How to corner the pig iron market

[Peet]

Raw Iron as a trade good is worth 1 sp per pound.

That's not a whole lot, but Iron is a relatively common mineral and iron mines will often have large veins, making easy to mine lots of ore, and it can be profitable to run one.

However, as a wizard or sorcerer you can corner the Iron market pretty easily once you hit 11th/12th level.

A 12th level wizard sorcerer casting wall of iron will create a wall 5 feet high, 60 feet long, and 3 inches thick. That's a total volume of 75 cubic feet. Iron has a density of 491.5 pounds per cubic foot at room temperature. So that wall of iron weighs 36,862 pounds, or over 18 short tons.

If Iron is worth 1 sp per pound, you can sell your wall of iron for 3,686 gp. Not bad since the material component costs only 50 gp. At 12th level you can do this at least twice per day depending on class and ability scores.

Now I just have to figure out how to cut it into ingots and stack it. Hmmm... fabricate perhaps?

Will they let me do this in PFS? ;P

[Leisner]

Unfortunately, the iron created is really sub-par, as it says:

"Iron created by this spell is not suitable for use in the creation of other objects and cannot be sold."

Otherwise, a lyre of building would be your go-to solution.

[JTibbs]

pig iron has a high carbon content, and contains silica and other impurities. medieval smiths had techniques to get pig iron to the correct carbon content and to remove the impurities.

Wall of Iron, as per the name, would produce a wall of pure iron. Pure iron is virtually useless for medieval smiths, as all their traditions and techniques of refining iron into useable metal are useless on it.

Pure iron is entirely useless to anyone without specialized knowledge on the elements and alloys involved in steel, something that did not exist until the late 1800's in the real world.

I would houserule the value of wall of iron to be 1 copper piece a pound, or 1/10th the price of pig iron.

This puts the price of the iron created by the spell almost 50% the price it would cost to get a caster of sufficient level to cast the spell under the 'spellcasting service' guidelines. Wall of Iron cast by a 12th level wizard would net 368GP 2SP and 5CP. Spellcrafting services for such a spell cost 720GP.

Thats to say nothing of the high amount of labor and heating supplies it would cost to break up the massive chunk of iron into pieces small enough to sell.
.
.
.
.

Even if you could then sell said iron chunks to smiths, you would be incapable of selling it in any real volume. A smith might buy a hundred pounds of it off you, netting you only 1GP for you effort, minus all the time invested and supplies.

hell, the cost of coal/charcoal would probably take all the profit out of it.

a 12th level Wall of Iron produces 18.41 tons of useless metal, unless you have a semi-modern society with the understanding of metallurgy and chemistry to turn PURE iron into steel. Something that is lacking in 95% of settings.

.
.
.
.

If you want to make easy money, arm yourself with a hammer, an item granting unlimited Prestidigitation, and go to a mountainous region with plenty of quartz bearing rock.

Find a nice stream, and start Hulk Smashing!

A very large percentage of the rocks in the stream will actually be low-grade quartz of various flavors. Most of them have rough exteriors due to tumbling in a stream full of rocks for 50,000 years... Any given stream is just FULL of Rock quartz, amethyst, etc...

Use prestidigitation to polish stones and break them apart with a hammer to find decent sized pieces of high clarity with a minimum amount of imperfections.

From my own experiences doing this for fun (minus the magic), you will be able to find hundreds of pounds of 'gem grade' quartz in many varieties in a day. my large collection of quartz attests to that.

With prestidigitation not pretty them up a bit through polishing and cleaning, you can net thousands of GP worth of Gems in a days work.

Quartz varieties (even simple rock quartz, aka clear quartz) are after all worth like 20 times their weight in gold in D&D

[DigMarx]

Pun-pun called and asked if you'd seen his bag of rats :)

[Leisner]

Not quite true. A blacksmith could still use it for plenty of things where high quality iron isn't required, like pots n' pans and other kitchen items.
Besides, while it is true that pure iron is not something that is all that useful, the iron is apparently good enough to make a wall out of.
And though pure iron would be softer and more brittle than steel or other alloys of iron, per PF rules they have the same hardness and hit points.

(You can fluff it to say it is pure iron, but nothing in the rules actually says so)

[Journ-O-LST-3]

Use polymorph any object on the wall to turn it into salt and sell the salt instead?

Or turn it into selenium and use it to kill a port city.

[JTibbs]

Journ-O-LST-3 wrote:

Use polymorph any object on the wall to turn it into salt and sell the salt instead?

Or turn it into selenium and use it to kill a port city.

There is an everburning camp stove listed somewhere... I can't remember where. it cost somewhere around 2200gp IIRC. IT might not even be pathfinder...

But basically if you took said everburning stove and set up shop on a beach with a nice big copper wok, you could produce quite a bit of salt. Potentially a couple pounds a day with it.

At 5gp a pound, and a pound of salt a day, you could recoup the cost after 440 days!

it seems like a long time, until you realize its essentially pure profit after that. And salts a trade good, so its good money.

If you wanted to get rich in pathfinder, all you'd have to do would be to reach level 3 as a wizard and be a little creative.

EDIT:

Found the stove. It was the Stove of Everlasting Flame from the Arms and Equipment Guide for 3.5

price: 2400 GP