User blog:Twitch.tv-Eeeekkk/Guide: Eeeekkk's Gol Guide

Welcome to my first Gol guide in My Time at Portia! I have had so much fun playing this game and have had numerous requests on my stream to make a Gol guide, so here we are! I am going to list what in my experience is the top 5 easiest and most efficient ways to get Gol and explain why. I have done a lot of testing and research on this, but these are in no way the guaranteed top 5. Other people could have figured out better ways and by all means, if you have and would like to share, please let me know! Let's get right into it then, shall we?

All information in this guide is current as of patch Alpha 7.0100427 (Harbor storyline).

What is covered in this guide?

 * Top 5 easiest and most efficient ways to get Gol
 * #1 Lead Bar
 * #2 Fishing
 * #3 Topaz
 * #4 Igneous Brick &amp; Aluminum Plate
 * #5 Stone Table
 * Item Market Cap
 * Skill tree
 * What separates great selling items from okay selling items
 * Market rate
 * Honorable Mentions

#1 - Lead Bar
Oh man, these bad boys have been my bread and butter. So what makes these so great? Lead Bars have recently been added into the game and still don't have any purpose as of yet, which makes these very expendable. Not only do these not have a purpose outside of selling, they're incredibly fast and easy to make and also have the highest sell price out of any bar (39). Let's take a look at what it takes to create a Lead Bar and I'll show you why I have 4 Industrial Furnaces cooking these every day. Lead Bars take 36 minutes to craft. Yes, you read that right, thirty-six. That's just insane. That means you can craft 40 of these a day with just 1 Industrial Furnace. Let's do some math. With only 1 Industrial Furnace, you're looking at a profit of (39*40)=1560 every day. Naturally, you add more Industrial Furnaces, your per-day profits go up. However, there are diminishing returns on the amount of Industrial Furnaces you have since Lead Ore is a Secondary Ore and you can only mine so much per day due to stamina and time limitations. If Lead Ore ever became a Primary Ore, Lead Bars would have no downsides for selling.

Where can I sell these incredibly heavy bars?

 * A&G Construction Store
 * Total Tools

Item Market Cap
Roughly 99972

#2 - Fishing
Fishing has the best in-game time to Gol ratio out of anything in the game. The amount of Gol that can be made from Fishing is all subjective to the amount of time you're willing to spend and the amount of Stamina you have. Unlike the other 4 methods on this list, Fishing is the only one that doesn't overlap. You don't get anything extra by doing it, just fish. With farming Lead Ore for Lead Bars, you're also getting tons of Iron Ore which you can sell for a profit or use, as well as some Stone. Same with farming Topaz, you're getting Stone, Marble, and other gems which you can use to craft more items to sell.

It takes 3 in-game minutes from the end of the catching a fish animation to get into your next fishing animation. This means you can potentially fish 20 times in 1h if you spam left click while exiting the caught fish animation to immediately get back into the fishing animation. With the lowest fish selling for 30, you're making a minimum of 600 per in-game hour. Now, this is extremely unrealistic as the chances of you catching only the basic 30 Gol fish in a 20-fish-to-1h ratio is pretty much non-existent. If you somehow do, please do not play the lottery, you will be throwing away your money.

Each Fishing Spot contains different fish therefore will yield different income-per-hour averages. Let's take a look at each Fishing Spot, the fish they contain, and the average amount of Gol-per-hour they yield.

*Fishing Spots are in order by availability in the storyline* River= Waterfall= Harbor= Beach= Amber Island= Lake= Oasis= Desert River= All=

Who will buy my slimy but delicious Fish?

 * The Round Table
 * Martha's Bakery
 * Best Brother
 * Total Tools
 * Farm Store

Item Market Cap
Roughly 104640

Topaz Routes
*Routes are in order by availability in the storyline*

With an average of 90 Topaz per full run, you're looking at a profit of 7200 every time these rocks respawn. The best thing to do is keep an eye out for when the rocks right next to your house (Route 1) respawn because all of the rocks on the map respawn at the same time; this prevents you from having to check each individual route to see if the rocks are available to harvest again.

