How to make currency
This guide is in the works but it’s a topic a lot of people have been asking for so I’ve gone ahead and just posted the write-up I did on stream today and will fine-tune it and make it a bit more in-depth & better looking when time allows.
League Start
Sell everything that you can sell, undercut the market so you get them sold before the items lower in price due to saturation of other people dropping items that enter the market as well.
Example:
A well rolled Wasp Nest sold for 30-50c the first 2-3 days. It’s now 1c.
Liquidate anything that you either don’t plan to use or have no intention of using.
Example:
Fossils, Essences, Deli orbs, scarabs etc etc
Only upgrade your character if you absolutely have to.
Example:
If you can do t16 with 6 portals to finish the map completion and/or kill regular end-game bosses, there is no need to upgrade your character. So only upgrade it when you absolutely can’t finish the completion you’re looking to finish within the 6 portals provided.
The more amount of hours you spend “online” means you’ll have your items up for sale for a longer amount of time opening up for the possibility of selling & getting the currency value out of your item(s) you have up for sale.
Example:
Someone that is only online for 5h/day will sell less than someone who is online for 12-18h/day.
Investments vs preparations vs char upgrades
If you plan to make currency doing certain end-game bosses your currency should be invested with this as your main goal and get there as soon as possible to capitalize on the profitability of running said content.
If you plan on flipping the currency invested should be mainly focused on whichever item(s) you plan on flipping by setting up buy-orders and “sniping” low cost item(s) you’re aiming for as early as you can afford it. Then you’ll sell it for a higher price per item but in bulk. Early game this can take a few days before people start buying them in bulk but it is also the most profitable way to make currency in the entire game, ever.
If you plan to craft for profit you’ll essentially do what the flippers are doing but you’re aim is for the materials used in w/e craft you plan on doing to make currency. This will result in you paying a vastly lower amount of currency per material the earlier you buy them off the market. The reason for this is that inflation affects chaos orbs the hardest early in a league.
Example:
Say I want to craft +2 wands for minion-related builds. I’ll need Shuddering, Corroded, Metallic & Jagged fossils. Knowing that both Metallic & Jagged are extremely common I tend to ignore these, however, corroded & shuddering tend to be a bit more expensive. Shuddering fossils is about 5c per fossil in single purchases, whilst in bulk they go for 8c per fossil. This goes very well for the sake of flipping for guaranteed profit but in our case, we’ve been buying them for 2 maybe 3c each early in the league and slowly ramped up to the current cost of 5c each. This means that once you start crafting +2 wands for the sake of profit you will have spent fewer chaos orbs per try compared to anyone else wanting to get in on that market “now”.
Bulk Selling.
This is perhaps the single most important piece of advice I can give a newer player. Path of Exile’s Economy is a bit weird and works contrary to the real-world economy. The more you have of something to sell at any one time, the more it is worth to the buyer. Experienced players value their time a lot more than they value their currency, and will pay a hefty premium to buy very large quantities of bulk goods at a time. This means things like Essences, Scarabs, Fossils and Stacked Decks are best sold in quantities of hundreds at a time.
The Hideout is lava
Time spent in the hideout is time not spent mapping. This means it’s time not spent earning currency. You want to avoid spending any more time sitting around in your hideout than absolutely necessary. Think of PoE as a giant slot machine, and every mob you kill as a pull of the slot machine’s lever. The more time you pull the lever, the greater the odds of something good coming out of the machine. Spend your playtime playing the game.
This might sound trivial, but it is the single biggest difference between efficient players and most newer players.
Lootfilters
Updating the strictness of your loot filter, or the lack thereof, is one of the most common issues new player face. They update the loot filter way too slowly and spend way too much time looting things that do not really matter. A good general guideline would be:
White maps: Strict Filter
Towards the end of Yellow Maps: Very Strict Filter
Doing Red Maps Easily: Uber Strict or Personalised loot filter
A general indicator that you are looting too much, is if you find yourself porting out of the map in order to drop off loot, your filter is probably a bit strict.
There are exceptions to this, such as if you’re short on jewellers orbs you’ll be picking up six sockets and they fill the inventory fast. This simply goes in the vendor, into the stash and then you forget it exists. It does not waste your time trying to sell something for 2 chaos later on. This harpers back to the earlier point of “play the game”.
Meaningless Trading
A common mistake made by newer players is to keep selling cheap items for values such as 2,3,4,5 chaos orbs too long into a league. These items are not worth the time it takes to leave your map, go to your hideout, sell the item and go back into the map. This is a bit tricky to determine, but consciously thinking about this will massively benefit you. A general rule is if the trade annoys you, and you are not excited by it, it is time to remove anything you are trading at that value. What point this occurs at, will vary from player to player. This harpers back to the “Play the Game” point from earlier.
Profit Crafting
Making sure you know what builds are popular and/or meta of the current league (thanks to Reddit, Poe-ninja & w/e build(s) are heavily promoted by content creators on Twitch and/or youtube) will allow you to structure a plan for what type of items these build(s) are using across the board and will allow you to calculate the profitability of those craft(s).
Now that you should have somewhat of an idea of “what to craft” you’ll need to calculate if it’s profitable or not to do. I will outline how I personally calculate these things but there are multiple ways of approaching this.
Before calculating it is important that the item(s) you craft is in an “active” market. So what’s an “active market” then?
An active market is an item that is in high demand but the supply is either non-existent or low. This allows for the prices of those item(s) to be of higher price because the demand is high enough to warrant it. If it’s “too active” it means the market is getting flooded and therefore turning into a “buyers market”, this occurs when the supply is higher than the demand which means instead of items getting removed from the market the market is just growing and growing. This all creates a situation where sellers start under-cutting one another and buyers start bartering for a lower final price on the item(s).
