At level 30, having done most of the side content I’ve come across, I have around 40k. How do you make money to afford those keys?
Selling greens and blues you don’t need.
If you fully clear a highlevel roguelike, you should make at least half the iron cost back in singleplayer without even selling anything. In multiplayer, iron gains are so substantial, you can usually make 4x the cost of a skeleton key from one run of a roguelike.
There’s no need to make any more of them than you absolutely need while leveling.
Wait until you’re trying to craft a level 90 relic - that’ll be 225k down the drain for the final craft, let alone all the constituent crafts.
Woah. Thanks!
By the way, I was thinking it’d be best to dismantle all the blues I find which I don’t need. Are there specific items I should save to dismantle?
I had the exact same issue around your level, but don’t worry about it, you’ll start to get increased value drops so 10k will quickly become little concern 
Why do you need skeleton keys at level 30? The drops are good enough to take you to ultimate anyway and its only “worth” doing the rouge-likes in Ultimate
Pick up yollow (not a typo) items and sell them. I had over 200k at level 40 on my first ever character.
'cause I’m a noob who plays through the game slowly doing almost everything and I don’t want to wait until essentially after 3 playthroughs just to do some runs. I’d probably look at it like you are if it wasn’t pretty much my first playthrough.
Woah. Ok! what do you mean by yollow other than yellow? lol
Then just do one run of each rouge-like to get a feeling for them. It is not meaningful to do runs of anything in Normal/veteran.
Yollow = yolo + yellow. Just me being me, nothing personal. 
The story behind this is, I once had to write something and I wrote “yollow” instead of yellow, never realized that till the receiver told me some time later, and after checking some random stuff I wrote, I realized I always said “yollow” instead of “yellow”. Now I use it very frequently because I realized it looked like a merged “yolo” and “yellow”.
How about because people like to play how they want and not by some pre-determined concept of when they should enter set areas, especially when the game allows them to enter somewhere :rolleyes:
Not to mention that only a very small fraction of players even reach Ultimate in the first place, so what’s wrong with wanting to enter and run a certain place if the player wants to.
Also being these dungeons if the player dies in one they need another key to get back in.
Don’t waste skeleton keys until ultimate. You’ll make lots of money later, i’ve been making 5-6 mil+ daily lately.
Can report selling the greens and yollows I had and the ones I’m picking up, I already almost have 80k now which is around double what I had before.
About not spending Skeleton Keys until Ultimate: I doubt I’d do more than one run of each rogue-like dungeon before Ultimate. I failed at my first free attempt of Steps of Torment so I’m gonna do another run when I can. I know the most efficient thing across a long time frame with end game taken into account is to even save the first free Skeleton Key I get but that’s not what’s most meaningful/fun to me on my first playthrough. It’s probably what I’ll do if I level other characters after this playthrough.
Been leveling lot of characters over the years and i think it’s not worth picking up yellows. Maybe if it’s your very first character, but other than that it’s not worth it. It’s much faster to progress if you don’t have to go selling all the time and i’m not sure but i think you get money almost as fast if you just sell green+.
Good point, but I think I’m getting more money selling yellows; their prices vary but they can reach amounts that come close to greens. I’m not trying to progress the fastest so I don’t mind going back a little more to get about 4k bits +, each time. However, I’m sure later on that amount wouldn’t mean much to me.
I’m not trying to progress the fastest. But if the loot from SoT is really good, I don’t think it’s self evident that it’s slower to sell more yellows and get around 4k each time you sell which is around half the price for a key, in order to get some really good loot which could help you maybe be twice as powerful from doing a few runs, thus progress much faster. But that depends on the quality of the loot. But if you already have twink gear, which I don’t, then it’s probably fastest to loot nothing at all.
I general, it is not the iron bits you should be worried about, but getting enough Blood of Chton
Depends how many runs you wanna do and how many bits and bloods you have. But I’m aware Blood of Ch’thon is a material you need to farm at Blood Grove.
You might already be aware of this, but it took me a while to get around to this.
If you are into doing rogues, the final Outcast faction quest is appropriate. Might as well kill 2 birds with one stone.
Edit: although, you might want to get to maybe lvl 50 to start these. 50 is better for chest rewards and drops.
For beginners / first char is very useful to pick up and sell yellows since you not just want iron bits per time played, but instead iron bits per progress made, cuz you want to buy component/relic blueprints, stash tabs, maybe faction gear too before you dive into later acts/difficulties.
Suggest you wait until @ least lvl 50 before attempting any of the rogue like dungeons.
The reason is simple: it’s from this lvl on that legendary items start dropping and these dungeons are “notorious” for dropping them, after the final boss(es).
What is "rogue like dungeon?
I have one toon and he is lvl 54, playing on normal difficulty and I think I have finished the game on normal. Not sure who the last boss is, but I got through someone really tough who after you killed them once, came back with full health again.