Overview
A list of items you can sell for $$
Introduction
Selling items is a lot more important in LW than in vanilla. Because of how many missions you do, there will be a lot of resources to juggle – and since your council allowance can only pay for a fraction of the possible projects, getting the most out of your loot is very important.
Easy sales
The only truly disposable items are those explicitly marked as junk, such as broken alien computers. Everything else, you can plausibly have a shortage of if you oversell. The items below are very safe to sell – they’re common and even if you oversell, you will quickly get more. Look at the following page if you want to calculate exactly how many you’ll need and when:
[link]
In order of decreasing sale priority:
- Floater corpses – This is probably the easiest sale in the game. Floaters are a very common enemy and you’ll get a hundred of these corpses in the first three months alone. The corpses are used in decent numbers later, but the research project is only unlocked after MECs [midgame]. So, you can more or less sell all your floater corpses in the earlygame – there’s a steady stream of them all game long.
- Meld – Similarly to floater corpses, meld is plentiful and only becomes useful midgame. Unlike with floater corpses, selling all of it will result in shortages later – but the earlygame cash infusion is tempting, and stocks can be replenished reasonably quickly. Personally I sell all my meld in the first three months, but this depends on player preference and strategy – if doing a MEC rush you should keep some of the stuff.
- Chryssalid carcass – They’re only used for chitin platings, an item you won’t be mass producing. And you get a lot of cash from them.
- Drone corpses – You need a lot of these, but mostly in the late game and for nonvital projects. On the other hand, you won’t get all that much cash from selling.
- Seeker wreck – You only need 10-15 for midgame projects, the rest can be sold. You can always kill more seekers, so you don’t really need to keep the 10-15 reserve either.
Hard sales
The naive approach to the market is to try and only sell resources that will never be needed, avoiding any material shortages. This is a flawed way of thinking – cash is a resource like any other, and refusing to sell means accepting a shortage in cash and any resources derived from it (like alloys, which you can acquire by purchasing more interceptors).
This isn’t to say that you should dump all of your elerium, but you should think of the black market as something that allows you to move shortages around. You can delay your laser cannon production in May due to a lack of cash, or you can sell some resources at the cost of potentially delaying some other project in December. Dealing with the black market isn’t about avoiding all project delays, it’s about picking which ones you’d rather have.
The wiki page on alien artifacts is the best and most detailed guide here – [link] . Reference it carefully before selling stuff. That said, here are some items I recommend looking at first:
- Thin man corpses – you get a lot so you can skim a bit safely. Chem grenades come up fairly late, improved medkits are very nice but can be delayed, and both projects don’t require much corpses compared to how many you’ll get monthly, so maintaining a reserve isn’t really necessary.
- Cyberdisk wrecks – you won’t get them by the dozens and there’s plenty of projects that require them, but they give a lot of cash and the only urgent project is penetrator weapons (3).
- Surgeries and stasis tanks – advanced surgery is a very expensive project. Think hard about whether you want 30% faster wound recovery or 1300+ in cash.
- Council requests – requests with cash rewards tend to be very rewarding, so they’re a good deal if you’re willing to risk a shortage. I almost always fulfill elerium/alloy requests.
- Power sources and flight computers – this point is less a recommendation and more a debrief. To upgrade your laser cannons, you need 12 power sources total [6 for supercapacitors and 6 for prerequisite research]. It’s lategame research, but they’re hard to get and how many you have will wildly vary depending on how many large UFOs you assault. You need a dozen computers for a variety of vital airspace research, and they’re more plentiful, but you need them much earlier than the power sources.