Who will buy my shiny Topaz without inspecting them?

 * A&G Construction Store
 * The Round Table
 * Alice's Flower Shop
 * Martha's Bakery
 * Best Brother
 * Total Tools
 * Clothing Store
 * Dr. Xu's Clinic
 * Farm Store

Item Market Cap
Roughly 237192

Igneous Brick
Just like the Lead Bar, Igneous Brick isn't really used for anything as of yet. The only thing it's used for is making Conductive Igneous Floor which functions the same as Conductive Wooden Flooring, but with a different look. So, if you are using Fire Powered Generators and already have Conductive Wooden Flooring and don't care about the aesthetics, then you have no use for Conductive Igneous Floor. Let's talk a little about price. These bad boys sell for 180 each! They only take 5 Igneous Rock to craft and don't take very long either. If you cut these with an Industrial Cutter, you can make 20 a day for a profit of 3600. If you cut these with a Comprehensive Cutter, you can make 16 a day for a profit of 2880. I would recommend cutting these with the Industrial Cutter so you can cut as many as possible as quickly as possible while also keeping your Comprehensive Cutters free to make Aluminum Plates. Keep in mind, the amount of Igneous Rock you can obtain is limited as you have to wait for the nodes to respawn. On average, you will be able to make around 50 Igneous Brick per full clear of the igneous nodes. The bad thing about Igneous Brick is you have to be towards the end of the current storyline (Harbor) in order to get to the location to mine these rocks. There's also a limited quantity of rocks (average of 250 Igneous Rock per full clear) that you can mine before having to wait for them to respawn. Because of this, and the fact that these are made via the cutter machines, this section has a "back-up" material you can make when you're not busy cutting Igneous Brick.

But wait, why would I sell Igneous Brick for 180 when I can turn them into Conductive Igneous Floor and sell those for 430 a piece!? Good question, here's why. Crafting Conductive Igneous Floor takes 2 Igneous Brick and 2 Aluminum Wires at a raw material cost of 452. You'd actually be losing 22 per Conductive Igneous Floor while creating more work for yourself.

Aluminum Plate
Sometimes you'll run out of Igneous Rock to cut into Igneous Brick while waiting for the nodes to respawn. If this is the case, don't let your cutters off easy, you need to put them suckers to work! This is where Aluminum Plates come into play. I recommend only cutting these with the Comprehensive Cutters. It increases the time by an extra 36m per plate, but you get to use raw material (Aluminum Ore, Magnesium Ore, and Manganese Ore) instead of Stainless Aluminum. The raw material is extremely easy to get. Even without the Mini-Drill, you can farm a lot of ore in a single day, enough to last you days or even weeks worth of crafting. If you use Stainless Aluminum to make these, you'd actually be losing money while creating a lot more work for yourself; you'd also need to have multiple Electric Furnaces going 24/7 in order to make enough Stainless Aluminum to not have any downtime on your cutters. We're trying to be as efficient as possible, remember? The less work the better!

Where can I sell my beautifully crafted Brick and Plates?

 * A&G Construction Store
 * Best Brother
 * Total Tools

Item Market Cap
Roughly 123692

#5 - Stone Table
Stone Table is comprised of Stone and Marble, two of the easiest materials to get in the game. You will be harvesting tons of Rock and Marble from the Topaz Routes, so no extra work is even needed. If you ever do find yourself needing more Stone but have plenty of Marble, head on over to the Abandoned Ruins and farm some more. These only take 20 Stone and 2 Marble to craft. They're also crafted at the Worktable, meaning they're instant, so no waiting around, just grab 'em and go. Each table sells for 32 meaning a stack of 100 Marble would yield you 1600 worth of Stone Tables. By the time you get around to selling these at a high market rate, you will probably have a stack of at least 300, at no extra effort.

Who is crazy enough to buy all of these tables from me?

