction than you normally would.

That transaction fee also applies when you attempt to sell your results, so make sure to keep that in mind with how much you make. However, to be honest, I would never bother to actually calculate the 2% fee. If the fee is going to make or break a money-making method for you, it’s probably not profitable enough to bother with in the first place.

Generally speaking, you want to use buy/sell orders instead of buy/sell now as much as possible in order to keep your costs down and revenue high. Ideally, you’ll pick an item that you still will make money off of the buy/sell now price, so that if your buy/sell orders aren’t filling fast enough for your tastes you can use buy/sell now, but this isn’t strictly required.

Also consider if the amount of money you are making is worth the time investment. Once you start making gold and platinum per transaction, the transactions you started with that only made you silver can probably be ditched.

Crafter Technique
This is my favorite technique and has been my money maker by far in Wildstar. The idea here is to use your crafting trade skill to produce an item more valuable than its individual components, and sell it to make a profit.

The key to this is looking at potential items you can craft, and not just seeing which is the most valuable to sell, but which will make you the most amount of money. The crucial difference between the two is how much the materials to craft the item will cost you.

Buy Low/Sell High Technique
This is the traditional technique that has existed in almost every game I have ever played with a currency. The basic idea is to use buy orders (often waiting for the price to be at its lowest) to purchase items for the lower end of their value, and then use sell orders to sell items for the higher end of their value (often waiting for the price to be at its highest).

CommodityStats or a similar mod makes a fantastic difference in your ability to make money off of this method as well.

Vendor Technique
Frequently, you will be able to get buy orders filled from the AH/CE at below vendor price. That means as long as you compensate for the AH/CE fees, you will make money simply vendoring items for other players. If this sounds stupid, you’re right. These players who fill your orders are losing money over just vendoring the items themselves. I tend to avoid this technique, but if you need a quick buck, it’s an option that exists.