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Ashes of Creation: The Ultimate Guide to Crates in Alpha 2
This guide provides a comprehensive overview of the crate system in Ashes of Creation Alpha 2, including acquiring mules, crafting crates, strategies for maximizing gold, navigating risks and rewards, and understanding reputation and certificates.
1. 🐴 Getting Mules: Your First Step to Crate Transport
- ✅ Crates are one of the main methods to earn gold in Ashes of Creation and are relevant from early to late game.
- ✅ To transport more than one crate, you'll need a mule. The first available option is the Day Rider Mule.
- ✅ You can buy it from an NPC near the agricultural supplies and train it with an animal husbandry station, as it is a beginner-level animal.
- ✅ Alternatively, you can buy a trained mule from other players, which is often cheaper, as some players improve their animal husbandry skills and then sell trained mules to cover some of their costs.
00:00 - 00:28
1. 🐴 Getting Mules: Your First Step to Crate Transport
- ✅ Crates are one of the main methods to earn gold in Ashes of Creation and are relevant from early to late game.
- ✅ To transport more than one crate, you'll need a mule. The first available option is the Day Rider Mule.
- ✅ You can buy it from an NPC near the agricultural supplies and train it with an animal husbandry station, as it is a beginner-level animal.
- ✅ Alternatively, you can buy a trained mule from other players, which is often cheaper, as some players improve their animal husbandry skills and then sell trained mules to cover some of their costs.
00:29 - 01:24
2. 📦 Crafting Crates: Resources, Certificates, and Deliveries
- ✅ With the start of Early Access, new crate crafting stations and NPC sales certificates were added to the starting locations, allowing new players to take their first steps into the crate system and earn gold early on.
- ✅ For the first ingredient, you'll need 12 stones, ores, or gems, for the second, 12 pieces of wood or herbs, and for the third, five fish.
- ⚠️ You can only use resources that can be gathered in the same biome where the crate is crafted.
- ✅ You'll also need a crate certificate, which you can buy from the NPC next to the crafting station.
01:25 - 02:36
3. 💰 Gold Maximization Strategies: Efficient Crate Runs
- ✅ The entire route takes about 6 minutes, and once you arrive, you just need to sell crates to the NPC.
- ⚠️ It doesn't make sense to deliver them to settlements, as their price is static and doesn't scale with distance.
- ✅ It's much more efficient to transport crates only between the two points in the starting areas.
- ✅ You shouldn't craft crates for every single run. Instead, you should craft them in bulk and store them in the warehouse at both locations.
02:37 - 04:58
4. 📈 Maximizing Gold per Hour: Tips and Tricks
- ✅ Fish can be obtained by AFK fishing, so this shouldn't be a problem, while other materials are easy to gather nearby.
- ✅ Herbs are often a better choice than wood, as they take up less space, but both options work.
- ✅ It's not recommended to craft crates with higher rarity, as you spend more than you earn from delivery.
- ✅ A full round with a mule takes about 6 minutes plus a few more minutes to sell crates, get to the warehouse, and reload your mule.
- ✅ A common crate brings about 24 silver and an uncommon 37 silver minus the certificate costs and the crafting fee.
- ✅ This method is strong for several reasons: it's simple and works even at low levels, the starting areas are heavily populated, so the chance of being attacked is close to zero, you earn gold while improving gathering skills at the same time, and it's perfect if you don't have much time to play.
04:59 - 06:35
5. 🗺️ Advanced Crate Types: Market, Citizen, Settlement, Guild, and More
- ✅ All nodes of tier three or higher, i.e., villages or cities, have multiple crafting stations for different types of crates.
- ✅ The first type is the market good, and the reward for delivering these crates is gold.
- ✅ The second type is the citizen good, and delivering these crates also rewards with gold. However, the crafting fee is paid with the node's currency, also known as script.
- ✅ The third type is the settlement good. These crates also require Glint as a crafting fee, but the reward for delivery is the node's currency.
- ✅ The next type is the guild good. Crafting these crates requires silver as a fee, and delivery rewards with seals of valor.
