What is most profitable ware to produce?

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Szynszyl
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What is most profitable ware to produce?

Post by Szynszyl » Fri, 17. Jan 20, 22:27

Hello
I always love in X series owning station and have production. So i have quick question, what is most profitable ware to produce?

DavidGW
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Re: What is most profitable ware to produce?

Post by DavidGW » Fri, 17. Jan 20, 22:39

Spaceships.

Just build anything required for building spaceships. When you can, build a Wharf, and put the output of your other factories into your wharf.

They basically print money, and you'll have a billion credits soon enough.

Ezarkal
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Re: What is most profitable ware to produce?

Post by Ezarkal » Fri, 17. Jan 20, 23:03

Exactly what Szynszyl said.

Barring that, it will depend on your game and at how advanced you are in it.

-Early game, silicon wafer seems a safe bet to me.
-Further down, claytronics are always a massive money maker.
-If you don't mind going outside the law, there are a few options as well. (Spacefuel is once again a big winner for me.)
This will often change on different play-through.


Also, while your own shipyard will generate crazy amounts of income, feeding the NPC shipyard with a few well-placed stations is a good source of cash. Smart chips will often be in high demand after a few dozen hours, and while they sell cheap per unit, you will sell huge amounts of them.
Plus, many NPC shipyards will produce until they are blocked by a resource shortage. Satisfy that shortage and another ware will be lacking soon. You can set up pretty profitable production chains centralized on NPC shipyards that way.


But yeah... nothing beats owning your shipyard. Especially if you feed it from your own stations.
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Derp
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Re: What is most profitable ware to produce?

Post by Derp » Fri, 17. Jan 20, 23:19

Szynszyl wrote:
Fri, 17. Jan 20, 22:27
Hello
I always love in X series owning station and have production. So i have quick question, what is most profitable ware to produce?
Shipyards are so ludicrously profitable that I wouldn't even consider it part of the economic gameplay. Get one going and you won't need to worry about the income of anything else.

Of the wares, what's profitable is what's in demand. Assuming equal demand, the best ROIs are found at the bottom of the chain. M miners will pay for themselves long before stations will.

Beyond that, find a shipyard you want to support, scan it to >51% so you can see its storage, and make whatever it's short on. Don't worry about closing production loops or maximizing profitability of that station. Every destroyer you help the shipyard churn out clobbers a destroyer's worth of other economic resources that trickles down into solid work for your mining and trade fleet.

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ubuntufreakdragon
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Re: What is most profitable ware to produce?

Post by ubuntufreakdragon » Fri, 17. Jan 20, 23:42

A Shipyard is most profitable but also a huge initial investment, so likely not you best option for a first station, as investment prices increase with the refinement of the processed goods a refinery is your best choice early, you can get a pretty impressive one for a few millions.
Best get all teladi L storage modules and only use these. (they are very effective and still really cheap to build)
you best build these stations in this order: (modules)
1 refinery
2 building material for stations
3 S shipyard
4 S/M shipyard(you only need to buy more blueprints)
5 L shipyard
6 XL shipyard
7 ship resource production

refinery:
first buy a gas and a ore M miner, fill them with a good captain and many resource probes to let them auto mine a resource than drop a probe to mark the field and move the ship somewhere else. (they are your truffle pigs)
Once you find a nice field start planing your station, most profitable are silicon and methane for a station as these the most needed resources.
The place should be secure and close to the ring.
total investment up to 20mil (investing more makes no sense)
will output enough money to start the next station.

building material:
microchips seam to be a good intermediate product to start with for early profit.
build one module of each material and its resources before increasing your production.
total investment up to 100mil (investing more makes no sense)
will output enough money to start the next station.

S shipyard
buy all S blueprints of one nation + all S components of said nation + the blueprint of the production module
than expand to other nations
min investment about 150mil before you get any money.
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Szynszyl
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Re: What is most profitable ware to produce?

