*at no loss but your own time and maybe some mp if you're impatient
hey. you. person who doesn't want to pay your real life money on fake game money. i see you. i see you thinking "well how else am i supposed to get all that fake game money to afford the things i want? the only reliable ways to get it are a handful from annual site events and winning raffles?"
worry not, humble gamer: you have missed the most relible option of all. it's basically automated once you've got the resources set up.
you know the pyramids? those things that you can put your pet through to eventually win something for your collections or a restricted pet? you can also win au from those. it's usually just the reward for one of the levels. most of these need a map requiring further au to access and typically ask for very pricey items to progress through (that you sometimes need ANOTHER au map to earn), so those are right out.
except for the slate pyramid. the slate pyramid is very much free to access and also has the highest au return out of all of them. you get five per run. the slate quests are also free to access. you can just do those
so: the biggest barrier of entry here is just accruing the slates to make progress at a good pace. you can just earn these from the game by doing simerian excavator quests, but the rng on how frequently they drop can be inconsistent, and it's very common that there'll be one or two that she just refuses to give you. the idea here is just to start doing them whenever you have a bit of free time; if you end up with good droprates and cheap quests, keep doing them for as long as you can.
it takes a few more seconds, but going through and buying things from the main shops instead of paying the shop search prices will save you a ton in the long run. i tend to keep a spending limit per-quest of about 10-15k mp, so quests asking for multiple items only available for over 8k or so is typically where i cut these streaks off. this keeps my on-hand mp in the same general range with minimal net loss, so the amount of mp i lose to get twenty slates is still less than it would've been to just buy any one of them. but also, critically: when a quest goes over the spending limit but it also asks for one or two main shop items that i can nab for a fraction of the shop search price, i always go out of my way to buy them anyway and stick them in my attic for any time a future quest might potentially ask for them. if it's not in the main shop at the time and i'd have to pay the typical ss price, that's an item i won't have to factor into the budget. this might seem like it's not worth the extra effort, but trust me: It Will Add Up. you're gonna be doing a LOT of this.
ideally you want to land yourself in a place where you have at least a couple of each slate on-hand, so you can progress past each level of the pyramid immediately and get through it as efficiently as possible. the nature of the droprates is just that you're gonna end up with a handful of slates that you have way more of than anything else and a handful that you get none of; i'd recommend looking at the trades for the ones you're missing and see if anyone's asking to swap it for one you do have, or, failing that, look at the ss prices and throw up your own trade with a similarly-priced slate asking to swap for the one you want. it's important to keep a balance, because sometimes the pyramid will decide to bleed you dry of a specific slate. i've been doing this for long enough that my comfort zone for stockpiled slates is keeping everything in the double digits, but it'll take you a while to get there. once you're at this point, though, you're pretty much golden to keep doing this for at least a full run without needing to go earn more.
once you've got a headstart on the resources, the first thing you want to prioritize is buying the slate pyramid giftbox: this'll cut the wait time down to four hours, and collecting all five au will take maybe three weeks. if you REALLY want to be efficient with this and don't care about the echlin, you can just leave the pyramid after you get the last au prize at level 40 and start over without having to waste a few more days on the last ten levels. and that's it!! that's how how you earn all the au you'll ever need to buy basically anything, without actually spending any money!! it's literally just "do a lot of quests"!! easy!!
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