Updated for level 75 / Onslaught Expansion / 6.0! Woohoo! – Swtorista, August 2020

Earning credits in Star Wars: The Old Republic isn’t as difficult as it might seem – in this video, we’ll be going over how to earn credits through conquest, flashpoints, heroics, gathering, crafting, and the GTN.

Earning Credits at a Low-Level

If you’re on a low level character, one important thing to know is that all quests in-game reward you with less credits the lower you level is. If you’re looking to save up for something expensive, you’ll first watch to level up as high as possible. If you’re on a free-to-play account, that’ll be level 60, and for recent subscribers that’ll be level 75. Quest rewards scale with level and most of your credits will be earned once you hit max-level – you shouldn’t be worrying too much about earning credits until you have at least one character levelled all the way. Don’t forget if you are preferred or free-to-play your credits will be capped at 1,000,000 credits and any additional ones you earn go into an escrow until you are subscribed – so make sure to deposit you credits in to your legacy bank before that point so they don’t go in to escrow.

As you level, make sure to pick up and sell any items you don’t need. You’ll receive gray-bordered items, these are specifically meant to be sold for credits, and you can easily sell them to vendors that have the yello and green box icon over their head, by clicking “Sell Junk”. If you get lucky and pick up any blue-bordered or purple-bordered items that don’t say “Bound” or “Bound to Legacy” when you roll over them in your inventory, you can often sell them on the GTN to other players for more credits than NPC vendors will buy them for. Don’t forget you can also sell any low-level bound gear that you don’t need anymore to vendors for extra credits.

While you’re levelling, you can also pick up the gathering crew skills from the fleet. Slicing, Scavenging, Archaeology and Bioanalysis all let you pick materials up off the ground to sell for pure profit on the GTN. You can also start crafting and gathering with your companions as soon as you finish your first planet, which we’ll cover in the crafting section.

#1 Conquest

Conquesting is an extremely easy way to earn credits and valuable crafting materials just by playing the game. Every week, you’ll have a personal conquest point goal to meet, and you can get conquest points by doing the objectives listed on the Conquest panel, which is tab at the top of the normal missions panel. Conquests reset weekly, so you have a limited time to meet your personal goal and earn the rewards each week.

Solo

If you participate solo and meet your personal conquest points goal, you get….

38,000 credits right off the bat

100,000 credits in the form of a credit certificate which you can sell to a vendor

4 Solid Resource Matrix that sell for a lot on the GTN

3 crafting decorations which also can be sold on the GTN

And a box of gear and tech fragments

Guild

If you participate with your guild, and your guild reaches their guild goal on a large-yield planet, you’ll also get:

31,000 more credits

150,000 credit certificate

4 more Strategic Resource Matrixes

10 purple jawa scraps, which can be turned in for rarer purple-bordered crafting materials

And a flagship encryption of your choice. The encryptions can be used to unlock more rooms in a guild’s flagship, so you could either donate this one to your guild or sell it for a couple hundred thousand credits on the GTN.

Even if you just participate solo, you’ll be getting an easy 100 thousand credits and the rare crafting materials, and if you conquest with a guild you get double or more rewards as a bonus!

Low level players get slightly different rewards, but conquest is still a great way to earn credits especially if you’re in a guild.

Super Easy Conquest Objectives for Credits

Here’s my super easy list of conquest objectives for level 75 players. Then you can run heroics, pvp, flashpoints, or any other type of quest to reach your weekly goal. Low-level characters may have similar objectives available depending on their level plus a few more easy ones like taking a taxi or assigning a utility point.

1. Run any 5 Crew skill missions (once per day) – SUPER EASY! – Send your companions out to gather materials!

2. Level up a crew skill (once per day) – SUPER EASY! if you are not maxed out. Ties in well with running any 5 crew skill missions!

3. Send your companion to sell items (once per day) – SUPER EASY! – Right click their portrait, choose sell trash.

4. Give a gift to your companion (once per day) – SUPER EASY! Keep a little stack of inexpensive gifts in your legacy bay for easy access.

5. Raise a companion’s influence level (once per day) – SUPER EASY! Just give them gifts which are conveniently also an objective!

6. Place 5 decorations in your stronghold (once per day) – SUPER EASY!

7. Recalibrate an amplifier (once per day) – SUPER EASY! You can even do it on a cheap piece of gear from the Adaptive Vendor in the supplies section of the fleet if you don’t have an amplifiers yet.

