Most profitable craft item to mass produce?

[flamewolf393]

The GM is giving our characters a month of in-game time off from adventuring. I am leveling up to level 10 artificer, may take a craft item feat, have several different craft skills, have leadership with all appropriate followers also as artificers. I own a large well stocked workshop in the market district of a major capital and can produce almost anything from blankets, to weapons, to jewelry, to small ships. I have the feats to craft items at aprx. 15% of market value. I have appropriate shipping contracts/contacts that I dont have to worry about market glut and can charge standard market value.

With an appropriate ratio of units per week and price per unit, what item would you say I should be making for the best profit margin over this one month period?

[John Longarrow]

1) Start a war.
2) Sell to the military.

Doesn't matter what. That's the best way to do it quick.

Otherwise get into high fashion.

[Firebug]

Poison*. It takes 1/6th of the base materials compared to 1/3 for all other items. A successful check creates Roll x DC in gold pieces compared to silver pieces for every other item.

*Using Song and Silence rules for crafting poison anyway, can't seem find craft poison in the Complete books.

[olentu]

Poison*. It takes 1/6th of the base materials compared to 1/3 for all other items. A successful check creates Roll x DC in gold pieces compared to silver pieces for every other item.

*Using Song and Silence rules for crafting poison anyway, can't seem find craft poison in the Complete books.

I believe it was complete adventurer.

[Gavinfoxx]

Read this:

http://www.minmaxboards.com/index.php?topic=2714

[flamewolf393]

Hmm. Not sure I want to get into something potentially illegal/semi-illegal like that. Weapons are one thing, but I think poisons quickly get into iffy territory. Especially for mass production. And with a major workshop of easily 50+ people making them, its sure to draw attention.

What would the next best idea be?

[Sith_Happens]

Well, besides poisons, it doesn't actually matter what you craft, since your output per time is a function of value anyways.

[Gavinfoxx]

Hmm. Not sure I want to get into something potentially illegal/semi-illegal like that. Weapons are one thing, but I think poisons quickly get into iffy territory. Especially for mass production. And with a major workshop of easily 50+ people making them, its sure to draw attention.

What would the next best idea be?

They aren't poisons. They are medical anesthetic that happens to use the poison rules. Seriously! Look at the unconsciousness/unconsciousness ones. That is TOTALLY medical general anesthesia.

[Psyren]

Craft 10ft. ladders, sell 10ft. poles?

Also, you can craft ravages. Works exactly like poison, but they're paladin-approved!

[Tvtyrant]

...Poison. Poisons are worth thousands of gold pieces, are easy to make if you are a crafter, and are small.

[Crake]

Wouldn't magic items, using your crafting reserve, be the most profitable? 500gp expenditure, 1000gp profit per day, comes out to 500gp/day earned. Of course, if your DM makes you sell at half price, then just craft stuff you'd actually use, thus you save money by not having to buy it

Edit: If you're gonna be crafting poisons, you'll want to buy a scroll of fabricate to quickly mass produce them, rather than crafting mundanely like a pleb

[Gavinfoxx]

Also as a level 10 Artificer, you can do most of these:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1aG4P3dU6WP3pq8mW9l1qztFeNfqQHyI22oJe09i8KWw/edit

Just saying.

[unseenmage]

Spell turrets from DMG2? With Elation and Distill Joy spells in them from BoED.

Congrats, you make nigh infinite wealth by making happiness in a bottle. Install the Spell Turrets in the ceiling of a temple you build and viola public service.

If you can't swing Spell Turrets then just make them repeating Magic Traps as per the DMG.

If you'd rather not involve the public the Greater Humanoid Essence infusion should allow the trap to work on your Dedicated Wright(s).

Me, I built Effigys of 1 HD humanoids and used the combining Magic Items rules to put skill boost items in them and then added the Feats in Items sidebar from Arms and Equipment Guide to give them crafting feats.

Robots making Robots while all the while the Spell Turrets fuel them with crafting xp and keep them happy.

[Fax Celestis]

Craft quarterstaves and clubs. 100% profit. And since you beat the craft check by an arbitrarily high amount, you can reduce the crafting time to an arbitrarily low time.

(protip: crafting a club is synonymous with picking up a stick)

[unseenmage]

Craft quarterstaves and clubs. 100% profit. And since you beat the craft check by an arbitrarily high amount, you can reduce the crafting time to an arbitrarily low time.

