Crafting profit, step by step
The Crafting page answers one question for every recipe you add: what is left in your pocket once everything is bought, crafted and sold? This guide follows the calculation in the order the app does it.
1. Add recipes and prices
Use Add Recipe to pick items by category, tier and enchantment. Each row needs two kinds of prices: the materials you buy and the item you sell. Type them by hand, or sync them from the Albion Online Data Project for your region. For each price you choose a type — sell order, buy order, an estimate or an average over a window of days — and the city.
A row with a missing sell price or unpriced materials is flagged: its profit is incomplete until you fill the gap.
2. Material cost after the return rate
The first craft always needs the full recipe. The resources the return rate gives back are reused on the next crafts, so every craft after the first one only needs 1 − return rate of the recipe. The app then rounds up to whole resources, so you never under-buy.
What the last craft gives back is a leftover. It is not subtracted from the cost: it is counted as income, resold through a sell order and taxed like any other sale. Artifacts and other non-returnable materials never come back.
Buying a material with a buy order adds the 2.5% setup fee to its cost.
3. The return rate
The return rate comes from the in-game crafting bonus tables. You pick where you craft:
- Royal city, with or without the city's production bonus for that item;
- Hideout, by its quality and power level.
On top of that come focus and the daily bonus (10% or 20%). In a Royal city without bonus, for example, the app uses 15.3% without focus and 43.5% with focus.
4. Focus
When a row uses focus, the app takes the item's base focus cost, applies the reductions of your Destiny Board specializations, and charges the run total rounded up. Profit / Focus is the run's profit divided by that focus. Rows that do not use focus still show an estimate of their profit per focus, computed as if they did.
5. Journals, food and quality
- Journals: crafting fills the matching profession journal. The empty journals you need count as a cost, the full ones you sell as income.
- Food: when enabled, the station's favorite food needed for the craft's nutrition is added to the cost.
- Quality reroll: when enabled, the expected fee to reach your target quality is added, except when you sell in a city you marked as ignoring quality.
6. Taxes and profit
Four charges are deducted:
- the market tax on everything you sell: the sales cut (4% with Premium, 8% without) plus the 2.5% setup fee for a sell order, the sales cut only for an instant sell into a buy order, and no sales cut at all for an item you mark as sold off-market;
- the station fee (Tax plot): item value × 0.1125 × the station's fee per 100 nutrition;
- food and quality reroll, when enabled;
- the fast travel tax, when enabled: an estimate of the Travel Planner fees to sell the crafted items across the five Royal cities, a fifth in each city. Walking between the cities avoids it.
So profit = net item sales + net journal sales + net leftover sales − materials − station fee − food − reroll − fast travel tax. Profit % divides it by everything you spent, taxes included. Profit / kg divides it by the weight you haul: the crafted items plus their journals.
7. Plan the run
The Craft Optimizer fills a target — focus, weight, profit or silver to spend — with the best rows first, capping each one at a share of its daily sales so you do not flood the market. Recipes you mark to craft go to the tracker, which follows the resources you have and the items you made, and shows the break-even sell price per unit.