Source
r/RimWorld•
_groundcontrol

RimWorld economy: It takes 5 hops to make one beer. Hops base cost is 2, beer is 9. You loose money by turning hops into beer

I think this is part of the bigger issue where crafted items such as art and clothing has extreme value, but things that are actually supposed to make money, such as drugs have very little worth.

In my current colony which I made as a drug plantation, the actual drugs make less money than replacing the drugs with cloth and selling chairs. Economy dont make much sense in this game.

Posted Mar 19, 2017, 11:53 PM UTC

3838
TynanSylvesterLead Developer•

Economies are hard to balance, especially with as many things going on and as many items as RimWorld. So I've screwed quite a few things up :)

I'm glad to say that the economy has been comprehensively rebalanced for next update, though, which will also fix this problem.

19
_groundcontrolOP•

Senpai noticed me

Good to hear! I really like the idea of running a drug plantation and doing nothing else. Managed to buy steel and components with drugs in this colony but not much else.

Keep up the good work man! Really like the game

5
stupv•

I've never brewed beer for profit, just to placate needy colonists.

Some other factors that may come into play:

  • Frequency of traders who will buy beer vs raw hops (anecdotally, i feel like there are probably more who buy beer than hops but it could be because i've never tried to sell hops and so dont notice)

  • Frequency of traders trading at inflated prices for beer vs hope (again anecdotal, but i feel like plenty of traders swing through with beer @ $15-25. As above though, i'm not noticing the same for Hops as i don't look at their prices)

10
TheHobbyist94Tons of Joy•

Chairs both take up more space and require you to micromanage to get them built. Art can be hit or miss depending on the skill of your pawn. Drugs? Drugs are always profitable, and you can start almost immediately with zero crafting skill to roll smokeleaf. Once you make psychoid plants and start making flake, you'll be rolling in it.

6
Protahgonist•

Is flake better than yayo? I've been making yayo all this time

1
TheHobbyist94Tons of Joy•

Flake has a higher return, yeah.

10
excelphysicslab•

ILR and in rimworld. Lol

3
The_BenLslate•

In Life: Real

6
CannonGerbilInterColonial Boomalope Missiles•

Flake is better for selling, yayo is better for consumption.

5
Moasseman•

Flake is better profit per leaf while Yayo is faster money.

1
[deleted]•

[deleted]

1
DrStalker•

Also, flake is lightweight. Really lightweight. This is very helpful if you're sending out a trade caravan... provided what you want to buy is also lightweight you just need one guy with a pocket full of flake and he can return with luci and medkits aplenty.

Chairs? Hauling thousands of silver worth of chairs around is a pain.

1
_groundcontrolOP•

Storage space isnt THAT hard to come by though. If you have enough for 10 chairs you are pretty much set. Compared to a couple of drug labs and drug storage id say there isnt much difference in space requirement.

Micromanagement, sure you have to put down 10 chairs now and then, mark them all and click uninstall. Aint that hard man.

Sure art depends on your skill, but you just need one passion and within a week they will be in the 12-15 range.

Agree that the benefit of drugs is that you require minimal skill, and they are very easy to carry around. But I really do think those are minimal advantages compared to producing furniture.

1
PetWolverine•

Joints need a crafting spot, not a drug lab. A crafting spot takes no materials or labor to build, and takes two cells of space counting the interaction spot. And joints stack to 400, so one stack sells for ~3200 silver. Unless your chairs are made of thrumbofur, that's hard to beat.

2
_groundcontrolOP•

Everything is worth tons of money when you blow it out of proportion. 400 joins require 1600 leaves. Thats 146 smokeleaf plants.

Do the same thing with cotton: 146 plants is 730 cloth. You can harvest cotton roughly 2.5 times in the time it take to grow smokeleaves, so 1825 cloth, 18 armchairs. 18 normal armchairs are 5580 silver. Assuming your builder is around level 15, the average quality should be superior, increasing value by 50%; 8370 silver.

When the only downside is that its harder to carry and somewhat marginally harder to store, cloth armchairs brings in way more gold than any drug.

Luckily Tynan commented and said value will be rebalanced next update!

2
agiber•

Usually I combine drugs, furniture and statues - there are different skills used so different pawns busy. And for some assassins there is no other job then art.

1
pear120•

What if grower skill also affected crop quality, not just harvest success chance? That way you can have the shitty drugs you sell to the flake den over the hill, while you keep the high grade stuff for yourself. Drugs with quality ratings.

1
Lindeed•

Manufacturing is never about price of material only. It's about weight, space management, transportation, production time, etc, etc. In RimWorld there's very simple reason (well, unless this is a bug) for this price difference. You can stack up to 25 beers on one field but only 75 hops (turning into 15 beers). So spacing for hops is only in 60% as effective as storaging beers. But that's not all - both beer and hops weight 0.03kg - which also indicates cost (food, time, etc) if you're selling out of your base.

Calculation is very simple here - if you can manage giant warehouses for hops AND you're selling them locally (space traders or incoming caravans) you can make a bit more money. If you don't have that much space AND you're sending caravans to sell/buy stuff - beer is choice for ya!

