Running a foraging business is an excellent money maker but requires a lot of time, people and money in order to succeed which is why it is mostly used for raising flag/crew funds. Before you can even begin considering doing this you need to make sure you have the following things so you can hold and transport your fruit properly.
Items Needed
-1 high capacity ship which you will post the job offer from and store the bulk of your fruit in(most prefer a Grand Frig).
-2 or 3 medium capacity ships (most prefer to use merchant brigs) for moving the fruit after it has been foraged.
-200k+ loose change, this is so you can have enough in your coffers to make the foraging business worth your while with a good amount left over to cover for possible losses from battles.
-A charter (someone who has about half the ocean memmed which isnt hard to find if this is being done for your flag) or charts (a pain in the butt so I would opt for paying one before trying to track down all the necessary charts), you need this because fruit needs to be moved out of the archipelago it was foraged in for maximum profit.
-Good friends/crewbies who know how to sail to help you run the fruit.
-A lot of time and patience or a good auto jobbing script.
Starting Out
So now that you are sure you have all of the necessary materials you need to start doing some research.
This first involves picking an island to do the foraging on, the most important factor when picking an island is making sure your charter has the area memorized.
After that you need to find an uninhabited island within the memorized area and discover what fruits the archipelago spawns (there is no solid list I can find but on the NB people job from every arch worth foraging in so you can just job with someone in the arch and check their hold).
You then need to check the docks of the nearby archipelago's main islands to see which pay the most and to help you decide on what to pay for your fruits (make sure you write these down in notepad and check weekly so you have a realistic price).
In an ordinary situation you do not need to be paying so much that you hardly make any profit, your prices depend on the others jobbing on the NB so all you need to do is pay more then them while not exceeding 3/4 of the buy price within whatever arch you plan to sell them in and you will be making maximum profit while getting the most jobbers.
Jobbing
Now that you have your prices settled and an island picked out its time to move all of your ships to the island and start jobbing.
Here is how to put up a foraging offer and set your prices:
Start out by clicking on the hold and then clicking "foraging offer" button
You will then get a menu with a variety of boxes and labels below them, this is where you enter in your prices, make sure to check the "post offer on notice board" box.
You now have a foraging offer on the Notice Board and all thats left to do now is wait.
Remember that it always jobs slow so do not get frustrated if you are only getting a few per hour because this is normal.
Saying hello and being nice is always a must, you will occasionally get some tells asking to be jobbed on foraging free days since they cant apply via the NB so helping them out always earns you some repeat workers even if they arent getting your fruits right at that moment, and having enemies is the worst thing that can happen when you regularly do fruit runs.
Remember that gems can be stolen from your hold by thieves very quickly so I do not advise paying much if anything at all for them unless you want to be going out of your way to quickly move 1 or 2 of them every time they come aboard.
Moving the fruit
So now that you have been foraging for a while and you notice your ship filling up its time to start moving the fruit.
After transferring about half of your stock of fruit to one of the MBs, charting your ship to the island you intend to sail to, setting your ship to evade, leaving 1 swabbie on carp and bilge and putting the rest on sails, and gathering about 3 crewbies to help you by sailing the whole way its time to get going.
This next part is fairly easy, all you need to do is turn about whenever a ship attempts to attack yours and running away in Bnav if they somehow manage to catch you (this usually only happens when the spawn comes up from behind you and is rather rare).
When you are first learning to do fruit runs I advise remaining off of a station and sitting in the crows nest in order for you to concentrate and be able to turn about in time to avoid spawns.
You then sell your fruit and swabbie the ship back to your foraging island, then the process repeats itself.
Remember to constantly be placing part of your profits back into the foraging coffers and not just go around spending it all because your business and profit margin will increase as you invest more money.
Well thats all I have for now, I would appreciate feedback on whether this guide was helpful/completely useless and if any part of this was confusing or I left something out feel free to post here or contact me on MSN Thazestyburrito@hotmail.com and I would be happy to help you as long as I am available
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By the way very nice guide, so nice in fact it makes me want to give it a try, but first I would like to know the answers to these questions:
how profitable is fruit running/foraging with say 500k or 1m? and approximatively how long will it take to do a whole trim from start to finish?
Profit depends on competition, on a nice day you can get 1/4th of your poe put in the coffers back not including expenses for moving the fruit. 500k would be quite a lot to be investing, I cant give you a solid number because i dont know what ocean you play on but a main dub ocean can get you 75k+ for a couple of hours on a slow day. You can also get an auto jobber and run it while you are at school which I do occasionally and that helps a lot with the profits too.Originally Posted by venthoz
You could also move fruit during the reboot as you'll get no spawns during then, all you need to do is just keep hitting sail. If you can run multiple clients (like...5-10 at a time) and are usually around for reboots, I would suggest using this method of moving the fruit. You'll need a fair number of MBs though since you can only move the ships so far during a reboot, but if you can make all three reboots during the week, you'll be able to sell all the fruit you foraged at the beginning of the week.
Leelas is right. Best thing to do is have as many GF's as you can afford, fill as many as you can and run the full ones 30 minutes before a server reboot since brigands do not attack during that time. Unfortunately I believe that time to be 4am Eastern.
In your guide you mention having an auto-jobber. Do those even exist? If not would be a great program to develop.
Reboot times depend on the ocean, but they're usually on Monday, Thursday and Friday. If there's an update/release sometime during the week though, then you won't necessarily have a reboot on the regularly scheduled days. You can see what time a reboot is on which ocean here: Reboot - YPPedia
I dont see the necessity of the double post and you dont do the fruit runs with a GF you do it with an MB.
@ your second post I believe quartermaster comes equipped with an auto jobber, the one I use I made myself but I dont know if I am going to releasing it anytime soon
Well I made my own simple one in SCAR. I might get round to publishing it sometime.
It takes a whole of 20sec to write one in Sikuli, you don't even need to know anything about programming for it.
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