As a lady of fashion, I have collected a significant number of trinkets and they are quite filling up my residence! I am loathe to part with any of it, for I am not quite certain what I might require in my future travels. I would not want to find myself without my Dreadful Surmise should I find it of great importance elsewhere.
Is there, perhaps, a guide for collectors, so that I might learn what is worthy to maintain and what I might safely part with?
I think everything will have its uses eventually. You should sell things you know you can easily get more of, but if you want to be on the safe side you’ll want to keep certain amount of everything. Then you just sell the surplus.
Just about everything can be used in bulk at some point… but, that said, I have two suggestions. First, note down anything you can see you’re going to want in the medium-term - for instance, if you haven’t yet unlocked every area (though, looking at your profile, I assume you have,) you can see the requirements for them all at your Lodgings.
Second, as a Person of Some Importance, you have reliable access to every basic trade good except Whispered Secrets (which must be converted at the Labyrinth from other items) and Silk Scraps (which can be ground, but less efficiently.) Therefore, I generally sell all these bottom-tier items - especially Nevercold Brass, Moon-pearls, Rostygold, Deep Amber, and Rats on a String, which can’t be traded for anything. (Though I do like to hang on to enough Amber and Jade to use for the various storylets and cards which make use of them.)
Excellent advice, @Sir Frederick and @Sara. I actually decided to grind the Rostygold into Whispered Secrets at the Labyrinth, as it’s 1.10E per action and easy. I also have about 40,000 Whispered Secrets, which I don’t believe I need so many, as I have all of the lodgings. I could grind them, I suppose…
In my case, there are several types of “vendor trash”.
Aside from common brass and ambers, I sell high tier items that are easy to gain and have no or little use, like wild words or mysteries. ‘Easy to gain’ or ‘virtually useless’ part is important here - Other end products are either more frequently needed or rare to get, so I recommend holding on it for possible change.
My primary grind is 13 action spite box grind, which gives out 8 candles, little Criminal connections and 6 correspondence plaque if you go with revolution. (About 177 pence per action, excluding criminal connect.)
It’s been nearly 6 years since this thread was first started. Does anyone feel differently? This thread is only one of the most popular searches from google.
I keep Nevercold Brass for the card that lets me grind favours for the great game. Beyond that I definitely don’t keep more than 5,000 Rostygold or Moon-pearls.
Well, candles do the same for Church favors, if you camp in Spite, plus they give Rostygold which is often needed left and right. Amber not so much. It all depends on what your end goal is. If you are going for SotC for example, you see what materials can be upgraded to correspondence plaques and accumulate them.
On the other hand, some grinds are drammaticaly shorter if you have cash around, so there is also that.
Here’s what my point of view has always been: there are certain optimal, or close to optimal, grinds - in terms of EPA - which pay out certain items. Those items are "optimally expendable": if you sell them, but later decide you want more, and go grind for them, you won’t be losing out. On the other hand, any other item is suboptimal to sell.
Let’s say you need 1,000 echoes for something. You sell a vast amount of moon pearls, brass, shrieks, or whatever other low-tier item; you now have your 1,000 echoes. But then, at some undetermined point in the future, you need those low-tier items again! So you have to grind them out. Say you’re using Unfinished Business, those range from 1 to 1.5 EPA or so. You probably won’t need 100k right now, but in the long term, if you happened to end up needing to make most of it back, you’d essentially end up grinding for ~1000 actions (1k echoes at ~1EPA).
Meanwhile, if you took the time to grind out some "optimal" items upfront, using the current best money grinds, you’d get your 1,000 echoes in about 460-ish actions, and never need to grind the low-tier items. So, long-term? Selling the suboptimal items cost you over 500 actions. Investing those into the EPA grind would have instead left you with a surplus of about 1,200 echoes (on top of the initial 1,000).
Of course, this assumes that you’ll actually need those low-tier items later. Reasonable limits can be applied to this: after ending up with something close to… oh, 300k moon pearls? - from going for Poet-Laureate, I’ve sold off the bulk of them over time, simply because while they’re suboptimal I know for a fact I’ll never need anywhere near that many, even if I keep playing for years and years. Unless FGB adds some kind of pearl-hungry action in the future, of course. But I wouldn’t sell them below about 10k; same for other low-tier items. I remember trying to get the Gang of Hoodlums and realising I was out of Rostygold because "Who needs thousands of the thing? I need some money right now, I’ll keep a few hundred just in case". Wouldn’t recommend the experience.
High tier items are even worse: you’re unlikely to end up with hundreds of them, yet you never know when you might need a few dozen for something. And their grinds can often be well below 1EPA, to boot.
Anyway, all that being said, right now the "optimal" items that are safe to sell are the rewards of the silk expedition (Parabola-Linen Scraps and Judgement Eggs) and, very slighly second to them, the tribute rewards from Court of the Wakful eye (Searing Enigmas, Night-Whispers, Favours in High Places, and Primeval Hints if I remember correctly). Anything else will incur a net loss under the assumptions above; though taking a look through the wiki page on grinds might be worth it: the old grinds, while now suboptimal, are often still much better than UB’s ~1EPA, and in a pinch selling e.g. Puzzling Maps might not be too bad of an idea.
Dudebro Pyro has pretty much nailed that. If you just want money, sell the stuff that can be most efficiently replaced - the named grinds being the best choices if you are far enough into the game to pursue them.
Personally I would add Bazaar Permits, Touching Love Stories and even Cryptic Clues to the list as I find heists so useful for generating fame without sacrificing too much on the money-making front.
Profitable cards and Favour trade-ins are also reasonable items to sell provided you consistently play the cards.
"A Visit" is highly profitable at high levels, and so items like Whispered Hints, Cryptic Clues, and Rats on a String from the card can be reasonably sold at lower quantities. I tend to have more than enough Nevercold Brass as well since it clutters the deck to have any Hell Favours.
“A Visit” is profitable at all points as soon as you make acquaintances. Even if the card itself gave no goods, getting two favors for free is great. If you only know the Regretful Soldier you get one favor for free, which is still fine.
Favours: Hell only clutters your deck with “A consideration for services rendered” as far as I know. Which is itself an excellent way to spend those Favours. It’s less profitable than other turn=ins, perhaps, but more profitable than calling in those favors in the Forgotten Quarter.