Money Making
From SpiralKnights
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Introduction
Crowns is the most important resource in your adventure through the Clockworks, this guide will teach you all you need to know to make the most of your time scavenging the clockworks and how to start becoming a merchant!
General Grinding Tips
Remember to run every level on elite. This increases the payout of a level by roughly 50% compared to normal. It also improves Rarity drop rates and will increase the amount of event materials you'll get when you're farming those.
Equipment
To be the most efficient at running levels you're going to want to pick up a Chaos Cloak set and/or Black Kat Cowl set and weapons from the following lines:
Strategy
You generally want to bring Blaster for levels that have a lot of switches or use many traps, so that you can still output damagefrom a range. Enemies that have crowds may warrant Brandish/Magnus + Vortex combo. Autogun should be brought to levels that have big tanky enemies that need to be taken out quickly.
The Sovereign Slime
Overview
This is the first mission you'll unlock that'll be a prime place for grinding. The Sovereign Slime is a Rank 5-2 Mission that'll offer plenty of Crowns, Jelly Gems, as well as Slime Coins which you can spend at the Casino.
Equipment
To effectively run this mission you ought to get yourself weapons from Acheron Line, Winter Grave Line, or Grim Repeater Line a Vortex is optional but improves run time. Once you have those, this mission will take roughly 14-15 minutes to run. Once your equipment gets better and you improve your technique, you can reduce the run time down to 10-11 minutes or even shorter!
Recommended Loadout:
There's no need to bring anything for Lumbers or Silkwings, they'll die reasonably fast.
Profits
- Jelly Gem (Token) can be redeemed for Rock Salts x2 for each. These easily sell for 500cr each on the auction house. They sell better in packs.
- 3-3.2kcr will be earned from full clearing the level.
- Additional Slime Coins will be earned from killing slimes, which have a minimum worth of 100cr. They can be redeemed at the Golden Slime Casino for much more however, averaging at a 190cr worth.
- Elite Orbs of Alchemy for crafting
- Warm and Glowing Fire Crystals
Built to Destroy
Overview
This is the second significant grinding mission you'll unlock and it competes well with The Sovereign Slime. It is the final mission of the Knight Elite rank!
Equipment
To effectively run this mission you ought to get yourself weapons from the Combuster line, Phantamos line, and Iron Slug line. Vortex and Autoguns are not necessary this time around. After getting the run strategy down your runs shouldn't take longer than 12 minutes.
Recommended Loadout:
You can substitute Iron Slug in place of Phantamos if you do not have a 3rd weapon slot.
Profits
- Bark Module can be redeemed for Schemer Scraps, these sell for 18-25kcr each on the Auction House.
- 3-3.2kcr will be earned from full clearing the level.
- Elite Orbs of Alchemy
- Warm and Glowing Fire Crystals.
The King of Ashes
Overview
The final significant grinding mission you'll unlock on your journey. The King of Ashes is a rank 9-3 Mission and it's where many Vanguards grind their crowns. You'll find yourself grinding this mission a lot as it's one of the prime areas for farming Radiant Fire Crystals, lots of other knights play this level as well so you'll always have someone to run with.
Equipment
For this mission it's recommended that you bring weapons from the Combuster or Voltedge Lines + weapons from the Blitz Needle or Plague Needle Lines. If you have additional weapon slots bring Vortex and Arcana. After optimizing you should be able to get 25 minute runs or faster.
Recommended Loadout:
- Combuster or Voltedge
- Blitz Needle
- Any Vortex
Firestorm Citadel has many optimizations to make sure you make the most amount of crowns in the least time possible, make sure to talk with knights in-game to figure out how to optimally run!
Profits
- Almirian Seal 30x of these can be redeemed for Ancient Plate which vendors for 30kcr, this makes each Seal worth 1kcr!
- 8-9kcr from full clearing the level
- Eternal Orbs of Alchemy
- Shining and Radiant Fire Crystals
Arcade
Overview
Arcade is a wild card, depending on the levels it can be either bad or good, because of this it may not always be worth running.
Equipment
The loadout varies, just follow the general grinding guide and equip yourself accordingly.
Profits
- Depends on the levels.
- T2 Gates average to 7-8kcr a run
- T3 Gates average to 9-10kcr a run.
- Runtime varies as well.
The Market
Overview
So now that you have started making a bit of cash making the most of levels, it's time to get into the market and become a full-blown Merchant! The market entails that you invest your money into various items, and then you sell these items to players later on to make a profit! Just like in the real world, many item's value will increase over time, so you buy while they're cheap and then sell when they're high!
Equipment
- A good standing as a player, doing bad things will decrease people's trust of you.
- A good amount of starting crowns, anywhere above 100kcr should be good to start getting into the market.
The Auction House
The Auction House is where you'll be doing most of your trading and trying to figure out what can sell for what. I highly recommend you do regular price checks however so you can determine what is a good deal. When people list items for bids only it's highly likely it's going to go way under market value. This is your chance to grab the item and quickly flip it for a profit. Just make sure you know exactly what the item is worth before you sell it.