- ✅ Next, we have port goods, which can be crafted in ports. Delivery is supposed to reward players with endgame crafting materials.
- ✅ Last but not least, there are construction crates, which are used to complete construction projects and buildings in settlements.
06:36 - 08:35
6. ⚖️ Factors Influencing Crate Compensation: Rarity, Distance, Diminishing Returns, and Biomes
- ✅ There are four main factors that influence how much you get paid for delivering crates.
- ✅ The first is the rarity of the crate. The higher the rarity, the higher the payout.
- ✅ The second factor is the distance. The further the destination settlement is from the starting point, the higher the reward for delivering the crate.
- ✅ The third factor is the diminishing return. The more crates of a specific type are delivered from node A to node B, the lower the payout becomes over time.
- ✅ The fourth factor is the number of biome boundaries crossed during delivery. Each biome boundary crossed increases the payout by 20%.
08:36 - 09:21
7. 📜 Unlocking Certificates: Reputation and Citizenship
- ✅ Certificates are required for crafting crates with the exception of construction crates.
- ✅ To unlock higher-tier certificates, you need to become a citizen and increase your reputation in that settlement.
- ✅ Reaching the highest rank, Aristocrat, allows you to buy legendary certificates in the settlement where you hold citizenship.
09:22 - 11:37
8. 🤝 Gaining Reputation: Construction Contracts, Murals, and Resources
- ✅ There are three main ways to gain reputation in a settlement: delivering construction crates for construction projects and buildings, completing mural contracts from the board near the town hall whenever they are available, and talking to the requisition agent near the warehouse and donating resources to complete purchase orders.
- ✅ Guilds often boost a player to the highest rank so they can buy certificates for the entire guild.
- ✅ When doing crate runs, it's important to occasionally deliver settlement goods, but not sell these to the NPC yourself. Instead, these crates are handed over to the player with maximum reputation.
- ✅ Ideally, you want to promote a player who plays a lot and is frequently online so they are easily available whenever someone needs certificates.
- ✅ Another good option is to promote a level 10 alt and park them permanently in a specific settlement.
11:38 - 12:35
9. 🛡️ Guilds and Certificates: Collaboration and Caution
- ✅ Well-organized guilds often have players with maximum reputation in multiple settlements.
- ✅ Certificates can also be purchased from other players or on the marketplace.
- ⚠️ Be careful not to shoot yourself or your guild in the foot. Selling too many certificates means more crates are delivered from your node, which can reduce payouts for your own crate runs.
12:36 - 13:40
10. 💰 Maximizing ROI: Identifying Cheapest Crafting Options
- ✅ To maximize your ROI for crates, it's important to identify the cheapest crafting options based on current market prices for resources of different rarities and, of course, the payouts for different crate types.
- ✅ Since you can mix and match rarities, there are several ways to craft a crate of the same final rarity.
- ✅ At least roughly calculate your crafting costs and compare them to current crate prices to estimate your profit.
13:41 - 14:25
11. ⚔️ Risk Management: PvP and Crate Runs
- ✅ Ashes of Creation is an open-world PvP game, and risk versus reward is one of its central design pillars.
- ✅ Even though the chance of someone killing you, getting corrupted, and stealing your crates is relatively low, it's never zero.
14:26 - 16:32
12. 🛡️ Reducing Risks: Tips for Safe Crate Runs
- ✅ Traveling alone is much riskier than traveling with a few other players.
- ✅ The higher your level and the better your gear, the easier it is to defend yourself and your companions.
- ✅ If one of your guild members is attacked during a crate run, you can not only help them if you are nearby, but you also get information.
- ✅ Having a backup mule.
- ✅ If you have been attacked and lost crates, you should immediately adjust your route and avoid the area where it happened.
16:33 - 17:05
13. 🎮 It's Just a Game: Learn and Adapt
- ✅ Even though there is always some risk involved, you shouldn't stress too much if you get raided at some point.
- ✅ It's a game. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. And if you lose, that's a sign that it's time to learn and adapt.
- ✅ Running crates is generally a low-risk activity with pretty solid rewards.