Fruit running

For more information on fruit spawning basics, see the article on fruit.

Fruit running is the practice of transporting fruit, either in large or small quantities, from their spawn island to a market. Fruit running can either be done as a solo enterprise or group effort. The following sections will address all possible ways of successfully running fruit.

The Basics

• The more people you have helping, the more fruit you can gather. One pirate with a labor badge (or subscription) can only forage 24 times in a day, so that means you can forage at most 24 fruit in a day.
• Larger ships may be necessary for profitable fruit running, depending on the number of pirates helping. The ships will be discussed later.
• Plan ahead: Know your spawn rates and patterns to be an effective runner in mass quantities.
• When planning your routes, remember that fruit is sold at a higher profit if sailed to another archipelago. This will mean longer routes, so plan ahead.
• Become adept at either the sailing puzzle or navigation puzzle for easy soloing.
• When transporting larger quantities of fruit, make sure you have close hearties that will work hard at helping you get to port.
• Always try for the disengage. Brigands will not have enough bots to generate sails tokens to catch you when soloing and live players should generate enough to counteract their NPP personnel when not.
• Make sure you read the section below on economics to understand the costs that go into a successful foraging operation.
• Lastly, float your ships back to your foraging spot. There's no use in spending PoE or rum in sailing them back. Float your ships home and let them reset.

Solo Fruit Running

Running fruit solo is extremely profitable as there are no partners to split the profits after interest with. This does however increase the risk when moving the fruit as it requires soloing a ship with only bots to help. Ships as large as a merchant brig may be used if the pirate is very skilled at the navigation puzzle, but generally requires one other strong sailor to help.

Solo running should never be done on ships larger than merchant brigs, since the bilge and damage will fill up too quickly. Since fruit generally requires a large quantity to be profitable, a pirate will likely not want to use a small ship to move fruit. However, for small fruit runs, please see the article on gem running.

Your Friend, the Alt Account

Some pirates find it more profitable to have several alts foraging at once, since this allows for more fruit to be gathered in a shorter amount of time. Since a player can generally create two accounts, and each account has 3 pirates, a single foraging player can have 6 pirates foraging every day. 6*24 = 144 fruit, so it is possible to find up to 144 fruit every day. This will overfill the smaller ships, so if you are planning to do this, you may want to invest in a second ship for storage space.

Cooperative Group Fruit Running

Cooperative fruit running is very similar to solo fruit running in many respects. Its principal differences are that when working with other people, traditionally the profits are split between all involved. However, the actual moving of fruit is slightly easier and less risky with other players on board.

Foragers and Helpers

Make no mistake, the heavy lifting of a successful foraging operation is the actual foraging. Each pirate must stay on board a ship for 10 minutes before he or she may forage. Therefore foraging can take a while, if you have to cycle through the 3 pirates on an account.

However, the fruit needs to be transported, which goes better with multiple people. If you are starting a larger operation, you should get used to finding a group of hearties that you can call on to help you move the larger ships in order to sell the fruit. Merchant ships were built for this, so use those rather than war ships.

A merchant brig can be run with as little as 2 people. However, in order to ensure a better chance of making it to port with all of your fruit intact, I recommend at least 6 (yourself and 5 others), along with the swabbies on board. Put one of the players on carp, one on bilge, your best dnavver on nav, and everyone else on sails. Even though you may not need this many people, it will help your ship move faster, and help you get moves to run away during battle.

A merchant galleon requires less than 10 people to run properly. A merchant galleon is a slow ship, and unless you have more people, it will never reach full speed. On the other hand, it hold three times as much fruit as a merchant brig. Place 1-2 players on carp, 1-2 players on bilge, your best dnavver on nav, and everyone else on sails. Move your swabbies around so that you have a total of 3 on bilge and 3 on carp. It is essential when moving a merchant galleon to keep your bilge and damage low the entire run, or else you will slow down and be engaged much more often.

Grand frigates can be used to move vast amounts of fruit, but should only be used by players who are used to the way these ships run, not by the inexperienced forager.