(protip: crafting a club is synonymous with picking up a stick)

I wonder if there's some interplay here with Feather Token Tree. We'd need a ruling on how many clubs and staves one oak tree can be turned into.

[Asteron]

*cough* (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0903747/?ref_=sr_1)...

[Alienist]

You can craft magic items, which is (theoretically) a gain of at least 500gp per day. If you can find a magic item to craft which your teammates would have happily paid full price for, then economic theory indicates it's actually worth more than that. (E.g. you don't pay $10 to go to the movies if you think that you're only going to get $9 'entertainment utility' out of it)

So anyway, 7 days worth of magic item crafting is worth 3500gp, or 35,000sp. Since the materials cost for mundane crafting is 1/3rd then you need to increase that by 50% to 52,500sp to beat magic item crafting. The square root of that is pretty much bang on 230. So if you can get +220 to whichever crafting skill you're using then you should go for it.

Otherwise mundane crafting is kind of pointless.

If you're an Eberron Artificer, then you might want to look into something like repeated castings of Unseen Crafter.

You could also sell your spell slots. If the DM objects simply point out that Identify is a very useful spell, which normally costs other casters 100gp+ (since the material cost is 100gp) - but you're explicitly not an Arcane caster so you don't have to pay for the material component.

I'm not sure what the level is where you can make more than 500gp per day from this, but you're probably not far off.

Then again ... as the ad says "why not both?"

Another alternative for an Eberron Artificer is to sell your uses of the Dragonmark. The houses have enormous infrastructure already in place to allow you to do this, and is the foundation of their status as 'megacorporations'. You did sign up for House Harkonnen Cannith, right?

Once you're doing that, it's a short hop skip and a jump to crafting Dragonmark Rods (I think it was?) to allow you extra uses of your dragonmark every day. The rods can actually pay for themselves in a remarkably short period of time.

Speaking of time and minions, it's not clear to me what happens if you have more than one of the 'dead baby' homunculi to do crafting for you. Can you craft N+1 magic items simultaneously for N dead babies? It seems legit, but potentially pretty game breaking.

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The absolute fastest way to break the economy at your level is to start 'crafting' mithril and adamantium masterwork plate armour, via use of the fabricate spell. It's so profitable it's actually worth your while going around buying up all the Fabricate scrolls. Then once you run out of those, you start crafting them with your army of dead babies. You could easily be making tens of thousands of gp per day like this.

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Or just build a Fabricate trap, or an Unseen Crafter trap (etc).

This is why Emperor Trappy went down that path, because for every possible scenario where the 'best' solution is to cast spell X, a better solution is to craft a benign trap of X, and then use it to cast X thousands of times.

And the tier system tells us that in 3.5 the best solution for every problem is spells.

Thus, no matter what, the answer is always a trap.

[unseenmage]

Speaking of time and minions, it's not clear to me what happens if you have more than one of the 'dead baby' homunculi to do crafting for you. Can you craft N+1 magic items simultaneously for N dead babies? It seems legit, but potentially pretty game breaking.



RAW you only get to benefit from one Dedicated Wright Homunculus as it says it can do your crafting and the rules state you can only craft one magic item at a time. (Some DMs are lax on this however.)
Unless you somehow give it it's own crafting feats but then you're better off just using hirelings with the going price of putting feats in things (10,000gp+5,000gp per prereq).

[Shalist]

Well, besides poisons, it doesn't actually matter what you craft, since your output per time is a function of value anyways.Yup, this. Might as well skip the intermediate steps and go straight to Craft: Minting:


Craft: Minting, where coins are used as the raw materials to make more coins.

...pay one-third of the item’s price for the cost of raw materials.So...yeah, crafting doesn't care about conservation of mass, and just triples the value of anything you use it on.
Material Component

The original material, which costs the same amount as the raw materials required to craft the item to be created.

With this, a level 10 wizard could be churning out millions of gold (or platinum) with every casting, and all he'd need is a single coin to get the ball rolling.


Gold is ~1200 pounds / cubic foot, platinum is ~1340...10 cubic feet / CL, so 400,000 gold / CL for gold, or ~446,000 platinum / CL for platinum (of new wealth) with each casting.