How to make money guide

Early Levels (lvl 1~50):

During your inevitable green noob of oblivion stage, you can start your first babystep toward riches and glory by begging.

Actually no, that will get you banned.

Okay, more seriously here are some of many tricks that can jump start your riches:

1. This applies to people of ALL levels and probably is the best way to make money without spending real money. Goto AO main website: http://atlantica.ndoorsgames.com/center/default.asp. Then hit "FREE Gcoins" on left side. Afterwards goto the Peanut Labs surveys. Again, it's PEANUT LABS surveys. Other ones ask for too much personal information and can give you a lot of problems. Even when you do peanut lab surveys do NOT give out any telephone address or your real address.

Anyhow before you can do the surveys here they will ask you few questions. This stage is critical, because some of the information you input here will be used over and over again, and you can't lie about it again, ever. I told them my real age, sex, race, etc and it turned out fine. But when I started doing the surveys a lot of them require you to have kids, so I started lying about having kids and it works fine now. If your real age is say 18, and that's what you've entered, you can't tell them you have kids anymore, I guess. That's why it's important that you lie about your age from the beginning. I tell them I have a 11 year old son and 9 year old daughter. Lastly, these surveys are BS because unless you give answers that they want they will fail you and you will get 0 Gcoins. In the beginning I failed pretty much all surveys but I got the hang of it and now I pass about half of them. To this day I probably received about 8~10k Gcoins. 500Gcoin is roughly 140~150m if you buy Permanent Mercenary License or Atlas Ores with it. Here are some tips that will help you get free Gcoins:
- If they ask if you've participated in any type of survey before, just say no.
- If they ask for your gender & age always tell them what you've told them the first time they collected your info.
- If they ask if you've tried a product before or currently using them, always say you did or have in the past. If they list 20 of them, say you tried all 20 of them, and then leave most positive review for all even if you hate the product. If you have to pick your favorite, well, your guess is as good as mine.
- Watch out for booby traps. Sometimes they ask you to pick a specific answer just to make sure you aren't randomly picking answers. More sophisticated booby trap is where they ask you a question, and then ask something similar or identical down the road. If your answer is different down the road they will fail you.
- Try to predict an answer they want out of you. For example if they are asking about a movie and want your kid to answer the questions (of course you will instead), they probably want you to write or choose children's movies as answers down the road. Another example is a car survey I did and they asked if I'm patriotic. Of course I said yes and I figured they wanted me to choose American made cars as my favorites. Picked up 375Gcoins on that one.

2. Exchange books with Goncourt. You can do this by finding Goncourt who is a moving NPC and exchanging whatever books you don't need with him for a random chance to get expensive books. You can find Goncourt by going to NPC called Livingstone near city of Bucharest. This city is normally reached around lvl 45~50 if you follow main quest line but you should pay it a visit early. Some of the books that are the rarest are:

War Cry III: Sells for 25m minimum from what I've seen. Probably can sell for 30m+ each.
Blazing Earth III: Sells for 16m minimum but when it's popular it sells for 25~30m+ also.
Freezing Atmosphere III: Sells for about 4~6m+ each.

I used to buy about 100 of cheap books and goto Goncourt every day.

3. Buy Manager's Scroll III, Growth Vial II, Insignia License, Repair Stone III & IV from NPC's through rumors. You can do this by looking for rumors above your chat box. It will indicate what is for sale and where it is. To do this it's important that you have visited most of the cities in the world. You will spend very little gold to make sizeable money at the cost of traveling expenses and 100 will. For example Manager's scroll sells for about 100,000g each, and you can buy 3 at a time for 1000g each. Insignia License can sell for anywhere between 100,000g to 1.5 million, based on experience.

4. This one utilizes Jackpot License. What it does is first collect a number of loot into a seperate window instead of your inventory. You can accumulate as much as you want but types of loots that can fit into this jackpot window is limited. After accumulation you can either simply take the loot into your inventory, or use a function called "Jackpot". If you choose to "Jackpot" an item, you sacrifice all OTHER items for the item you have chosen to "Jackpot". How much of the jackpotted item you get depends on the value of rest of the items. Higher the value of items being sacrificed, more items you get. At early levels jackpot license is cheap and can be purchased from market.

Once you have a fairly good idea of how to use the jackpot license, fight a monster that drops hot items such as ashen crystal or any craft materials that you know to sell fast. Try to only have that one item in the jackpot license. Then purchase a few ornate treasure maps, then start visiting as many towns as possible. Afterwards hunt for treasure maps (you have 5 minutes to get it) by right clicking ornate treasure maps and whatever you get from this hunt will be sacrificed. Do this as long as possible and at the end hit the jackpot button and you will get tons of items to sell. In my experience low lvl craft materials and Beast Summon Book I jackpotted the best.

5. Columbus trick? someone elaborate on this please?

Mid Levels (lvl 50~90):

1. Run Witch recruitment quest over and over and at the end choose 3x Small Marionnettes as reward. Each goes for about 3m~4m right now, but when I used to do it they wold for about 7m each. I ran this about 40 times. 9~12m per run is still very good money for mid levels. Some people insist on picking a witch marble instead due to market but the marble is much harder to sell believe me and may go down quite a bit before you sell them.

