THE USEFUL BITS
Before you set out
- Protect essential spending before tying gold up in stock.
- Unsold materials are inventory, not realised profit.
- Compare methods after travel, posting and other costs.
What you’ll need
- No starting gold or beta access is required for the planning steps.
- Use a notebook or spreadsheet to record costs and actual sales.
- Treat every sample number below as a worked example, not a Forever price.
September 17 Q&A: economy plans
Icy Veins’ partial transcription reports that GDKP will not be allowed and that developers intend to monitor the economy actively. This does not establish future prices or reliable farming returns.
Our advice: build your budget from completed sales and current costs, and reassess a method when the game changes.
What can we responsibly plan today?
The Forever beta ran from 17 September to 21 October. We do not have a repeatable market or farming benchmark to publish, so this page focuses on budgeting and measuring your own results rather than a claimed gold-per-hour return.
The useful work now is to decide how you will measure a method and what you can afford to risk. A launch economy can reward preparation, but a persuasive list of supposedly profitable items is not a substitute for current sales evidence.
Give every coin a job
Divide your available gold into essentials, experiments and a reserve. Essentials are the costs your character actually needs to continue playing; confirm those prices in the current client rather than importing an old shopping list. Your experiment budget should be small enough that an item failing to sell does not stop your progression.
Avoid treating a rare drop or an unusually high sale as normal income. Keep it in the record, but mark it as exceptional. The result you can repeat matters more than the screenshot you could post.
| Bucket | Purpose | Decision rule |
|---|---|---|
| Essentials | Required training, travel and supplies | Confirm current costs first |
| Experiments | Small gathering or crafting trials | Limit what you can afford to lose |
| Reserve | Keep playing if sales are slow | Do not tie all available gold up in stock |
Gather, craft or trade? Start with the constraint
Gathering is a reasonable experiment if you already spend time in the world and can reach useful resources safely. It still has a cost: travel, competition, bag space and the alternative activity you could have done. A material you gathered yourself is not economically free.
Crafting adds another question: does the finished item sell for enough to justify its ingredients, relevant charges and your time? Value ingredients at the amount you could reasonably obtain by selling them, not only at what you paid yesterday.
Trading depends on liquidity as well as the displayed price. Begin with a small quantity and observe actual sales. A high asking price tells you what someone wants, not what buyers will pay. These are evaluation methods; no specific Forever item is recommended as a guaranteed earner.
Calculate the result you actually realised
For a completed experiment, start with money actually received. Subtract purchased inputs and other recorded costs. Divide the net result by the full time spent, including travel and selling tasks. Keep unsold stock in a separate column.
Worked example: suppose a hypothetical trial returns 3 gold from completed sales and costs 1.2 gold in inputs and charges. Net realised profit is 1.8 gold. If the whole task took 45 minutes, the effective rate is 2.4 gold per hour. These invented numbers explain the calculation; they are not a Forever forecast.
| Measure | Calculation |
|---|---|
| Net realised profit | Completed sales − recorded costs |
| Effective gold per hour | Net realised profit ÷ total minutes × 60 |
| Unsold inventory | Record separately; do not count as a completed sale |
Run a small test before committing
Choose one method, a fixed time window and a spending limit. Record where and when you ran it, what else was happening, how long selling took and what remained unsold. Change one major variable at a time so that comparisons mean something.
Repeat under a second set of conditions before increasing your budget. If the result depends on an empty zone or a single buyer, say so. A route that fits around your levelling can still be useful even if a dedicated farming route has a higher measured rate.
- Track gold earned and costs separately.
- Include travel and time handling sales.
- Record the game build and the market you used.
- Stop when the experiment reaches its spending limit.
- Keep screenshots or notes that explain unusual results.
What will turn this into a tested gold guide?
We need repeated timed runs, item and quantity records, sale outcomes and clear assumptions about the character used. A useful published result should show its sample size, date and limitations. We will add specific farming routes and item recommendations after that evidence exists.
For now, the best outcome is a plan you can execute without gambling your progression on unverified prices. Use the checklist to prepare your first experiment, then compare it with your levelling and profession goals.
Review notes
Recheck after relevant beta changes and recorded playtests.
Guide version 1.0.1 · Forever beta · budgeting reference
