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.

There are two methods of obtaining the fruit: foraging for it directly, or purchasing it for a low cost at an inhabited island and sailing it to another market to sell at a higher profit.

Foraging

Foraging is the process of finding fruit directly from the spawn island. It is a way to gather fruit without the need to purchase it from an island.

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 can be discussed later.
• 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 generate many sail tokens to catch you when soloing and on a fully-staffed ship even moderately skilled players should generate enough moves to successfully avoid getting grappled.
• Make sure you read the section below on economics to understand the costs that go into a successful foraging operation.
• Lastly, you can save PoE if you float your ships back to your foraging spot, rather that autofloating them. There's no use in spending PoE or rum in sailing them back. Float your ships home and let them reset.

Choosing an Island On Which To Forage

The best islands for foraging are uninhabited islands located on inter-archipelago routes between archipelagos that spawn different fruits.

Ideally, you will forage at an uninhabited island, and at the other end of the inter-archipelago will be an island with a market where you can sell your fruit. Not all oceans have such routes, though, so look for the uninhabited island that is as few leagues as possible from a market that buys the fruits you'll find. You may also want to consider route difficulty (try to avoid red routes if possible) and the purchase price of gold at the destination island when you choose your route.

Solo Fruit Running

Running fruit solo can be more profitable since there are no partners with whom one must share the profits. 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. It is generally best to bring one other strong sailor to help on a merchant brig, though.

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. A cutter or larger will yield much better profits for the same work sailing compared to a sloop. If you are nonetheless interested in 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 three accounts, and each account has 3 pirates, a single foraging player on a doubloon ocean can generally have 9 pirates foraging every day. A subscription account only gets 24 hours of labor per account, and accounts must be subscribed to forage.

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 in proportion to how much foraging each person did. The main benefit to cooperative foraging is that moving the fruit is easier and less risky with other players on board.

Foragers and Helpers

The largest time commitment in 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, especially if you have to cycle through the 3 pirates on an account.

The most difficult part of foraging, though, is transporting the fruit to a market. This transport typically goes better with multiple people helping to sail the ship. 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, if those people are highly skilled in sailing and/or duty navigation. In order to ensure a better chance of making it to port with all of your fruit intact, most pirates should have at least 6 people (yourself and 5 others) on board with the swabbies. Put one of the players on carp, one on bilge, your best dnavver on navigation, 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 9 to 10 skilled 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 holds three times as much fruit as a merchant brig. Place 1-2 players on carp, 1-2 players on bilge, your best dnavver on navigation, 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 successful foragers who pay anywhere between 50-100 PoE per league for help sailing their ships. You'll have to experiment to see how much you can afford and what amount attracts reliable jobbers on your ocean.

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 at the foraging island. The large ship is where the pirates forage the fruit. The smaller ships are used to move the fruit. An example is one Grand Frigate and 2-3 Merchant Galleons or Merchant Brigs. Some players may have several Grand Frigates and use one of them for sailing, but only do this if you are very experienced at moving Grand Frigates.

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 0.05% per click) chance of finding gold. Low-priced fruit sells at between 14-16 PoE each. Higher-priced fruit sells for 55-66 PoE each. Based on that, on an average day you find about 660 PoE worth of fruit 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, which accounts for an occasional loss during transport. 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 6 pirates (from 2 accounts), you'd be making 54-60k per month.

On the higher end, you may make 660 PoE/day. If dubs are lower (maybe 600 PoE), you'd have an income of 19,800, 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 sells for between 6k-32k depending on what ocean, where you sell it, etc. You can add that to the numbers listed above when estimating your profits.

The Market Purchase Method

In addition to foraging the fruit yourself, you can purchase the fruit at some islands, usually from the fort or palace, and transport it to another market at a significant profit.

Since the highest profits tend to be found at faraway markets, this is best done in large quantities, which require larger ships, such as Merchant Galleons and Grand Frigates. As a result, hiring more jobbers is an absolute necessity.

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.
• If you are foraging, 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. Although many Officers solo-sail by getting the sloop up to speed using 2 bots and themselves, and go laze in the nest to watch out for brigands when the ship is at full speed. The Bots can keep full speed, they just have hard time getting to full speed themselves.
• 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 only fruit in your hold.

• Grand Frigate: 4320 fruit - Requires a minimum of 30 jobbers to transport safely, but the voyage can begin with 21. Alternatively, Grand Frigates make excellent warehouses.
• Merchant Galleon: 2160 fruit - Requires a minimum of 9 jobbers to transport safely, but 10 is ideal.
• War Frigate: 1728 fruit - Requires more people to job, but the size of the hold makes this less suited for transport (and better suited as a warehouse for overflow).
• Merchant Brig: 720 fruit - Can be run solo, but 2 is the likely minimum. Hiring up to 6 people helps tremendously in safeguarding the fruit.
• War Brig: 432 fruit - Can be run with 1-2 people, but the size of the hold makes this less suited for transport (and better suited as a warehouse for overflow).
• Cutter: 324 fruit - Can be run solo.
• Baghlah: 144 fruit - Can be run solo.
• Dhow: 108 fruit - Can be run solo.
• Sloop: 108 fruit - Can be run solo. (And you can laze in the nest)

See Also

• Foraging
• Fruit
• Gem running