Conquest on Multiple Characters for Credits

If you’re playing regularly, you’ll should reach your conquest objective without even trying, on your frequently played characters. You can then hop around and complete your personal goal on multiple characters to earn the weekly reward on each character. Most objectives are daily repeatable with a yellow triangle beside them. So if you only have one day to play per week, you might try and gain your conquest points with harder objectives on your main character, then use the easy ones we talked earlier about on your less-played character. If you plan on playing everyday, you can hop on a different character every day of the week and complete those easy objectives on each of your characters for minimal work! Some players will even complete conquest on 10-20 character per week!

If you want to learn more about conquest, I’ve got a video called “What is Conquest in SWTOR?” as well:

#2 Flashpoints

Running Master Mode Flashpoints solo while in stealth can be an extremely fast way to earn credits for players who are at item-rating 306 gear. Your stealth character will allow you to skip past a large majority of even all of the smaller enemies in the Flashpoint, and you’ll just fight the bosses which drop gear and bundles of crafting materials. Running a Flashpoints with three bosses will get you approximately 20 pieces of gold-bordered gear, a pile of tech fragments, and 30 Processed Isotope Stabilizers which you can sell on the GTN for credits. The big money comes from Reverse-Engineering the yellow-bordered gear that drops from the Flashpoint. While we don’t have exact numbers, for roughly every Flashpoint run you do, you’ll get one yellow-bordered Legendary Ember material from Reverse-Engineering, which is the most expensive level 75 crafting material currently available in the game. On top of that, you’ll also get a pile of Jawa Junk from reverse-engineering you can turn in for crafting materials to sell.

The most common Flashpoints to stealth through are Master Mode Red Reaper (Guide) and Hammer Station. Inexperienced players will have a rough time soloing the bosses, but even a very bad team of two stealthers can take them on easily once they understand the mechanics. The big thing to know is that if you want to make credits, you should go in with full 306 gear, otherwise lower-tier gear will drop that won’t reverse-engineer to give you those rare Legendary Embers. However both of these Flashpoints are also great to run to gear up if you aren’t 306 yet, as they drop so much gear.

Here’s an example of all the gear you get from a single run:

And here’s what we got from reverse-engineering that (didn’t get lucky with the Legendary Ember, did get tons of jawa scrap):

There’s also a weekly available for completing any three Master Mode flashpoints that gives you three really good gear crates that will be filled with 3-5 pieces of gold gear each plus a ton of tech fragments. Pick this up in the Supplies section of the fleet before you start. You do NOT need to complete these through the groupfinder to get the weekly.

While you run time will vary a lot depending on how well you know the Flashpoint and how fast you can complete the boss fights, I’ve seen players report that can run Red Reaper in about 10-15 minutes on a solo stealth character, and Hammer Station as low as about 5 minutes with a group of two stealthers. If you can get in at least 4 Red Reaper stealth runs per hour, and got 4 Legendary embers between the reverse-engineered boss gear and the weekly gear, on my server’s GTN you’d be looking at about 4 million credits per hour worth of materials from the Legendary Embers and Processed Isotope Stabilizies dropped from the bosses. This doesn’t even include the extra credits you can get from your Tech Fragments which we’ll talk about later. Stealthing Master Mode flashpoints for materials is by far the best way to make credits if you have an item-rating 306 stealth character, especially if you can do it quickly!

#3 Swoop Event

The Swoop event is a limited-time racing event. While the event is running, it’s by far the most lucrative event in the entire game. You can very easily earn 700,000 credits in 20 – 30 minutes on a level 75 character. Pick up the daily quests, pick up the weekly quests, and while running the races complete the bonus time quest and bonus objectives quest for a large pile of extra credits for each of the nine courses. You can then go and run the nine races again on a second and third character for another pile of credits for about 2 million credits per hour!

#4 Heroics

A very easy way to earn credits is to do Heroics. Heroics are repeatable daily quests which are meant to be done in groups of 2 or more, but can often be completed solo by experienced players. Heroics tend to be a lot shorter than running more involved quests like flashpoints or operations, and players who run them regularly can complete them fairly quickly. Heroics also now have a free teleport, which means you can get to them very quickly without wasting time on travel.

At level 61 or higher, Heroics start granting locked supply crates. These can be turned in to Odessan after you have completed Chapter 9 of Knights of the Fallen Empire on your character, and grant extra credits, and extra items that can be sold to vendors and very valuable golden-bordered gifts that can be sold on the GTN for a lot of credits. Don’t forget you also get credits from a quest on your Odessan base when you increase your alliance commander’s influence level.

