I’ll let you in on a little secret: I hate doing dailies for cash.  I’ll do them for rep to get a dye recipe.  I’ll do them for crystals so I can buy presents for my idiots, but not cash.

So when I need cash to purchase the latest fashion (I’m lookin at you, Jedi Strategist outfit), I go forth to the GTN and craft and sell dye kits.  This has kept me reasonably supplied with cash.

Here’s why crafting and selling dye kits is a good idea:

(1) They are consumable.  There will always be customers because you can’t reuse your kits.

(2) They are a pain in the ass to make and people would just rather pay, even if the price is way out of whack compared to the cost of mats.

Now, boys and girls, here’s why I say making (and selling) dye kits is a huge pain in the ass:

(1) Unlike most things you want to craft, you will need low level materials of just about every tier.  Even with the stacking changes, this adds up to an entire cargo bay devoted to it.

(2) The materials themselves are also a fussy nuisance – both in the gathering and the sheer variety.  Typically you will need 3 different color crystals from the same tier for any given dye kit.  However, at any given time, there is only one color crystal mission for each tier.  And that color crystal mission may bring back the color that you don’t need.  I find that having multiple toons with archaeology is the only way to keep up with my color crystal needs.

(3) You need reputation to get recipes for the “good” ones.  If any old artificer can make them, the prices are way low.  If the recipe requires rep to get, the kit fetches a better price.  I even repeatedly went to Voss, to get a recipe.¹  Now, if you’ve been playing the game since the beginning, you should have enough rep with all the relevant factions to buy the recipes you want – or only be a few quests short.  But if you started playing just recently and skipped certain quest hubs, you might have to go back and start the painful process from newcomer.

(4) You have to keep a variety of kits on hand and can’t just cheat and make and unload the same kit over and over.  Some idiot will inevitably flood the market with a given kit, and selling the kit in competition with that moron is useless. On the other hand, you may have kits that don’t happen to be on the GTN right then, and you can quickly unload them (for exorbitant prices).  If some idiot has flooded the market with something, I wait a few days and try again after all his auctions have been snapped up or expired.  I generally keep on hand 3-5 of each kit to put on the market when conditions are good.

Have I talked you out of making dye kits yet? Yes? Ok fine, go run the star fortress again, see if I care.