2. Craft Blood Knight or Gilga items if your skill level is high enough. If you craft +0 you probably won't make much profit, but if you get lucky you will craft +1~+5 or even +6. You will probably need to make mules to carry and sell these. For your information most or all weapons, "armor", shield and orb aren't very profitable. Pants, shoes, gauntlets and helmets are.

3. Buy cheap books or jewels and resell them at much higher value. For example Devastation Shell III and Arrow Cascade III fluctuate a lot. If you can grab these books at about 1.5m or less each, you are guaranteed to make a lot of profit down the road. I've bought about 20 Arrow Cascade III's for 1m each and sold them for 5~8m each later. Same with Devastation Shell III books. You can do the same with Jewels. Try to grab Giant Jewels or Redemption Jewels for 800k each. You can later sell them for 900k~1m each later depending on the market.

4. Pay attention to the ticker (ingame forum) above when you are free. Sometimes you will see a really good deal. For example I've traded my permanent merc license for a scarlet horn. Then I traded it for another helmet that was more valuable. Eventually I kept trading costume to another and other stuff to other stuff, and ended up with a set of Gothic and Cute Bunny Costume. I've probably made about 500m+ from the good trades. For your information following are the most valuable clothing sets:

Jiang Shi Set (Discontinued and is probably the most rare set in the game)
Cute Bunny Set (Also discontinued and rare. Worth about 500~600m+).
Casino Set (Also discontinued and rare. Worth about 500~560m imo).

Other discontinued sets seem to go for normal rate of about 200m per piece.

Gothic Set (Most popular out of the sets currently on sale)
Elegant Victorian Set (2nd most popoular out of the sets currently on sale)
Maid Set (3rd most popular out of the sets currently on sale)

Ninja Mask & Scarlet Horn (Scarlet body is popular however) are probably the least desirable clothing pieces in the game. If you have these virtually any other clothing item is more valuable so make the trade. Shogun set isn't really popular either.

5. When AO patches a new event/content, sometimes you will see a drastic change in prices. Now if you could actually predict what's going to happen before the event hits you can make tons of money or save a lot of money. In the past there was a fishing event where you can trade in coupons that you fish into mounts. I predicted that mount prices will drop a lot, and instead of wasting my time and resources into fishing (it was too expensive for me during that time), I decided to wait and get me a new mount when prices drop. And it did and that's when I got my Snow Tiger for 400m (going rate was 550m+ before event). If new changes are unannounced, you need to react quickly and make a decision. For example when AO implemented AT Points people started buying kitty bags off for pre-patch price. Before the patch they only went for 350m. After patch they doubled in price due to the change. I hope you weren't one of the victims. All this is a risk and you need to make an educated guess the best you can. So again, if the game is making changes pay attention and exploit it the best you can instead of being a passive bystander.

High Levels (lvl 90+):

1. Jackpot Thick Animal Bones or any other hot items as much as possible. The equipment boxes from Individual Dungeons are the best to sacrifice. Personally I don't use Jackpot license much for now, but I will when I can solo a lot of Individual dungeons without help.

2. Invasion Monster drop very valuable items. If you are lvl 95 or above you can find a group to kill these monsters or solo if you are very high lvl.

3. Some of listed above continue here.

4. I've been doing this recently and made more money than I ever before. If you aren't already aware, decorations and outfits are now assigned "AT Points" with recent patch. Should you choose you may sacrifice your items for "AT points" in Rome. These "AT points", then can be exchanged for really beneficial accessories for your mercenaries. These accessories sell for somewhere between 10million to 15 million on average depending on how you sell them (in bulk or individually in market which takes longer to sell but more profitable).

Anyway once you understand this, now it's important exactly how much AT points your items are worth should you be fortunate enough to have them.

Here's a good website (http://g1cannon.blogspot.com/2010/03/atlantica-online-gold-cat-jules-de.html) to find out.

It's important to note that many of these items have IDENTICAL AT points despite the difference of statistic contributions. For example Chopper and Hydra both have 2400 AT points (as well as Ninja Star, APU & Sabre).

So what people do is trade their Chopper for Ninja Star + gold, then trade their Ninja Star for Sabre + gold and so on. THEN trade their last mount in chain, ideally Hydra, for AT points and then sell off the accessories which results in huge profit. For example let's say you bought a chopper for 2.6b today. You make a chain of trades and end up with 200m (with Ninja Star)+ 200m (with Sabre) + 200m (with APU) + 200m (with Hydra). Instead of Chopper now you have 800m with Hydra. Then you trade your Hydra for AT points and sell all your accessory for 10m each and end up with 2.4b. Now you have 2.4b + 800m = 3.2b.

This is just a moderate example but in reality you can make more than that since accessories can sell more 12m each easily in markets and trades could end up with much more than 200m profit per trade.

Another way of going about with this is, instead of trading in the Hydra for AT points just pay someone with a Chopper 200m on top of your Hydra. Then start the whole chain again (which is what I did initially until no one wanted to trade anymore).

Another thing to keep in mind is to feel the market. If you try to do this when new mount or decorations are introduced you'll have a lot of competition so do this in between.

I wrote this in a hurry so it's probably a bit unorganized but I hope this helps you. Oh, and yes this requires spending some gcoins on your part to have an item to trade in the first place (unless you somehow make the money via diff route).. sorry to burst your bubble.