One of my PC's is an Artificer, and we're at a break now where he can craft some stuff. How does he go about buying materials to craft items? I said he'd be buying stuff from the locals (gems, minerals, plants, animal bits), so buying things in 800 gp chunks isn't a problem.
I have been house-ruling some of the treasure given and giving out a slush fund of "arcane materials" base on CR that can be harvested from defeated monsters (hydra blood, demon hair, golem bits, etc.) this goes into a fund that can be used to fund item creation. I also put a cache of it in the kopru druid's lab. This was working ok, but now that he's making wands, he depleted it very quickly.
The problem is the Assets total, what happens once he's bought up enough stuff to use it up, does it ever replenish? I've gone over those 3 paragraphs in the DMG and it says nothin, as it's more for "sell your loot, move on". He's got some items he could sell and that falls under the assets rules, but creating a cottage industry to gather arcane materials isn't covered. I'd be interested in knowing how other DM's handled this.
