Your first gold: where it goes and where it comes from

The first twenty levels of Guild Wars 2 pass in a state of “I have no money, but something keeps trickling in”. Later you find out that half of that something was being thrown away, and the other half was hauled around in your bags for nothing.

Four things worth understanding early. They will not make you rich, but they will stop the usual losses.

1. Deposit materials, do not sell them to vendors.

Right-click in your inventory → Deposit All Materials. Everything craftable goes into a separate storage that takes no bag space and is reachable from anywhere in the world.

Why it matters: ore, wood, cloth and leather are what every crafter needs, so they have constant demand on the Trading Post. A vendor pays a fixed pittance. On a single scrap the difference is trivial; across several stacks it stops being trivial.

There is a table of current prices at the bottom of this page. Look at Copper Ore or Jute Scrap: small numbers, but you collect them by the hundred.

What your materials are worth, in numbers

The advice to deposit everything is easier to follow when you know the numbers. From our archive in August 2026, the things falling into your bags while you level:

• Mithril Ore: about 40 copper each
• Elder Wood Log: about 28 copper
• Silk Scrap: about 10 copper
• Thick Leather Section: about 69 copper
• Orichalcum Ore: about 1 silver 60
• Ancient Wood Log: about 1 silver 40
• Glob of Ectoplasm: about 3 silver 12

Individually that looks like nothing, and that reaction is exactly why new players vendor them. A full stack of 250 mithril is a gold. Two stacks of elder wood is 1.4 gold. The bank tab you fill without noticing across levels 1 to 80 is several tens of gold sitting still.

Vendoring the same materials pays a fraction of those prices. The difference between a player who deposits and a player who sells to the merchant is not skill or knowledge of a secret farm. It is one keystroke, repeated.

2. Do not buy gear before 80.

The temptation makes sense: at level 30 you see a nice piece for two gold and assume it will last. It will not: eight levels later it is obsolete.

Below 80, gear is a consumable. Wear what drops and what hearts and the story hand you. The money matters later: your first mount, your first real components, your first serious crafting.

One exception: bags. A bigger inventory works for you across all 80 levels and everything after, and it is close to the only early purchase that pays for itself.

3. Know the difference between selling now and listing.

There are two ways to sell:

• Sell instantly. The item goes to the highest standing buy order. Money now, lower price.
• List it. Name your price and wait. More money, no idea when.

The gap between those two numbers is often close to double. For the small materials you have hundreds of, selling instantly is usually the sane choice: a few copper is not worth managing listings.

But know this: the 15% cut applies either way, and it is not “almost nothing”. A stack bought for 8 gold has to rise 17.6% before you have broken even. That deserves its own page: what the Trading Post takes.

4. Your gold is not in your wallet.

The most common beginner mistake is judging your wealth by the coin display. The real picture is different: most of your money is sitting in material storage and in the bank, in stacks you have forgotten about.

Easy to check: on the account page, paste an API key and the site adds up your wallet and your stash together at today’s prices, with the fee already subtracted. The key never goes anywhere; your own browser makes the request.

The usual result: one and a half gold in the wallet, five gold on the shelf. People spend a month believing they are broke while holding enough for a Springer and change.

Where gold comes from

The honest answer: not from picking things up.

Levels 1–80. Your income is a side effect of playing. Do the story, explore maps, deposit materials. Do not optimise: this is not the stage for it.

Level 80. Now the real sources appear: daily map metas in the expansions, fractals, crafting aimed at actual demand. An order of magnitude above early play.

The market. Flipping works, but it is a separate game with its own rules and risks, and starting it with five gold makes no sense: the fee eats small trades and order depth lies about liquidity. Once you are at twenty or thirty gold, look at the candidates, and start with boring materials that move every day.

The first gold is not earned, it is not lost.

Everything above is arithmetic. This part is the thing nobody tells a new player, and it matters more.

At level 30 you will want a weapon on the trading post. It costs 2 gold, you have 3, and it looks like a reasonable purchase for a character you will be playing for the next fifty levels.

It is not, and the reason has nothing to do with the price. You outlevel it in four hours. The stats on gear below 80 barely matter because the world scales to you, and every piece you buy is deleted from your account by the time you reach the content where equipment starts mattering at all.

Meanwhile the actual gold sinks are waiting further up: your first ascended set, the trading post fees on your first real sale, the mount collections, waypoint costs across a map you do not know yet.

So the honest version of “how do I make my first gold” is uncomfortable and short. You mostly do not make it. You arrive at 80 having failed to spend it, and then the game opens up and the earning begins for real.

That reframing is worth more than any farming route, because a new player who believes they are poor plays badly. You are not poor. You are pre-revenue, and everything about that changes in a fortnight.

Short version

• Deposit All Materials is a habit, not a one-off
• no gear before 80; bags, yes
• 15% fee, break-even at +17.6%
• check what you have before deciding you are poor