How to earn gold?

Yario

IS ratting and catching butterflies the only reliable ways to get gold, I have found a few quests that give me some cash but they are often hunted out.

Is fishing worth the investment? or getting access to sewers for more rats? 
Would selling credits on the market be worthwhile?

TIA

Jeslyn

Goats+rabbits+actar+farming every 15 minutes=$$$

Make sure to kill the nymph.

Sena

If you can afford (and are willing) to buy credits with real money and sell them for gold, that's by far the easiest way to get gold. Whether or not that's worthwhile depends on how much disposable income you have and how much you value your time.

Aside from that, quests are the best way for 99% of players. I wrote a basic guide here on how to find quests for yourself and how to do them well once you do learn them. If you have someone to show you some good areas/quests (your house, city, friends, mentor, etc.), that will help a lot. Questing could get you more than 20k gold per hour, more like 30-40k if you're really efficient and dedicated, and have a good method of fast travel (very few people actually pull this much from questing, 20k is the more reasonable figure).

The newbie areas have simple quests that give very good gold and have a lot of hints to help you along, so they're a good place to start earning gold and learning how to solve quests. You should take advantage of it while you can.

High level bashing is pretty simple: Kill denizens, they drop gold, or they drop talismans that you can sell to other players for gold or credits. At low levels, the gold dropped isn't enough to matter. Until around level 80, most areas you could bash won't even drop enough gold to cover the costs of your elixirs and cures. Above that though, it starts to get profitable. By the time you're a dragon, you could potentially be getting more than 50k gold per hour, but that takes a lot of time and effort.

Fishing can be worthwhile. In terms of how quickly you can get gold, lake/river fishing doesn't pay well at all, and it requires a large lesson investment that's better spent on your class skills first. I'd estimate 4-6k gold per hour with trans survival. Deep sea fishing is a lot better, but it requires access to a ship (you don't have to buy one yourself, there are a huge number of ships sitting unused in docks, so you should be able to find someone who will lend or rent you a ship, or your city might give you access to a city-owned ship) and it requires additional lesson investment in seafaring, not to mention the risk of pirates (which can be minimised, but it's still something to keep in mind), and even then, deep-sea fishing is far inferior to questing. I'd estimate 10-15k gold per hour, not counting any expenses other than bait. What makes fishing, even lake/river fishing, worthwhile (after you can afford to put a lot of lessons into survival) isn't how fast you earn gold though, but how little effort it takes. There are rules against fully automating things that earn gold or experience, but almost every person who ever fishes in Achaea has it automated to some extent, and so it requires minimal attention and effort, and you can work on other things at the same time. You could do Achaean things like working on scripting, reading logs/news, paperwork if you have any, descriptions/designs, performances/rituals, anything that doesn't require you to move around much. Or you could do OOC things like homework or watching a movie or whatever else you can do while still keeping some of your attention on Achaea. It's a way of earning gold while you're busy with other things so you can't bash or quest.

Tradeskills vary a lot, so it's harder to give an estimate on how profitable they are, but I'd estimate that they generally fall into three categories:

1. Profits roughly on par with lake/river fishing (maybe less), but easy to sell. Not a lot of gold, but it's reliable. Synthesis, gathering, inkmilling, and harvesting fall under this category.
   
2. Extremely high gold per time spent, but the amount you can sell is very limited (unless you can manage to stock a shop that sells a lot, or stock multiple shops). So it's either not a lot of gold but takes very little of your time, or it's extremely good gold but requires experience and contacts and keeping up with demand. Remedies and toxicology fall under this category. Weaponsmithing and armoursmithing also fall under this category, but they also take either a large initial investment or a ton of customers to get up to a decent rank.
   
3. It's a design skill and you'll probably never make any profit. They cost 200 credits for a permit, and they usually only get you a tiny amount of gold. Some people have managed to do pretty well though (not quickly, but eventually), either by having a reputation for very good designs and getting a lot of custom orders, or by possessing a lot of good designs (you don't have to be the original designer) and running a shop. Cooking, tailoring, and jewellery are in this category.

Rats and butterflies are pretty much at the bottom of the list. Laying in an alley and begging for spare change will probably be faster than chasing butterflies.

Yario

Jeslyn said:

Goats+rabbits+actar+farming every 15 minutes=$$$

Make sure to kill the nymph.

Aye that is one of the quests i have found however the cyclops is always dead

Jeslyn

Yeah kill the nymph, if you don't want to...either keep the javelin until it decays or icewall the cyclops

Titonus

I actually still rat from time to time...

Blujixapug

Quests are the best, most consistent way to get gold at low and mid levels. Catching butterflies is good one at very early levels, but there are better quests out there.

Hunting doesn't become very lucrative until very high levels, when creatures start to drop significant amounts of gold. But there are some NPCs who will pay you for certain corpses, like the Pixie Queen who'll pay for dead imps, which makes hunting a bit more lucrative in some places. Hunting at any level requires you pay for supplies like health potions, which cuts into your earnings.

I suggest you explore different areas, greet the NPCs, and try to find some quests. That way even if someone has recently done the quests in an area, you can go somewhere else.

I don't think fishing is worthwhile. The profit margins are very slim.

The sewers are interesting - and Survival is worth learning for other reasons - but they're not really a goldmine.

Selling credits is probably not a good idea. Early on, you're better off using them for lessons to learn skills.

Halos

Sena said:

Laying in an alley and begging for spare change will probably be faster than chasing butterflies.

 I laughed.

Multon

I've gotten into the habit of pretty much making Moghedu my home away from home, and a living hell for all the Mhun for whom it is actually home. (I spare none, and laugh when the women and juveniles try to run.) Serves a joint purpose of earning enough gold to make a little bit of a profit, as well as keep on up the level grinding. I'm 77 now, (I think?) and should be 78 before much longer, and I usually try to keep a cushion of about 10k in my pack. Frankly, I've just learned to live with being poor. Makes sense for a slave in Mhaldor to not really be swimming in disposable income... If I ever desperately need just a few hundred more gold for something I'll sometimes rat, but I generally deplore ratting.

Sherazad

What's fun to do is to do HELP GEOGRAPHY, read about places, visit them, and figure out how to help them. Questing basically. It really pays more to quest at lower levels.

The popular quests have already been noted but most of the time, others have already done it. Do enough of the ones which aren't as well-known and the gold will pile up.