You should also be using the Auction House regularly to sell most of your items. However, if you item is worth more than 500kcr, I would not recommend selling it on the auction house as the 10% tax really hurts your net profit. All of your smaller and lower demand items should be sold here unless someone is actively buying said item.
Prize Boxes and You
Promotional items are perhaps the most profitable items you can come across in your Spiral Knights career, however, they are more of a long-term investment than anything. You want to buy promotional items near the middle or end of a promo when sellers are starting to get desperate for sales and will sell for lower. You see at the beginning of a promo there is generally a lot of hype, so people will pay way more than how much it'll sell for later. You do not want to buy during this period. Once the prices lower, make sure to grab some of the demanded items, a month or two after the promotion ends, the items will begin to noticeably inflate. This is due to the fact that promotional items are always limited in supply. This inflation will keep going as long as the promo does not return.
This sounds like a long time to wait but, you get lucky with buyers and they'll buy for higher prices even during the promo! Sometimes you can quickly make a turnover. Make sure to do this for every promotion, eventually you'll be constantly making sales from old promotions and have a constant flow of money!
The same that applies to promotional items applies to event items, be on the look out for events such as Dark Harvest Festival, Winterfest, Kataclysmic Confrontation and March of the Tortodrones to help make a bit.
Expanding Your Horizons
One of the key ingredients to success as a merchant is to not put all your eggs in one basket. I get it, you're making loads of profit off this gold mine of a market you just found, but do you want all the gold to run dry? You need to make sure that you do everything in moderation so that you do not kill a market. I've learned this the hard way and I've killed my fair share of markets. But what does killing a market mean?
Killing a market basically means that the demand for those particular sets of items are almost gone, resulting in very low selling prices, when the market is killed, it'll take a long time for it to return to its former glory. So you need to make sure that you don't get too excited about your findings and end up killing the demand for some item.
Basically, all this means is that you don't put all your money into one thing, you can be investing in say lockboxes, recipes, promotional items, and more. If you say had 300kcr, you wouldn't want to put that all into lockboxes, especially when you don't know when your return is going to come out on them. Be sure to invest into many things!
Commonly Sold Profitable Items
Be sure to check out these items as they are also very great for reselling.
- Recipe
- Book of Dark Rituals
- Silver Solstice Ring
- Golden Solstice Ring
- Grand Solstice Ring
- Material
- Power Star
- Divine Star
- Shadow Star
- Lockbox
- Slime Lockbox
- Mirrored Lockbox
- Iron Lockbox
The Art of the Trade
So, I may have told you what do and how to sell and make the most of the levels you're playing but, I haven't told you much about the actual trading process.
First of all you're going to make sure you are in trade chat. To type in Trade Chat, simply do /2 or /trade and type your message afterwards, if it doesn't work then do /join 2 to join trade chat. This is where most players and well-known merchants will be posting their stores and where you should be too. While you are in haven doing your normal business browsing the Auction House or creating your own listings, you should be frequently posting in Trade Chat to advertise your merchandise, this is where most of your big sales will come from.
Once you find a buyer for your merch, they'll likely engage in a private message conversation with you in which you will either have to convince them to buy your item or you have already listed a price and they'll buy it outright/offer.
Now, let's go over the basics of trading, you put items on one side, they put items and currency on another and you trade, easy as that. However, there is more to trading than simply advertising and hoping your goods go for the prices that you want, you see the moment a potential buyer starts asking about the price of an item is when the game begins. Your mission is to negotiate with this buyer to get the best price possible, and hopefully sell your item. Can you do it?
To start off, most buyers are going to ask for your price, do not respond with "Please Offer" or "Offers Only" that turns most buyers away(with few exceptions). Instead, the best move is to give them your most wanted price/optimal price and then tell them if they don't like it they can always offer. The reason most people will get turned off by "Offers Only" is because buyers will have to know the price before hand before having to decide on whether to buy it. Most buyers have a rough price in mind, but EVERY seller has a buyout/optimal selling price. Many buyers are scared of over offering when people say offers only so most of their offers become lowballs, which is why you should always be the one to give them a base price to negotiate from.
If they decline your first offer, make sure you get an offer out of them. A lot of buyers for whatever reason will not counter offer at all, thinking that the seller is stingy and not negotiable. You'll have to be the one to make the moves to get them talking.
Repeat the offer/counter offer process until you find the buyer's limit, after you find the limit you can then decide on whether you will take that offer or not. After making that decision you will either find another buyer or accept the offer.
Final Words
I hope this gives you a good starting place to start making millions in Spiral Knights! While I did not include every single little thing you could do here, I'm giving you a basis of how to make money in this game. What I will say is that there ARE some methods out there that generate money at breakneck paces, I've made 1 million in under 2 days from these sort of methods. However, if they are overused they could easily be ruined, so I have chosen to leave them out.