Post by Szynszyl » Fri, 17. Jan 20, 23:51

Thx guys for quick replies. So as you say ships are new gold in X4F, selling them is that same like wares? I get order for ships from faction and my shipyard start to build them automaticaly? Or i must build ships manually and then manualy sold them to faction shipyards?

DavidGW
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Re: What is most profitable ware to produce?

Post by DavidGW » Sat, 18. Jan 20, 02:26

You build a shipyard or wharf with a large amount of container storage. You then have to buy a whole lot of ship blueprints.

When you have the blueprints and materials to build, other factions will start ordering ships be built. It requires no input from you, you just lose some wares from storage and get millions of credits dumped into the station account.

This is mid-late game stuff, as it's probably around a 500M credit investment, even without building the production modules to stock the shipyard/wharf with wares.

Working towards the goal of a player owned shipyard/wharf, I'd suggest looking at local wharfs, figuring out what they are generally running low on, and building factories to support them. Use them to generate a reasonable income until you can afford your own wharf and buy blueprints, then divert all your own produce into that to maximise your profit.


Initially, I built a huge complex fabricating microchips and smart chips, but it saturated the market. I'd suggest diversifying would be a better method than focussing on producing just one resource, because the "most valuable" resource won't be for long if you make too much of it.

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Re: What is most profitable ware to produce?

Post by Ezarkal » Sat, 18. Jan 20, 08:02

ubuntufreakdragon wrote:
Fri, 17. Jan 20, 23:42

Best get all teladi L storage modules and only use these. (they are very effective and still really cheap to build)
For stations whose purpose is generating income, I found that using L storage modules is often not the best case. (I mean container storage. Solid/liquid storage are solely used for mining wares, which are not sold, so the bigger the better.)

When it comes to selling wares, pricing will vary in function of storage usage. A station with empty stores will sell its wares at maximum price, while a full station will sell much cheaper. However, if your wares are too pricey, NPC customers will simply turn towards the competition. So your stations will take a while to fill up, until the prices are low enough that you get customers.

On the other hand, if you use smaller storage, you will attract customers immediately and start generating income right away. Sure, you may end up selling a bit cheaper, but a discount sell is better than no sell, especially if you're early in the production chain. Refined metal/silicon wafer production are very efficient this way.

You can of course adjust prices manually, but then they won't changes if the market does.


Of course, if your station's purpose is to stack up wares, (say for construction purpose or to feed your own shipyard,) then L containers are awesome. The same goes if you have more complex production chains in a single station.
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Ezarkal
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Re: What is most profitable ware to produce?

Post by Ezarkal » Sat, 18. Jan 20, 08:08

Szynszyl wrote:
Fri, 17. Jan 20, 23:51
I get order for ships from faction and my shipyard start to build them automaticaly? Or i must build ships manually and then manualy sold them to faction shipyards?
You can do both, but the former is much more profitable.
When your shipyard build ships for the NPCs, you get the full price of the ships. You can also adjust this values and tell your ship dealers to sell ships at, say, 120% of the normal price, if you want. Chances are they will sell like hotcakes anyway. :D

However, when you build and sell ships manually, you always get a less than the ship's value. It's still a decent amount, but still...
Humans are deuterostomes, which means that when they develop in the womb the first opening they develop is the anus.
This means that at one point you were nothing but an asshole.

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pref
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Re: What is most profitable ware to produce?

Post by pref » Sat, 18. Jan 20, 09:38

I found claytronics to sell really well, even though there weren't many buy offers for it at all. So just checking trade offers can be misleading.
Perhaps the AI evaluates availability of resources before starting station builds. This might mean that some wares might sell really well even though you see no demand for them.
Don't know if this only applies for station building resources or for ship components as well.

Shipyards are the best for income, they make any kind of normal trade seem like a waste of time.
But when you already have a couple billions for the blueprints, income won't matter much probably.

