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[ActnMoviHeroBoy]

I'm wondering what you all think are the best trade goods for maximizing Profit over Effort. (P/E)

My pots full of cooked meals tend to be the most valuable, and I always make sure I don't trade away more food than I get back.

[PotatoOverdose]

Prepared meals?

[Caz]

Prepared Meals. Platinum goblets.

[peskyninja]

Cloth crafts.

[Telgin]

Profit vs. effort?  It's pretty much impossible to spend less effort than on rock crafts, even if the profit isn't great.  And I rarely need that much from the caravans anyway.

I saw where someone once bought out an entire caravan with a single dress.  I'm guessing cloth stuff can be almost as abusable as the food industry as a result.  It takes a lot more effort though, to get a dress like that.

[Loud Whispers]

Cloth crafts.

Dyed cloth crafts.

[MonkeyHead]

The value stacking if you weave high quality GCS silk cloth, dye it with emerald dye, make 2 masterful socks out of it and then sow some  images onto it with dyed thread means a single item of greater than 5k dorfbucks is possible - and these can be made in pairs. Considering the relativly low value of the initial resources and thier renewable nature, thats a pretty obscene profit margin.

[mnjiman]

I have 2-3 dwarfs making rock crafts non stop while I have some dwarfs placing rocks near by so they can make the craft rather then search for rocks far away.

Hopefully in the next version when you give a trader too much of something, the overall price for wanting that item decreases next time he comes by, that way you are forced to trade in multiple items.

[puke]

something strange happened a version or two ago where GCS silk seems to be worth less than regular CS silk.  Not sure how or why, probably the material value multiplier on the creatures changed.

One of the ways I mass-produce / abuse cheap rock crafts is by putting a workshop (or three) down in the depths somewhere, and then training miners by boring a shaft straight up above them.  all the rocks fall straight down, no hauling needed.  turn the room into a massive valuted dining room later.

[zzedar]

I'm gonna have to go with those who said prepared meals. Once I figured out how to get the chef to use dwarven syrup without having to micromanage, my jewelers became useless, and my craftsdwarves much less valuable. The great thing about prepared meals is that you don't have to anything. You're making meals anyway for your own dwarves' use, so you can just send some of those meals out. Plus, it just requires much less effort on your part to run a food industry than just about any other industry.

Now, meals do have one big disadvantage: storage space. Pretty soon you'll start producing meals too big to fit in containers, so the stockpile will have to be enormous. But if you run out of space, you can just turn off your farms and let the dwarves eat the meals down to a manageable number.

[Jacob/Lee]

Gem encrusted stone crafts. By the fifth year I have so many gems that I never use I just pack them in one room with 3-4 gemcutters and cut them all, then start encrusting furniture and decorating the mountains of stone goods with them. You can turn ~200 Urist sandstone goods into ~1000 Urist gem-encrusted goods if you put enough on there.

It removes two useless materials for me -- the rocks and the gems. I don't even bring the rocks to the crafters, I just let them find their own rocks in the fortress. Good for cleaning out the place.

[Mushroo]

Prepared meals for sure (whip vine flour and quarry bush leaves are my personal favorites). Honorable mention to large serrated disks.

[agatharchides]

Like everyone else said, prepared meals are probably the easiest. But honestly, there are few industries that couldn't easily buy out caravans once they get going.

[JinF]

I'm gonna have to go with those who said prepared meals. Once I figured out how to get the chef to use dwarven syrup without having to micromanage, my jewelers became useless, and my craftsdwarves much less valuable.

Make sure your solid cookable items are not stored in barrels. The system prioritizes cooking solid foods in barrels first, other foods in barrels second then any other food outside of barrels. The problem is that the system also cooks all solid items together FIRST, so the dwarves never get to use the syrup (since cooked meals require at least 1 solid item). So if all your solid stuff is not in barrels your dwarves will take a solid item to start the meal, but use whatever is in barrels to top it off eg. Dwarven Syrup.

[zzedar]

Make sure your solid cookable items are not stored in barrels. The system prioritizes cooking solid foods in barrels first, other foods in barrels second then any other food outside of barrels. The problem is that the system also cooks all solid items together FIRST, so the dwarves never get to use the syrup (since cooked meals require at least 1 solid item). So if all your solid stuff is not in barrels your dwarves will take a solid item to start the meal, but use whatever is in barrels to top it off eg. Dwarven Syrup.

That's... actually much better than the system I was using (which involved traffic designations and separate stockpiles to make it look like all the solid food was really far away from the kitchen). Thanks.