If you pay your helpers well, they'll help you more often. You'll find foragers who pay anywhere between 50-100 PoE per league. You'll have to experiment to see how much you can afford.

Advanced Fruit Operations

In order to perform a foraging operation on a crew or flag scale, you should probably have a larger ship and several smaller ships. The large ship is where the pirates forage the fruit. The smaller ships are used in moving the fruit. An example is one GF and 2-3 MGs. Some players may have several GFs and one for selling, but only do this if you are very experienced at moving fruit like this.

Economics

Foraging can be very profitable if done correctly. Generally a pirate will find 12 cheap fruit and 8 higher-priced fruit every 24 clicks. There's also a small (about 1.2% per day) chance of finding gold every day. Low-priced fruit sells from between 5-15 PoE each. Higher-priced fruit sells for 55-66 PoE each. Based on that, on an average day you could find between 500-648 PoE per day, per pirate.

On dub oceans, a labor badge costs 5 dubs. Based on the dub rates at the time, you should be able to make the cost of the badge(s) back in 5-8 days. The rest of the 30 days on your badge then goes straight into your pocket.

So let's look at your profit. If dubs are at 800 PoE/dub, a badge would be worth 4000 PoE. On the low end of the foraging, you make 500 PoE/day. 30 days of this would make you 15k PoE. Subtract your badge cost, and you make 11k in profit a month, per pirate. There are some other costs (like rum and helpers) which would probably drop this down to about 9-10k profit, but if you're using your 6 pirates (from your 2 accounts), you'd be making 54-60k per month.

On the higher end, you may make 648 PoE/day. If dubs are lower (maybe 600 PoE), you'd have an income of 19,440, and an expense of 3k for the badge, minus more for rum and jobbers. That means a profit of about 15k per pirate. Your 6 pirates will then make you about 90k per month.

Your actual profit will probably be somewhere in the middle.

Gold is a bonus. You likely won't get much. Your 6 pirates will probably find about 2 gold over the course of a month of foraging. Gold runs between 12k-25k depending on what ocean, where it is, etc. You can add that to the numbers listed above.

The Do's and Don'ts

Do

• Check the prices of fruit at the market at which you are selling. Fruit prices change every day. After watching the prices for a few days, you can see what a high price is, and what a low price is. Waiting for high days will make you a lot more than if you sell on a low day.
• Always stock enough grog/swill/rum for the trip. Running out of rum will slow you down, just like any other voyage. The difference is that now you're holding all of your investment on board, and you don't want to lose it.
• Attempt to avoid brigand battles. They both slow your sailing progress down and risk your fruit investment. Once at full speed, brigands will only spawn ahead of you heading in the same direction and will target and engage you as you approach them from behind. A quick turn about and then another one when out of range will easily remedy this.
• Forage every day. You pay for a day of labor (either as a badge, or in your subscription) whether or not you forage. Therefore, if you don't forage, you lose income. In case you don't have time on a given day, you may want to take a job somewhere to cover you, but you're going to probably make more using your labor to forage than at a shoppe job.

Don't

• Don't put the bots on stations and then laze. No group of bots is good enough to get to max speed without player help before being engaged. A player must sail or navigate to effectively move their ship.
• Don't try and take the brigands solo. Whatever might be won from them during an engagement is not worth the possible loss of the fruit investment. Disengage is the fruit runner's ally.
• Don't worry about carrying a lot of cannonballs. This is a merchant run. You should be avoiding battles at every chance. When you are engaged, run away or grapple as fast as you can. Don't get involved in a long fight.

The Ships

Here is a list of the amounts of fruit each ship can hold if full, although remember that a successful run will require other supplies (such as rum). You should never move a ship with fruit alone.

• Grand Frigate: 4320 fruit
• Merchant Galleon: 2160 fruit
• War Frigate: 1728 fruit
• Merchant Brig: 720 fruit
• War Brig: 432 fruit
• Cutter: 324 fruit
• Baghlah: 144 fruit
• Dhow: 108 fruit
• Sloop: 108 fruit

See Also

• Foraging