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[Kaos]

I understand that one of the points of the mod's balancing is to not easily being able to buy the whole dwarven caravan the first autumn by having your carpenter mass produce wooden spiked balls and your cook mass produce roasts.

That said, I'm finding that having spiked balls removed, and the other trap components values nerfed, plus the guild system where your dwarves won't be churning out masterworks by autumn, plus the value of food nerfed, and farming not producing as much, and so on... makes difficult to create value to buy out caravans, so I'd like to share strategies to do so:

Carpenter: I'm using glumprogs and feather trees to mass produce stakes (stakes seem to be the highest valued item you can make with wood)
I'm saving my regular rough wood for smoothing in the wood splitting block (smooth wood has the same value as rough wood) and saving the smooth wood for pressing into paper.

Kitchen: milling plants into flour and sugar and making bread and candy and then cooking roasts produce relatively high value roasts, also boiling cheap eggs and then cooking the boiled eggs.

I was thinking on making an early Guild hall and train my dwarves but making the coins seem quite complicated...

Also there are only 2 kinds of booze you can cook, bloodwine and boozbelly rum, bloodwine being valued at 3 and blood at 6 and 1 blood producing 1 bloodwine causes you to loose value, it's better to just cook the blood, fermenting boozbelly cheese into rum in the other hand produces a lot of value and you can cook the booze for even more.

Also using the Brewstery instead of the still gives you more booze from your plants/honey.

I'm taking a look at the glass reactions next to see if I can get high value trap components from sand, although finding the fuel would get tricky having an aquifier.

What have you found out?

[Meph]

Javelin Ammo.

And the Archeologist can give very pricey items if you are lucky. Once I embarked on a mountain with 4 exposed fossils. I got mithril javelin thrower and ammo (1), a guardian of armok (2), a soul for a legendary skill (3) and some gold/gems (4). Still had to build the fitting buildings, but after 3 months I already had an iron colossus guarding the entry and a legendary crossbow-user with javeline thrower and mithril ammo. After digging some more I uncovered enough to buy 30k worth of the second caravan, which brought me 4 trade-licences, worth 16k alone.

[snelg]

Like you already mentioned wooden stakes seem to be worth a bit.

I like producing cloth and leathercrafts. By buying the raw materials from the caravans and sell them the crafts you made back to the next one you can make a bit of a surplus. especially when your tailor/leathercrafter starts to gain some experience.
In one fort I got mussels from fishing which gave shells that counted as leather eventually.

[silentdeth]

Green glass flask. iirc you get 3 per reaction and a masterwork one sells for 240. They also have the advantage of being an elf-safe trade good. Stick them in green glass bins with a stockpile next to the depot set to auto trade. You can then use the search function to search for bins and sell them in bulk quite easily. I just have a workflow order set to make them, and usually sell 250k-500k worth every time the dwarfs come.

[Meph]

500k in glass flasks would be over 2000 masterwork flasks... I wouldnt count that as economic. Maybe with magma near the trade depot...

[jonveck]

Long term, I've never found the need to look further than lavish meals, regularly selling small stacks of 20 (rather than my larger stacks of 60+) for 10,000 dorf bucks.

Short term, I dig a central staircase and excavate a native gold vein when I find it and have a mason create native gold statues.  There may be other crafts I could make with the ore, but so long as your depot is built such that the merchants bring wagons, you can load them up with the heavy statues and buy most of what they're selling.

Of course, if you get too exploity, you might as well simply disassemble the depot underneath them and take everything for free.

[silentdeth]

500k in glass flasks would be over 2000 masterwork flasks... I wouldnt count that as economic. Maybe with magma near the trade depot...

Bins hold quite a lot of flask, works rather well for me. A well planned layout and traffic zones help a lot. I actually only need 1 furnace producing flask once I get someone skilled. 

[Jilladilla]

I like using brass goblets for the first caravan... But I think Meph took out the brass from ore reaction soooo.... Nickel silver would work better then. Cheap to bring the raw materials at embark, and produces decent value tradegoods. While certainly not the best method, it works for me!

[Findulidas]

If you have acess to gold or silver bars then crafts are a good way to make money later on. Unless something has changed since I last checked you get more than one craft per item created out of it once you have a skilled metalcrafter. Its cumbersome to carry around and organize though.

[Panopticon]

I just make crafts out of whatever is available, stone if there is no metal. Might have a rough time with the first caravan, but with at least one crafter working year around and adding in the random junk you get off ambushes, sieges, and archaeology then there really isn't a problem, guild the crafter if you want to for faster leveling, but it isn't really needed.

[urmane]

Go deep and dedicate a Potter to make clay Crafts.  He'll churn them out so fast you'll be making macros to select a hundred items in the trade screen.

[Jilladilla]

Why crafts? Goblets/mugs/cups have the same base value and you always get three of them per job. Of course if the caravan is paying extra for a craft, then yes, crafts are better (somewhat, I think).

[Repseki]

To be honest I usually totally forget to make anything specific for the first caravan and end up pumping out a bunch of minecarts made of whatever I have available to pick up a few things. After that it's generally cooked meals, worn clothing, and whatever fossil/relic/treasure or kobold bag loot that I come across. Any goblinite I don't melt down might also get thrown in, but that depends more on if I have iron or not.

I don't end up really relying on much from the caravans besides supplementing my booze stocks and as much coke/ore stones I might need.

[sir_schwick]

Gem mechanisms only rely on the Gemcutting skill.  The common gems are 1k for a masterwork, so you can imagine anything higher.

[firefly68]

To begin with I tend to just set a single stone crafter to repeat stone mugs. On my current world, there is a lot of shallow obsidian, so it's turning into quite a money maker. I also tend to have a woodcrafter from embark. After I've got a larger population and more resources, I start with the other crafting industries. In my current fort (just after second migrant wave), I also have a crafting guild dwarf who is handling bone and leather, which goes well with my other tip.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

One way to get some high value trade goods is by offering blood to Armok at the Altar of Armok. You don't get a product every time, and it is limited by the amount of blood you have access to, but the rewards have a base material value almost as high as Volcanic metal. Combine this with a priest-cast dwarf (which is free from the monastery) to speed prayer levelling up and you can have high value goods in very little time, along with occasionally getting something else that comes in quite handy. My skilled apostle, is able to produce goods with over 2k value from this already and It's only going to get more valuable as he levels.