Travellers Rest – Early Game Tips to Make Money

Money Making Tips

Note: Credit goes to Magden

General Tips

If you set yourself up properly, the game is too easy and you will be swimming in endless gold. It really isn’t that hard to do this. You don’t mention how many seats you have for patrons, nor what you’re serving them…

If you are seating 50 people (very reasonable if you have all 4 employees), serving a mixture of ale, wine and spirits, have 5+ inn rooms rented out regularly and have at least 30 different meals (half of which are worth 5 silver or more), you should be able to make 30 gold in a single day of being open for 12-14 hours. 30 gold profit. It’s possible to make 2-3 times that much, or 4-5 times as much if you only serve the highest profit items with the highest profit ingredients.

If you’re struggling, you probably have too few seats (and inn rooms) or are serving drinks and meals that are not worth enough. Watermelon, melon and coconut spirits will sell for over 20 silver each (and way more than that with proper employee perks). There are meals that sell for a base amount of 10 silver and will be worth 3 silver more if you have enough variety of food served.

Other Tips

• Every new recipe/meal you put into the tavern inventory increases the value of all meals by multiple silver. It ends up being 3 silver or more when you have 30+ recipes.
• Get rid of employees until you can afford them. You can run a 50 customer tavern with 0 help (well, most people can). Get employees with +customer trait and uncheck all their tasks and do everything yourself until you’re selling wine, vodka and 5 silver+ meals.
• You can fit 4 of every machine for cooking and brewing in a slightly-increased-in-size kitchen.
• Some meals are free (think fish- and mushroom-based meals). Repeatable crops like berries are really good because while the final product is worth less, the cost of seeds is basically nothing if you can harvest 60+ berries for a 9 silver seed pack. Spam wine or spirits with 3 berries.
• Do not waste gold on any decorations and don’t buy anything you can craft in the early game. You need to invest your gold aggressively into the things that require it (buying floor space, buying seeds and some animal products from the farm store, buying crafting machines you can’t make yourself, etc.) Decorations to increase your tavern reputation gain are not worth it early game. (Obviously this is only for people trying to expand. Have fun decorating if you’re into that and don’t care about growing fast.)

You can either aggressively expand and offer high-end products, or you can run a small business with no employees. You can’t run a small business with employees selling low value goods.