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[Frelock]

Which should I have my craftsmen mass-produce for use with traders:crafts, mugs, instruments, or toys?

[Ed-]

Ammo, then encrust ammo with anything.

Sell to humans for prices that sometimes go > 9000 and enjoy.

[Derakon]

Those items all have the same base price (10), so it depends on what they've told you they really want. Generally I just put all of them on full-auto. Legendary stonecrafters are fairly common for me (they tend to show up when an unskilled dwarf gets moody), and a bin full of their goods goes for around 1500 on average.

Though, I got lucky with a moody metalsmith in my current fortress. He can't do weapons or armor, but he can do furniture and "other objects", and that includes anvils. For three bars of metal, I can get an anvil worth 5000 or 12000. I was actually getting 18500 or so for them from the dwarves last time they came around, thanks to trade agreements. For one anvil, I was able to buy five anvils and some miscellaneous armor, and then melt down their anvils for the ore.  

[MrGimp]

I dont know about mass producing expensive items.  The idea behind trading (for me at least) is getting rid of the massive amounts of stone I have.  Thats why simple crafts are all I sell.  That and goblin junk.  Goblin junk is valuable enough that you can buy whatever you need with it.  And just supplement that with microcline amulets and scepters.

I never can waste stone fast enough.  I put coffers and cabinets in everyones rooms, I dump crafts on the traders, I build walls and fortifications everywhere, I engage in massive construction projects, and STILL Im burdened with too much stone.

[Untelligent]

Quarry bush roasts tend to go for a lot of money.

[greggbert]

For your stonecrafters, all have same base value.  Build what they request for a better price.  What matters most is that you have a skilled craftsman and that you use an economic stone like marble.

Once you get some type of non-wood charcoal, then you will want to crank out weapons.  They are worth bank, plus you can keep the best ones for yourself.

I think the fastest way to make money with non-coal is to buy cloth and silk, dye it and make in-demand clothing items out of it.  Don't buy the dye, though, dying the item will cause you to break even.

[kaypy]

Starting out, I like mugs/goblets because they get produced in stacks of 3 at once (a pain to haul, but you get lots of value fast without much skill/infrastructure required) (They are also good for mandates for the same reason)

Later on, who cares? There will always be another narrow giant cave spider silk loincloth to pawn...

[Forumsdwarf]

I buy pretty much anything nonperishable the caravan brings, with a few exceptions like ridiculously overpriced gem-encrusted ammo, clothing, etc.

I sell junk first, like catapult parts < exceptional, crossbows < superior, bloody, dirty, and deteriorating clothes, and anything worth under $100.  Storage space costs labor, so the more you can concentrate and keep value the better.

Encrusting, sewing images, studding with precious metals, and other value-adds along those lines are a great way of saving space.  A cloth image on a sock might not be as valuable as a second sock, but you don't have to find room for a second sock, either.

Prepared meals are a ridiculous bonanza, particularly when using ingredients with an extra stage of value-added preparation, like flour or quarry bush leaves.  For the amount of labor required to get from rock nuts to $10,000 stacks of lavish leaf roasts you could probably make more mining and crafting gold, but you can't eat a golden trumpet, you're going to overproduce food anyway, and gold eventually runs out.

So I'll buy ~$20,000 worth of metal and gems, dump several tons of crap at $20-$100 apiece, then make up the difference with a couple of $8,000 quarry bush leaf roasts.

All the fine clothing and extravagant treasures my dwarves labor night and day to produce stay in the fort.

[BurnedToast]

A single stonecrafter set to make stone mugs on repeat forever will easily turn the tons and tons of excess stone you have laying around into enough monies to buy anything you could ever want from the caravans.

Ammo is bugged right now in that decorated ammo is worth disgusting amounts of money so if you don't care about the bug, that's probably the easiest thing to get mass cash off - order some gems from the dwarves and decorate up big stacks of bolts.

[sneakey pete]

Cloth crafts Make a fair coin too, once you've got the chain set up, and everyone experienced

[bigmcstrongmuscle]

Any lavish meal - for me, usually dwarven wine roasts. The smallest I've seen a stack go for (this by a barely skilled cook, without a trade agreement) is around 750*, and I've always got a metric shit-ton of them. My construction projects are usually massive enough to waste all my stone without the help, but I tend to try stupidly grandiose things.

[Othob Rithol]

To summarize all of the above posts: trade what you have a lot of for what you don't have a lot of.

If you have excess food : trade it off.
Too much stone : sell stone trinkets.
Plenty of wood or other fuel : Metal items are worth good money.
Have a magma source : Glass is free.

One I want to mention is seeds: you will likely have too many, and they make a decent profit (I export about 4000 worth yearly). As long as you have some of every plant in storage unprocessed, you can safely trade off your seed barrels.

Everything will have a cost as well as benefits. Selling stonework means a cleaner fort, but less value per unit. Cloth does real well, but has a hefty production chain. Food is worth a bundle, but might leave you starving. Metal goods universally are worth plenty, but are based on rare resources. Glass needs  magma to be really effective, but is infinite.

Me, I continuously crank out stone crafts/toys/instruments of regular stone from the very beginning. I think it provides a useful side effect as well as a stable base. But it won't buy you everything.

I also export goblets of rare metals from the very first to supplement my value. The average dwarf caravan comes to my fort loaded with wood, metal bars, gems and booze. It leaves with a ton of stone rings,crowns,min-forges and trumpets, a small stock of platinum/gold/aluminum/silver goblets, as well as excess clothing, the seeds, and goblin leather armor (I modded out the regular clothing, made it too easy and a hell of an annoyance.)

[numerobis]

I export seed roasts: when I get about 200 of some kind of seed (usually PH spawn or rock nuts), I turn on cooking and queue up 30 lavish meals, which eats up 120.  Once they're done, it's pretty important to turn *off* cooking that kind of seed.  These are small annoying stacks of 4 food each, so I trade them off (select 'seeds roast' or 'spawn roast', sort by value, pick off the 30 least-valuable stacks of food).

These are the best only in that they help you empty the bags for more useful things like glass.  Of course, you could use them to buy leather bins, and end up with more leather bags than you know what to do with.

[Deathworks]

Hi!

One thing that wasn't mentioned is weight: Unless this has changed in 3D, stone mugs are heavier than stone crafts. In 3D, the weight problem has been somewhat helped since caravans tend to bring a lot of heavy and cheap stuff (wood), but if you are unlucky (especially with the elves), there may be caravans with no such dead weight (or only prohibitively expensive dead weight). This is why I never produce mugs.

Deathworks