5
MehniDa Real MVP•

You're not taking the whole production line into account there. Beer requires a cook to man the brewing table and a climate controlled room for the fermenting barrels. It takes significant amounts of space, time and energy to get beer.

The upside is that you can sell it to a greater variety of traders, but I doubt it's the most profitable item in the game.

3
Lindeed•

Aye, you're right buddy! I kinda manipulated my answer here, but the point still stands - profit isn't only best price-per-unit. I'm not sayin' that beer is most profitable - I'm just sayin' that there are other factors in production. Cheers&lovvoss.

2
_groundcontrolOP•

giant warehouses

Like 40% bigger for storage? And this excluding all the space you need for production of yort and fermenting. Removing all of those steps easily takes less space than some more storage. And this isnt even counting in the labor.

Ive been running a brewery for some time now and can agree that shipping beer is a hassle, it weights to much, so I usually let it stay and sell locally. Also makes a bit more money this way as you dont have the -5% sell price debuff.

1
Lindeed•

40% is A LOT. But again - yeah, I kinda manipulated my answer. Point still stand - profit is not only about final price.

1
Modo44•

Your pets can't get drunk on hops, though. That's a big no-no.

4
verticalgripsSpace•

Traders will buy some items at a multiplier. For example, selling medicine to tribals. So some traders may buy beer at an increased price.

2
_groundcontrolOP•

Huh, I had no idea this was a thing. Know if there is a wiki page on this?

1
verticalgripsSpace•

Nope, your best bet is to hover over the price label in the trade menu, it shows all the multipliers. Would make a good wiki page though.

1
_groundcontrolOP•

Hm, think ive never seen anything but item sell price multiplier, wrong trader type price increase, faction base multiplier, difficulty and negotiation bonus

1
zogger568•

Beer should require grain like barley or wheat in addition to hops.

2
ayylmao31•

Beer is a fun production system. That's why I run it over smokeleaf when I get the spare time to carve out a brewery.

But yes, there are other ways to make optimal money. At least the hops to beer loss is ONLY 10%. Some other crafting chains DESTROY the value of the ingredient to product.

2
olljoh•

many things make sense only for own use.

your products of less value have a longer shelf life.

1
FutureSynth•

This post has inspired me to make a furniture manufacturing game. Ha

1
ironboy32Bill, stop walking into the killbox!•

wait what? Fuck, my entire production for my last 3 colonies have been wasting money. Fuck it, im making a clothes factory this playthrough.

1
rimworldjunkie•

Get a pack of alpacas and do regular hunting. You'll make so many clothes and have so much money you won't even know what to do with it all.

2
_groundcontrolOP•

I think armchairs, art and perhaps simple meals is the most profitable items to make.

Kind of make sense in a roleplaying way though. Industrial work pays more.

1
ironboy32Bill, stop walking into the killbox!•

yeah, but drug prices should go up over time due to addictions

1
Le_Oken•

A colony is nothing compared with the whole galaxy. Your production is not enough to change the price really.

1
[deleted]•

[deleted]

1
ironboy32Bill, stop walking into the killbox!•

im mainly selling to trade caravans though, not orbital traders...I increased the number of traders in a custom scenario i called the cocaine road. like the silk road but with cocaine/ flake.

1
GitRightStikPracticeMedicineUntilThePatientDies•

This is exactly why I want vodka from potatoes and whiskey from corn. Forget beer. Waste of time.

1
Le_Oken•

Vegetable garden does that. Is amazing.

2
al_kerhloic•

This post is highlighting a common issue with rimworld economy: Selling raw plant matter is more often than not more profitable than selling manufactured goods. what makes even less sense is that berry's are the most profitable "plant matter per growth day". a few examples: smoke-leaf4 ($2.404=9.6) -> Joint ($11) increasing the value of the 4 smoke leaves by $1.4 time better spent planting another plant for the 10ish * $2.40 6 days later making a joint essentially runs at a $23 loss

beer25 ($225 = $50) -> wort5 ($2.55 = $12.5 ) Wort25 ($2.525 = $62.5 -> beer ($9*25 = 225) so 125 hops ($250) -> 25 wort ($62.5) -> 25 beer ($225) so making beer not only loses $25 per craft but it takes 6000017 units of work to make, this is similar to the average growth time of a hops plantation. its more profitable to run 2 crops and sell plant matter than turning one crop into beer.

a quick overview of the number for all the drugs: Smokeleaf -> joint = smoke leaf goes from $2.4 -> $2.75.... Hops -> beer = hops goes from $2 -> $1.8 ... Psycoid -> Flake = pyscoid goes from $2.4 -> $3.5 ... psycoid -> yayo = pyscoid goes from $2.4 - > $2.88 ...

as you can see the value or manufacturing is not that of just spending your time planting another crop And the most profitable crop is berry's @$5.66 per square per day compared to psycoid into flake (ignoring addition time spent making flake) @$5.12 per square per day

1
_groundcontrolOPGold assault rifle Tynan plz•

And thats just drugs. My last playthrough relied on cotton and later on devilstrand to make armchairs to sell. The money was UNREAL, i had more money than I knew what to do with. Started making silver and gold sculptures. Way more income than my drug-colony games.

1