The Economics of Furniture

Just as there has been some discussion on the economics of glass and preserving food, I see another issue with furniture. The manufacture of furniture for luxury items is needed as rarely does a trader have any for sale, though they will purchase them. To manufacture 1 piece of furniture it costs you 12 boards and time to build it. A single worker will build approximately 5 pieces of furniture a year. This is one of those resources that once created your asset depreciates. Those 12 boards (72-144) it took to build a single piece of furniture will sell for much more than that single piece of furniture will (40-72).

Why bring it up? If you’re building furniture build it for your city’s luxury items, not to sell. Sell the boards and save the work time. :wink:

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What is the most economical thing to sell?

In my previous village I haven’t seen a trader selling furniture, not even once over 60 years and I was desperate to buy some as I’m always struggling with wood.

One of them are shirts - no cost but labor to manufacture (they don’t eat any of your resources like clay/coal/wood etc) - because they just grow and you can start making them super early.

I asked because I’d just done a build based around a clothes monopoly. It worked but it wasn’t great, so I was hoping someone wanted to do the math. My next build is going to be around beer, because with the upgraded trader almost everyone wants to actually buy it.

Shirts, candles, pottery, and beer are my go to trade fodder

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I haven’t studied the numbers completely to give you a specific answer. I find it’s best to not concentrate on only one resource, but several, and to sell the surplus of anything. Don’t try to sell items which use resources that you have minimal of. Baskets shouldn’t be sold for example, unless you have a good supply of willow that doesn’t rely on a trader.

Beer is good and you can sell the honey early in the game before you build your beer facility. A lot of players avoid using pubs, I don’t. They’re good money makers and as long as your town is happy you won’t get any of the negative effects such as fighting. Candles, because they use the wax of the apiary go well with beer which uses the honey.

Other goto items are pottery when clay is abundant, clothes when not in arid lands, hides and coat hides when hunting is abundant, and combine soap with the hides/coats if herbs are readily available.

I’ve never struggled with wood. If it’s not in abundance, such as on arid land, plant decorative oaks close to your villagers homes and ā€œfarmā€ them every 3 years. You’ll get 7 logs for each gold ingot spent in planting. Far cheaper than the traders, though I’ll buy it from them too.

This is exactly what I’m calling struggling :slight_smile:

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A guy over at the FF subreddit did calculations on average market prices vs. Cost to manufacture yourself.

From memory the best sellers were a lot of the items you describe but can add planks as a real moneymaker compared to cost of production, and consequently as mentioned furniture is not a good sell, but a good buy. Most of the ā€œsimpleā€ manufactured goods nearly allways make sense to produce yourself and sell surplus (not a big surprise there honestly).

Also most of the metal goods are good buys and poor sellers, esp. Tools are better to buy than manufacture, doubly so when discounted. Surprisingly heavy tools are a good seller. Armors also i seem to recall can give you good profits if you manufacture.

EDIT: link below to Reddit post:

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This is a great analysis minus the fact that the cost of the labor involved wasn’t calculated for the cost to manufacture yourself. It’s almost always the highest cost for real life products.

This is analysis of market prices, nothing about manufacturing yourself.

Lets go from the start:

1 gold = 7 logs
1 gold = 7 logs = 14 planks
1 gold = 7 logs = 14 planks = 1 furniture + 2 planks

This is the manufacturing cost of 1 piece of furniture - less than 1 gold. True question here is, how much is the labor worth?

Or you could simply chop re-grown tree and the cost of manufacturing is 0.

That’s pointed out in the discussions in the thread as well. He said he was working on a full analysis but i have ā€˜t seen that, understandably so it’s a very big undertaking for just a game :slight_smile: the table still gives great insights IMO.

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After some testing I’ve found beer and candles to be the best export focus so far.

Wheat has a huge yield, water is free, honey is free, wax is free, and firewood is easy enough to keep up with. The brewery has netural desirability so you can house the workers adjacent for a very tight setup with minimal travel distance. The wax piles up too, so you need to make candles, but they sell often enough.

Selling furniture doesn’t make mush strategic sense either. As furniture usually starts production at the same time as you upgrade homes, and every other building needs planks, it’s near impossible to build enough furniture to sell any surplus

Cheese and beer is my strongest sellers. Not sure if they are the most profitable, most likely shirts are more profitable, also available earlier - which is hugely important

Cheese and beer is end game territory in tier 3, but it is also what I find the easiest to produce a huge surplus of. Beer and cheese will sell for 4 gold. I make sure production and storage is close by the trader so they wont have to run that long when stocking, and most years one trader will want at least one of those

Strategically you will want a surplus of planks early, as they sell good as well and later on the production will be needed to build your buildings. And get into shirts after that. Add candles along the way, but it’s more difficult to produce large quantities here. After this, beer and cheese. Early on you will want to sell whatever you have alot of, so you can get into cows early. And then beer

Cows are essential to large populations, not only the economy, usually I have surplus meat and milk in order to produce hide and tallow enough for other production. Beer will take you farm fields which could produce other food so I prefer selling cheese, and space here is important in late game, and beer will take up more space with the fields needed I think. Also I find it difficult to produce enough grain for mills/bakery, breweries and cow feed, as space is usually limited here

So sure, furniture is poor for you economy, but the calculations as to what to sell, and when is more complicated. Selling logs could be the go to from day 1 as well, as it requires the least amount of work to be honest - use an auto clicker to plant trees and save your fingers!

Yes, beer is good. For some reason I can never keep up with candles production vs usage, feels like villagers are literally eating them.

I was making a lot of beer. At 300 pops, with 6 breweries and 4 candle shops.

Uh are you sure you need that many breweries? I have serious doubts you produce enough grain to keep them all running.

Grain wasn’t the problem, three 12x24 fields at 95-100% fert running wheat one year, buckwheat the next, and then peas and carrots for food. Most of my grain was rotting. Honey was the limit, but I’ll get it balanced out with more hives tomorrow. I’m doing a vegan no-bows playthrough to see if it’s more of a challenge, kinda fun so far. Just making a lot of beer and trading that to buy everything else.

That’s 52 villagers working in this industry not including your farmers, firewood choppers or laborers to cut down trees. How much revenue are they bringing in yearly?

Currently making about 4k beer and 500 candles. Once I’m happy it is sustainable I’ll post some screenies of the production info.