When running heroics, you can choose to either run them or choose to try and run them efficiently, either by only running the faster ones or by running the ones that are good for stealthing through quickly. If you decided to run all 70 of the basic heroics and their bonus quests, you’d earn about 3 million credits guaranteed from the quests, plus an extra 2 million credits from selling the gold gifts on the GTN to other players. While researching, we took a team of 4 level 75 players through all the heroics, and with a team that didn’t always know where they were going, it took us a total of about six and half hours, which we could probably shave down a lot by the second time we ran it, for about 800,000 credits per hour. Some heroics are ridiculously quick especially on the first two planets, while others take up way too much time to be worth it. Running heroics alone but picking which ones to run efficiently will earn you only slightly less per hour than doing them indiscriminately with a full group. I’ve put together a short list of efficient heroics you can run very quickly, in a link in the description of this video. On top of that, if you have a stealth character, you can run the heroics even faster by skipping as many enemies as possible by stealthing past them or putting them to sleep while you click an objective beside them.

List Source: Really Awesome Heroics List

Republic Short Heroics List

I have tested this list, it’s a good short list you can do solo in under an hour even without a stealth character.

Alderaan – Special Delivery

Balmorra – Industrial Sabotage

Balmorra – Local Predators

Belsavis – Jungle Flight

Belsavis – Open Communications

Coruscant – Enemies of the Republic

Coruscant – Republic’s Most Wanted

Ord Mantell (Trooper & Smuggler only) – Cutting Off the Head

Ord Mantell (Trooper & Smuggler only) – Destroy the Beacons

Ord Mantell (Trooper & Smuggler only) – Buying Loyalty

Taris – Rakghoul Release

Tatooine – Pirate Bullies

Imperial Short Heroics List

I have not tested this list, but they all should be pretty short.

Alderaan – Spring Thaw

Balmorra – Toxic Bombs

Balmorra – A Question of Motivation

Belsavis – A Rock and a Hard Place

Corellia – Explosive Assault

Corellia – CorSec Crackdown

Corellia – Prison Busting

Dromund Kaas – Saving Face

Dromund Kaas – Personal Challenge

Hoth – Pirated Lockbox

Hoth – Deconstruction Efforts

Hoth – Taking the Heat

Hutta (Bounty Hunter & Imperial Agent only) – The Man with the Steel Voice

Korriban (Sith Warrior & Inquisitor only) – The Hate Machine

Korriban (Sith Warrior & Inquisitor only) – Armed and Dangerous

Tatooine – Prison Labor

Tatooine – Jawa Trade

CZ-198

If you’re looking for an extremely quick and extremely simple way to earn a bundle of credits, the daily planet CZ-198 can be completed in 10-15 minutes and gives you a cool 100,000 credits. It’s bit less profitable than heroics, but you don’t have to carefully pick and choose which quests to do, just fly to the planet pick of the quests, complete them and quick travel back to the terminal to get your credits. While the other dailies and reputation tracks offer cool rewards, none of them will be making this list for their ability to earn you credits.

#5 Jawa Junk

If you’re level 75, any of the activities we just talked about including conquest, flashpoints, heroics, pvp, or almost any other activity in the game will eventually get you endgame gear. If you’re still working on your gear, you’ll compare your new gear to what you have, equip any that have a higher gear score or are better for your stat distribution, then disintegrate the rest. When you disassemble this gear, you’ll gain a special type of item currency called Jawa Junk that you can turn in for materials. To spend your Jawa Junk, go to the Cartel Bazaar which is the northern elevator on the Republic fleet, and the southern elevator on the Imperial fleet, and look for the Jawa vendors, where you can spend your green, blue and purple jawa junk on crafting materials. If you’re looking to make credits, you’d then sell these crafting materials on the GTN for some easy extra money. What exact items you should buy for the best profit will depend on the current market. Some items that players often buy to resell for a good value are the green items that only cost 1 jawa scrap, including Desh, Silica, Dielectric Cell Fiber, Green Goo, Lost Artifact Fragment, Rubat Crystal, and Sacred Artifact Fragment, which are used in large quantities by competitive guilds to craft for Conquest. Purple and Blue items you’ll want to compare prices but I’d check the ones that cost only 1 as well. A few other purple items to compare include the Strategic Resource Matrix, and the two gifts hiding in there which are the Armor Maintenance and Spiced Aric Tongue items.

If you need to compare, I’ve made a Google Docs spreadsheet you can make a copy of to help you compare prices. Choose File -> Make a copy, then on your copy type in the GTN unit price after sorting it low to high, then the sheet will tell you the credits-to-jawa-junk ration on the right-hand column. Jawa Junk Sheet

#6 Tech Fragments

When you disassemble level 75 armor, you will also get tech fragments. While you are still gearing your characters up, you’ll probably want to save these tech fragments as you an spend them set bonus gear, which is some of the best gear in the entire game. But once your characters are all geared up, you can start turning those tech fragments into credits. The idea is to use your tech fragments to buy gold-bordered gear, disassemble it, and then hope you get lucky and receive a Legendary ember, and even if you strike out, you’ll get a small pile of Jawa Junk you can trade in for crafting materials. The cheapest option seems to be buying random mods for 175 tech fragments, then disassembling those. You can buy these random items from a vendor in the Supplies section of the fleet, Imperial side her name is Takana and Republic side his name is [[Nitoo??]]. The randomized gear you get is based on your current gear score, so make sure you’re wearing a full set of 306 when you go to buy it.