A good active market is therefore a market that is in high demand but with a rather low supply. This knowledge will come from experience & is directly affected by the player base that is playing w/e build that is using the item(s) you’re crafting.
Once a market has been established to be good (which in some cases is impossible before “trying it out”) you’ll want to calculate its estimated profitability of it this way:
You want to look at what the base cost of w/e item(s) you’re crafting is which will be a somewhat static price say “X” currency. (Reason this is somewhat static is that base items rarely fluctuate hard).
The next step is to look at the average cost of crafting the final product which is heavily dynamic because of RNG, you can utilize craftofexile.com for this purpose which will display the average amount of tries to craft a final product. Because of this dynamic approach we will always take the final number and add 30% to that value to make up for situations where we might be “unlucky” We’ll call this value “Y”.
Calculation example:
X + (Y*1.3) = C: Final estimated cost of crafting the final product
Now you take the value of “C” and compare that to the WORST SELLABLE outcome on the market. If the margin between these 2 values is “good enough according to yourself” then you’ll be able to determine if this is a profitable market to be active in or not.
A direct example of a +2 wand:
If we say that the average cost of hitting +2 according to craftofexile.com is in 12 tries and the cost would be say; 2 divines. And the base wand would cost 5c the calculation would look like this:
5c + (2d*1.3) which is 5c + 2.6divines.
Now you’ll compare this estimated average craft cost vs the WORST SELLABLE outcome on the market and if we say that the +2 with spell damage and nothing else is selling for 3divines the difference would be 0.4d profit per wand. Now when it comes to this specific item you in today’s state of crafting have to Annul to open a suffix to get a trigger craft on it which risks removing one of the +1 modifiers which will drastically lower the sale price of the final product. So as much of this specific market isn’t an optimal profit craft to elaborate the calculations remain the same. Especially as you can sell trigger crafted +1 wands with or without minion damage on them. It just adds to the layer of sellable outcomes you can hit during the process of crafting the end product.
Another example that is a bit easier is the Absolution helmet(s):
The base cost of the helmet is: 80c
Awakener’s orb + scrap base to woke it with 85c
Average craft cost using the essence of insanity: 4.4divines
The calculation looks like this:
80c + 85c + (4.4d * 1.3 ) = 6.72d
Current worst sellable outcomes are going for about 8+ divines most of which have an open prefix slot for the +1 level of AoE gems crafted on it.
The profit margin is then 8d – 6.72d = 1.28d which is obviously not a very good margin in this case.
Some final notes on profit crafting:
We are always comparing average craft cost with the WORST SELLABLE outcome, this means that sometimes you’ll hit big and end up with a final product that is selling for WAY more than the WORST SELLABLE outcome(s). However, since crafting is all about RNG you’ll also many times over will end up spending more currency on some item(s) which is getting countered by the “better sellable items”.
Ultimately we are looking at making a profit on average and as long as that is the case it doesn’t matter if we lose currency on X items because in the end, we are making out with a profit based of these calculations. This also means that you do not craft 1 item and be done with it, you’re expected to craft multiple upon multiple of the item which is why it’s important that you do it in what I’d call “an active market”. It also means that if you see a trend of the market getting flooded you want to stop working that market asap and move on to another project to avoid having multiple item(s) up for sale in a market that is going to drop in price for the sellers.
Some minor tips/tricks for doing this:
You don’t want to solo flood a market so having 1-2 per “budget” up for sale is ideal whilst keeping other potentially finished products off the market till they sell and just simply replace them when they do.
Example of this:
Say you have 2 items up for 10d each and 2 items up for sale for 15d each and 2 items for 20d each (same type of item obviously), I would never put up more, Instead I would leave finished products within their “budgets” off the market and put them up when any of the ones that are up for sale after they’ve sold.
This sums up the league-start approach for how I make my currency.
After 1-2 weeks into the league, we continue the same process of profit-crafting, however, we up the budget of my items and focus most of my crafting on the more expensive items. This is because the low-budget market is going to be extremely flooded at this point due to a variety of reasons, not just because more people are crafting but also because the people that are now upgrading their characters or making a new character will re-introduce their old-item(s) into the market creating a stream of high supply with 2nd hand items that have already been in the market before. This turns good profit markets into extreme buyers-markets which is very good for the casual players as the prices of these item(s) crash VERY hard & fast.
Due to the nature of making a profit this way we never have to farm for currency, but rather make the currency work for me. That’s why we always set personal “thresholds” of currency that we are simply “not allowed to spend” if it means I go below the threshold or if I’m already under it.
Example:
Normally we set a threshold of 15d early league and simply will only ever upgrade our own character if the upgrades won’t bring us down below 15d, if it would, then we can’t afford it. The reason for this is so that we will always have at the very least 15d to work with for the sake of profit crafts and/or investments. Seeing as we want to eventually start working on higher budget items this threshold is consistently dynamic and is based on our plans for the character and/or league.
Example of it being dynamic:
Once we have reached a point where we have tons of items up for sale doing this process consistently we will move the threshold to either allow me to be active in more markets or start doing investments (which we elaborate on further down in this “thread”). So next step we tend to move the threshold to 50d, then 100d, 150d etc etc
To note:
We would also only ever break our threshold if the upgrade to our character is going to net us more currency in return and/or if it’s a personal goal of us to do something specific.
Investments:
Thereseveraler of item(s) and currencies that are positively affected by inflation in PoE.
Examples:
Mirror Shard, Mirror of Kalandra, House of Mirror Divination Card, to some degree Apothecary and/or Mageblood.
A good way to handle your currency once you start generating insane amounts of it is to invest in these item(s) or currency orbs as they will simply be growing in your stash rather than negatively being impacted by inflation.
We hope you found the build guide useful and we wish you all many 
Divine Orb drops!
