Wiki:Money making guide/Editing guide

This page explains how a gold-per-hour guide works, by building one. If you have five minutes and have played the game, you can improve the Money making guide — no wikitext experience needed beyond copy and paste.

The idea

A guide never contains a price. It names the items, and the prices are looked up from each item's own Sell Value page. That way a wrong price is fixed once, in one place, instead of in every guide that mentions the item.

So a guide only has to answer three questions:

What is one repetition of this activity, and how many fit in an hour?
What do you get from one repetition?
What does it cost you?

A worked example

Say you mine copper nodes. You count 210 nodes in an hour, and you average two Copper Ore per node. That is the whole guide:

{{Money maker
| mode             = {{{mode|page}}}
| page             = Money making guide/Mining copper nodes
| activity         = Mining copper nodes
| category         = Gathering
| skill            = Mining
| location         = [[Neo-Tilus]]
| intensity        = Low
| action           = node
| actions per hour = 210
| output1          = Copper Ore
| output1qty       = 2
}}

If Copper Ore sells for 3 Gold, the table now shows 210 × 2 × 3 = 1,260 an hour. You never typed 1,260 — it is worked out, so it stays right when the price changes.

Quantities can be sums

Write a drop rate as the sum it actually is. Both of these are fine:

output1qty = 2 — two every time
output2qty = 5*(1/64) — five of them, one node in sixty-four

This is better than doing the division yourself, because the next reader can see where the number came from and check it.

Costs work the same way

| input1           = Repair Kit
| input1qty        = 1
| input1perhour    = y

input1perhour = y means one per hour, not one per node. Use it for anything consumed by time rather than by action: food, repairs, a commission refresh.

When an item has no price

The guide will say value needed and join Category:Money makers with a missing item value. To fix it, find the item's Sell Value on its own page and create Template:Value/<item name> containing just that number. Nothing else. That single page fixes every guide that uses the item.

The three things people get wrong

Symptom	Cause	Fix
The guide looks right but is missing from the table on Money making guide	New guides are not found automatically	Add a line to Template:Money making guide/list
The table shows an em dash	No `actions per hour` and no `profit override`	Put a rate in, even a rough one
The figure on the table is older than the one on the guide	The table is cached	Purge the hub

On honesty

Every figure here is an estimate and the table says so. That is the point: a rough number that says how it was measured beats a precise-looking number that came from nowhere. If you are unsure, put it in and write what you are unsure about in notes. Somebody who plays that method more than you will correct it, and that is the system working.