 * A&G Construction Store
 * Best Brother
 * Total Tools

Item Market Cap
Roughly 123692

Section 1.1 - Item Market Cap
If you've ever taken an economics class, I'm sure you've heard your teacher say these three words, "Supply and Demand". If you've never heard of this little phrase, go ask your teacher, mom, dad, sibling, cousin (okay, maybe not your cousin, he's a little weird; I mean, what's up with those Facebook posts of his anyway?), I'm sure one of them could give you the rundown. So, you've asked them and none of them could tell you? Well, you're in luck, we just so happen to be covering that in this guide.

Supply and Demand

If you want to sell an item, you have got to make sure people want to buy it. You can make as many double sided pens that have a ball point on one end and white out on the other as you want, people still don't want to buy them. Actually, those sound pretty useful, maybe that was a bad example. The point is, make sure there's a market for the item you want to sell before producing mass quantities. All of the items listed above, on top of being very easy to obtain, have a very high market cap; it's what makes them so great.

'''Market cap? What do you mean by market cap?'''

Market cap is the amount of potential Gol you can sell the item for on any given day. All stores have a certain range of Gol they have available every day. If you wipe out all of a store's Gol, come back tomorrow and they'll have their average Gol available again and ready to purchase more. The combined total Gol of the stores an item sells to, is that item's market cap.

Section 2 - Skill Tree
Which skills you pick make a very very big difference. A lot of skills on here are pretty useless, but a few of them are very overpowered. Let's take a look at what skills, in order, you should be taking.

Essential Skills

Here is an example of my current skill tree. Keep in mind, I am only level 46 on this account so I do not have the skill "Loot". You need to be level 51 in order to max out all of the skills above. Loot is not nearly as important as the other skills, therefore we can afford to get it later.
 * Business Mind - Items sell for 10% more.
 * Mastery of Pickaxe - Stamina cost for pickaxe reduced by 50%. Must have this before Master Miner becomes available.
 * Master Miner - Pickaxe damage increased by 25%. Must have this before Advanced Mining becomes available.
 * Advanced Mining - 24% chance of double drops while mining. Must have this before Lucky Miner becomes available.
 * Lucky Miner - 100% chance for rare item drops while mining.
 * Loot - Chances of double-loot increased by 20%.



Section 3 - Great vs. Okay selling items
All of the items listed above are considered Great selling items. The perfect example of a Great selling item vs Okay selling item would be the Aluminum Plate (listed above) vs. Aluminum Wires. Aluminum Wires take 1/3 of the resources and time to craft, but sell for more than the Aluminum Plate when comparing the amount of resources used. If you compared selling 3 Aluminum Wires to 1 Aluminum Plate, Aluminum Wires would win. Take a look at the table below for clarification. So why don't we sell Aluminum Wires instead of Aluminum Plates? Two words, market cap. The only difference between these two items is the selling potential. Aluminum Plates have a market cap of roughly 123692, while Aluminum Wires only have a market cap of roughly 37910. This is a 326% difference! As you can see, the difference is not small by any means.

Section 4 - Market Rate
Market Rate is the price at which items sell. If the market rate is at 100%, items sell for their normal rate. If the market rate is at 130%, items that sell for 100 will now sell for 130. Market rate is the key to making a lot of Gol. Just like in real life, buy low and sell high. Except, in real life, most people buy low and sell high, stupid stocks, they always go down as soon as I buy in. Sorry, where was I? Oh right.

A few things we know about the the market rate.
 * It is completely random. You, the player, have no influence on the market rate at all. There are theories that buying items from shops will make the market rate go up and selling a lot of items to shops will make the market rate go down. This is completely false. I have done 100 tests of re-loading days and trying to influence the market in any way that I could and so far, everything points to 100% random.
 * The higher the market rate, the higher average Gol the shops carry.
 * The higher the market rate, the more "in debt" the shops can go.
 * If the market rate is below 90%, a shop cannot go "in debt".

Section 5 - Honorable Mentions
I will be listing some other Great and Okay items here. For specific reasons, these items did not make the cut.

Section will be added soon.