Raevyan
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Re: What is most profitable ware to produce?

Post by Raevyan » Sat, 18. Jan 20, 11:50

You can get a s/m wharf up and running with about 200-250m. That’s enough to buy the wharf module, L container storage, blueprints for 2 s sized ships and equipment and for the manager to just buy needed resources to build ships. From there on the profit are only limited by how well npc economy can support your shipyard, usually pretty well and money won’t be any issue anymore.

The question is, what’s the most efficient way to get the initial 250m.

GCU Grey Area
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Re: What is most profitable ware to produce?

Post by GCU Grey Area » Sat, 18. Jan 20, 12:08

Tend to focus on Refined Metal & Hull Parts production first. They sell OK, but mostly build those first because Hull Parts are critical for station construction. Maintaining a substantial private stockpile simplifies the logistics of subsequent station build projects. After I'm happy with my production rate for Hull Parts I start construction on the supply chain for Claytronics (also essential for station building). However it's a significantly more complicated process, with many more production stages, which is why I focus on Hull Parts first.

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ubuntufreakdragon
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Re: What is most profitable ware to produce?

Post by ubuntufreakdragon » Sat, 18. Jan 20, 14:29

Ezarkal wrote:
Sat, 18. Jan 20, 08:02
ubuntufreakdragon wrote:
Fri, 17. Jan 20, 23:42

Best get all teladi L storage modules and only use these. (they are very effective and still really cheap to build)
For stations whose purpose is generating income, I found that using L storage modules is often not the best case. (I mean container storage. Solid/liquid storage are solely used for mining wares, which are not sold, so the bigger the better.)

When it comes to selling wares, pricing will vary in function of storage usage. A station with empty stores will sell its wares at maximum price, while a full station will sell much cheaper. However, if your wares are too pricey, NPC customers will simply turn towards the competition. So your stations will take a while to fill up, until the prices are low enough that you get customers.

On the other hand, if you use smaller storage, you will attract customers immediately and start generating income right away. Sure, you may end up selling a bit cheaper, but a discount sell is better than no sell, especially if you're early in the production chain. Refined metal/silicon wafer production are very efficient this way.

You can of course adjust prices manually, but then they won't changes if the market does.
Just change the storage limit not the price :P .
You should always use L as many hightech cycles run for a long time and output a great amount of wares in a single cycle, a S or M storage can't store a full cycle if you add many different products.
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Ezarkal
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Re: What is most profitable ware to produce?

Post by Ezarkal » Sat, 18. Jan 20, 17:34

ubuntufreakdragon wrote:
Sat, 18. Jan 20, 14:29
[...]
Just change the storage limit not the price :P .
You should always use L as many hightech cycles run for a long time and output a great amount of wares in a single cycle, a S or M storage can't store a full cycle if you add many different products.
Very true... I forgot that feature. I didn't play that much since they added it. (I'm waiting for the DLC before I jump back in.)
Humans are deuterostomes, which means that when they develop in the womb the first opening they develop is the anus.
This means that at one point you were nothing but an asshole.

Some people never develop beyond this stage.

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Nort The Fragrent
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Re: What is most profitable ware to produce?

Post by Nort The Fragrent » Sat, 18. Jan 20, 23:26

Ships yards are cool to begin with, wow, I have my own ship building plant. And you then get drowned in cash.
Just like the drug lords who have huge stashes of cash and don’t know what to do with the stuff. It becomes an infestation. I reached over 100 Billion in one game, ! What for ?

Ship yards are a good addition, but the monetary mechanics are so way off, it becomes laughable after your first Billion.
And being so outrageously wealthy you go and buy what ever you want when you want, and that throws the game out the window.

Ship yards need to be more of a nightmare than a vastly out of proportion money fountain.
Something that requires careful attention to keep the thing functioning. Not have it vomit huge blobs of undigested cash at you.

I like shipyards, don't get me wrong. But the cash is a joke.

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