Low Budget Chart Voyages

Overview

The creator of the strategy calls this the best low-budget money maker in the game right now, and ran it during a zero-to-mirror challenge on roughly a 10-20 divine budget. It is a pure maps-per-hour strategy built on charts and voyages, with no scarabs and no juice of any kind. Almost none of the loot comes off monsters - it comes out of chests, strongboxes and tile loot - so damage barely matters. A semi-tanky character with good movement is the only real requirement.

Rolling the Charts

Charts are bought raw for a few chaos each and rolled with the loosest possible filter. The creator uses scours and alchemies with a regex pasted into the stash search, rebinds scroll wheel to left click, and rolls in bulk: hold Alt to flip the alchemy to a scour, scour everything, release, alch everything, repeat. Roughly 10 out of every 35 charts pass on the first pass, and 100 charts take about five minutes.

Only three things matter on the roll: high quantity, high sulphur, or a decent combination of both. Quantity scales the chest and strongbox loot, which is where the money is; sulphur sells in bulk. Any chart that comes out with open prefixes or suffixes just gets exalted to full. The creator's regex is sul.*([6-9]|[6789].|\d..)%|m q.*[1-9]..%.

Running the Charts

Charts are run purely for speed with auto-place lanterns on - shield charge or frost blink straight through and get out. The creator does three charts in a little over a minute. Targets are messages in a bottle, sunken chests and Operative's Strongboxes. Normal, Arcanist's and Diviner's strongboxes are skipped, since they do not pay enough currency to justify the time at this pace, though two sitting next to each other are worth grabbing. Gold piles are picked up for mercenary hiring.

Running the Voyages

Nine charts link into one voyage. The creator does no selection at all when building one - charts are slotted in at random and the borders are ignored unless a divine border shows up, which is rare enough that it is barely worth the few seconds to check.

The voyage itself is the same game: place lanterns, move fast, open everything worth opening. Extra lanterns are valuable because they let you explore more of the map, and it is often worth backtracking onto lanterns you have already placed rather than walking a long unlit route. Sunken loot chests drop a lot of raw currency and have a real chance at high-value drops; waterlogged scarab chests and Operative's Strongboxes are the other priorities. Make sure the last lantern you place is near a capsule, then take any capsule to call the bathysphere down and end the voyage.

The cycle is roughly three minutes to set up a voyage and just under four minutes to run it, so about seven minutes per full loop.

Considerations

The investment is only the charts, a couple of alch-scour cycles and a handful of exalts - under 10 chaos per chart all in. There is nothing else to buy, which is what makes it viable from a standing start.

Because the loot is chest-based rather than monster-based, speed is the only scaling stat. The creator was running a budget build and states plainly that a faster, more invested character will earn more from the same setup. Sulphur was around 22k to a divine at the time of recording and made up a meaningful share of the take, so the strategy's value moves with the bulk sulphur market as well as with scarab prices.