Refining for Profit in New World
How to consistently refine for profit
This is an article about how to consistently make money by buying and refining materials, then selling the higher-level products. You can’t. The End.
For those who prefer a little more detail, let me describe the results of an analysis I conducted over many months, including a fancy spreadsheet and a lot of raw data from the game (on the El Dorado server). I am a PhD statistician and data analyst, so I did these analyses because I could, because it was fun (?), and because I thought I could outsmart the market and make easy money.
The details
Consider ore and smelting. For materials, you can start with Iron ore, and progress through Mythril ore. Refining these, you can produce anything from Iron ingots to Prismatic ingots, and several sidetrack products along the way, like Asmodeum and Tolvium. But the higher-level products require lower-level products and resources, plus some generic items like flux and charcoal.
The question is:
Can I buy some ingredients, at any levels, refine these, buying and refining in the most strategic way, to end up with a product at some level that I can profitably sell for more than I spent on ingredients?
Considerations
Obviously, you need to consider the refining recipes and current market costs. But there are other considerations…
Station Fee
You should do the refining in the town where you have the lowest station fee (check the map). For me, that’s currently -13.1% in several towns
Trading Tax Discount
You should sell the product in the town where you have the largest discount on trading tax (again, check the map). For me, that’s currently -25.4% in Brimstone Sands. The trading tax (or ‘listing fee’) is a very significant concern which I discuss more below, and is far more impactful than the refining station fee.
Refining Gear
You should conduct the refining while wearing your best refining gear. Each piece provides +2% yield when refining. I have a complete smelter’s outfit, so that’s +10% yield when refining ore. This is the most impactful controllable factor aside from market prices, and it’s almost impossible to make a profit without such gear.
Listing Fees
You must also account for the listing fees at the Trading Post. This is complicated. First, there is a flat 5% listing fee. Subtract that from the listing price. Then, there is an additional listing fee rate of X% of that amount, where X is different for listings of 1, 3, 7, or 14 days. Reduce this additional listing fee rate by your trading tax discount. Then apply this computed rate to the 95% price level from the first step.
What are the X values? I deduced these values through careful data analysis. Since the game and the developers seem to keep these secret, I will leave this puzzle to those who are sufficiently determined and mathematically inclined, but I will confirm/compare if you DM me on the New World discord server with your result. Suffice it to say that the values of X range between 2% and 4%, roughly.
Conclusions
Factoring in the recipes, prices, gear yield perks, station fees, and market listing fees, I computed the profit for optimally obtaining, refining, and selling every wood, ore, fiber, stone, and leather/hide/chitin product in the game, plus a few other things. By ‘optimally’, I mean making each ‘buy it’ vs. ‘buy something lesser and refine it’ decision sequentially, along the way, for example as you turn stone into stone blocks, stone bricks, lodestone bricks, obsidian voidstone, runestone, runic voidstone, or prismatic blocks. Then I monitored the profit levels for months as prices fluctuated at the market.
Usually, for less than 10% of items, can a profitable play be made. I define worthwhile profit to be around 200 coins or more profit on a 1000 coin investment, because if it’s much less than that I could probably make similar money with less time and effort doing something else like daily corruption portals. Time is required because I need to update all the market prices in my spreadsheet to identify a profitable strategy, buy the materials, refine them, and sell them, plus dressing/undressing and any necessary travel involved. Remember, without the yield gear and significant reduction in listing fees, your profit, if any, is likely to be at least halved, and maybe wiped out altogether.
The largest profit I have ever seen is about 400 coins per 1000 coin investment. Almost always, the profit is derived from buying an ingredient and refining it zero or one step (e.g., buying starmetal ore and refining it to starmetal ingots, or combining it with purchased orichalcum ore to make orichalcum ingots). Usually, the most profitable item to sell is not the prismatic material, but something intermediate like dark leather or wyrdwood planks.
But to reiterate, making a profit is a rare exception, and it requires market prices to be aligned just right. Almost all the time, almost all materials sell for less at the market than what it costs to make them. Hence my original claim: you can’t easily make consistent profit.
Additional thoughts
Let me end with a few related points, both cautionary and hopeful.
- Obviously, if you don’t have to buy the materials you are refining, your profit level can soar. Thus, I tend to go on regular gathering runs, for everything from stone to runewood. That’s the real way to juice your profits. The coin income can be much, much higher, but the gathering runs take significant time.
- One critical additional issue to consider is market volume. It is a lot easier to sell 20 prismatic blocks than 20,000 stone blocks, because large listings will be undercut before all units are sold. Thus, even when analysis says that selling stone blocks would be profitable in theory, you might not be able to realize that profit. Moreover, due to the limited volume of the market, even if you can afford to produce it, you can’t effectively sell 1,000,000 of anything. So your daily profits are limited. My profits amount to hundreds or few thousand coins per attempt, which is not substantially more effective than other ways to make money in New World.
- Importantly, as you refine materials, you will earn refining XP and skill aptitude reward crates. If you are reading this article, you probably already are a level 250 refiner, or nearly so. However, it’s worth noting that those crates will usually contain stuff that has at least modest value, so this provides an additional profit, in principle. If you need the XP, it’s even better.
- During my months of data collection, I learned that market prices for these materials vary remarkably. It’s not uncommon to see materials in the low to upper-middle levels vary by as much as 50% over a week or two. Highest level stuff and prismatics vary somewhat less on my server. Thus, I have been tempted to focus more on market arbitrage (buy low, sell high), or to augment my refining calculations by opportunistically buying large amounts of a material when it is discounted, even if I don’t have any intention of refining it immediately. Similarly, if I see a material with a highly unusual inflated price, I’ll sell a bunch of it, rather than save it for refining.
- You’ll find a lot of related get-rich-quick schemes on the internet (bananas, pristine pearls, etc.). While some of these can be somewhat profitable, sometimes, if you’re lucky and timely, you also have to worry about the distorting effect of everyone following some YouTuber’s advice at the same moment. Also, these sorts of schemes tend to be vulnerable to changes in the game itself, or in the meta, for example as AGS adjusts recipes, perks, and other content. As in life, there’s no such thing as a true get-rich-quick scheme.
Finally, this article focuses only on basic refinable materials. Arcane materials (e.g., motes to quintessences), gems, consumables, trophies, bags and tools, key crafting ingredients (e.g., Matrices or Blessed Rivets), craftable weapons and armor, and other refinable/craftable items can be a whole different story. Overall, however, I believe that New World is designed to promote diversified activity, and earning money is just like everything else: do a little bit of many profitable activities instead of hoping for one gigantic windfall. My New World FAQ lists a wide variety of money-making activities.