SWTOR Banking Credits as Free-to-Play

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In SWTOR (Star Wars The Old Republic), accounts that are Free-to-Play or Preferred have a credit limit of 350,000. The excess goes into Escrow and cannot be accessed without the use of Cartel Market Coins.

Here are some ideas for how to bank credits. You may want to bank credits in case you suddenly see a good buy on the Galactic Trade Network and don't want to bankrupt that character -- remembering that as Free-to-Play or Preferred you cannot transfer credits by mail. You therefore need to send things between your chararcters using Legacy Storage.
  1. Meat Trees
    • If you are able to go to Rishi, you can buy Meat Trees in stacks of up to 9999. Each Meat Tree costs 1 credit, but more importantly also sells back to a vendor for 1 credit. Therefore there is no value loss buying and selling them. A full Cargo Bay is almost 800,000 credits banked.
    • Unless you are planning to somehow make multi-million credit purchases (e.g., have someone buy something for you and then pay them back in installments), there is probably no need to maintain several pages worth of Meat Trees, especially if you have a single stack of high-vendor-value items (see below). It is quite tedious to keep going back and forth to Rishi buying stacks, so just let the rest of your credits go into escrow. When you do become a subscriber, all credits in escrow come out immediately with no need for Cartel Coins to access.
  2. Expensive Items
    • Since one inventory slot can hold 9999 Meat Trees for a value of 9999 credits, you may therefore want to hold on to any item you intend to sell to a vendor if the value exceeds 9999 credits, thereby getting more "storage value" for your inventory space.
      • For example, some green level 66 weapons have a vendor value of just over 10,000 credits. The corresponding blue version has the same vendor value, so try to sell those on GTN instead and hold on to the greens.
    • Some consumables that stack can easily exceed a vendor-value of 9999.
  3. GTN Sales
    • Leave your successful sales in your mailbox and redeem them only when you need credits. Watch out not to leave them too long as they might expire and disappear after 30 (?) days.
  4. Reputation Items
    • Once you have maximum reputation with a faction, the reputation-increasing items they award have no value except to a vendor. Keep them around and let them grow into a sizable stack of credit value.
  5. Slicing Lockboxes
    • If you cannot go to Rishi, another way to bank credits is by "converting" them to Lockboxes. Unless a Slicing mission fails, the lockbox you get always nets more than the cost of the mission (though sometimes not by a wide margin). The Lockbox is not Bound so you can put it in Legacy Storage and have another character pick it up (or you can even try to sell it on the Galactic Trade Network).
  6. Treasure Hunting Lockboxes
    • Similar to Slicing Lockboxes, except it is much chancier whether you will profit by a good margin as it's very likely you'll get a green item that will net less than the mission cost when you sell it to a vendor. You can sell what comes out of the box on the Galactic Trade Network but that could take a lot of time and there's no guarantee it'll sell at all.
  7. Companion Gifts
    • Diplomacy, Investigation, and Treasure Hunting all let you have missions to get Companion Gifts. Grade 5 Gifts means for a mission that costs you 1,650 credits you will get a rank 5 blue gift worth 5000 credits (or a rank 5 pink gift worth 10000 credits if the mission is a critical success).
    • You cannot vendor the gift for more than the cost of the crew skill mission, but even if you sold it on the Galactic Trade Network for the same as vendor cost, even after the 6% GTN commission you come out well ahead.
  8. Crafting Supplements
    • Same idea as Companion Gifts -- convert credits into something you are likely to use anyway, and that way "buy" at a huge discount. Grade 6-10 crafting supplements cost much less this way than buying at a Crew Skill Vendor.
    • Note that lower-grade crafting supplements are more costly to get this way, so calculate your Crafting Supplement cost per unit. Typically you can get 5-10 units on a successful mission, and approximately three times that amount on a critical success.
  9. Craftable Consumables
    • Grade 8 Biochemistry consumables (adrenals, stims, med units, medpacks) vendor back at 1400 credits per unit. You get 6 units each time you craft, making them far better than any Slicing lockbox.
      • Strangely, Grade 9's vendor back at LESS than Grade 8's.
    • Similarly, Grade 8 Cybertech grenades also vendor back at 1400 credits per unit.
    • You can of course try to slowly sell some on the Galactic Trade Network, but keep a large stack of a thousand or so for their sell-to-vendor value and you have a compact and easily shared stack of liquid credits.
      • Remember to buy them back from the vendor when you can or temporarily convert a page of Meat Trees (see above) to buy them back and maintain credit liquidity.
    • Obviously for this to work well you need a lot of crafting materials, and if you have to buy them off the Galactic Trade Network your net profit isn't going to be as good.

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