#7 Gathering Materials

If you have Slicing, Scavenging, Archaeology, or Bioanalysis as a crew skill, you can gather materials in the world to sell to other players who will use them for crafting.

While you are running around gathering materials, don’t forget you can also send your companions out on missions to gather materials​ too. If you don’t like having to sell your materials on the GTN, slicing will reward you with pure credits.

One important thing to know is that when you gain crafting materials, they do not go in to your inventory. Instead, most materials automatically go in to your Materials Bay, which is accessible in your inventory from a tiny symbol of a diamond on the left. To remove materials from your legacy-wide materials bay, just right click them and they’ll go in to your inventory.

To sell your materials, go to the GTN located in the Galactic Trade Market section of the fleet, and click in the typing box under name. Then SHIFT+LEFT CLICK the material in your inventory. This will put the name in the GTN so you don’t have to type it in. Then, click Unit Price to sort by price until the lowest price is showing. If you’re just starting to sell, and easy way to price your goods is to price them for slightly less than the current lowest price. Make sure to set the price for your entire bundle, so if you want your Unit Price for your crafting material to be 1,000 credits, and you have 17 of them, price the whole thing for 17,000 credits and set the duration to 3 days.

What materials are most lucrative to gather will shift over time, and as you start pricing your materials on the GTN, you’ll start learning the market. You’ll also start learning what prices are low or high for the materials you have, so you can gage when you hold on to materials if the price is too low instead of selling them as cheap as possible. Experienced players will also buy out the stock of a player who is pricing their goods too low, and resell them at a higher price!

If you’re gathering looking to gather materials on the ground, grade 8 materials are on Yavin 4, grade 9 materials are in the Zakuul swamp, Zakuul Break town and Darvanis from Chapter 14 of Knights of the Fallen Empire, grade 10 materials are on Iokath and grade 11 materials are on Onderon and Mek-Sha. Even lower level materials can sell fairly well on the GTN, because other players buy them to craft decorations, low-level gear, cosmetic gear, dyes and crystals. If you are running into other players who gathering, you can try switching instances by opening your map and selecting another instance from the drop-down on the bottom right.

If you’re looking for something to start gathering to sell, I recommend the lowest-level grade-one materials except for the red, blue and green color crystals.

#8 Playing the GTN

Between heroics, conquest and gathering there are some pretty solid ways to earn credits, however players that are billionaires most often do something known as “playing the GTN”. This is when players carefully watch the GTN and the market, and buy and sell items based on what they’ve seen, instead of earning credits directly through quests in the game.

A simple example of playing the GTN might include watching for players posting items at low prices, buying them, and reselling them at the normal price for a quick profit. These types of credit-making tactics require two things… Knowledge of the average prices of items, and the patience to make credits over time.

Items that players flip are usually cartel pack items, including armors, weapons, mounts, emotes, color crystals and decorations, and also companion gifts and crafting materials. Players usually pick one or two areas of expertise and focus on them, so they can get familiar with the prices and the market. One easy way to start flipping items is by noticing when players accidentally sell their items for the default price set by the GTN instead of a custom price – for example, you may see a companion gift is being sold for 8,000 credits when the next highest one is being sold for 100,000 credits. You buy this item, get it from your mailbox, then resell it at the higher price for easy profit.

#9 Crafting

Players often also combine playing the GTN with high-level crafting. The most common items to be crafted seem to be augment kits, augments and stims, rather than gear, as the crafting path to being able to craft gear is very steep and expensive, whereas the path to earn gear is the easiest it’s ever been in any expansion. Knowing what to craft involves finding that niche where you can unlock the gold crafting schematics, then acquire the crafting materials for cheaper than you can sell what you craft, and this is something you’ll need to figure out for yourself based on the price of materials, finished items, and their supply and demand on your particular server. Just to unlock the ability to craft high-level items costs 500,000 credits, and reverse-engineering so you can get gold schematics will likely costs you millions, so crafting is not for the feint of heart, and is also how players are able to make millions of credits in profit.

You can also find yourself a niche within low level crafting and charging exorbitant prices to players who have lots of credits to gear up their low-level characters. Other crafting niches include cosmetic armor, dyes, crystals, and decorations. Whether you can take advantage of these niches depends on the supply and demand of your server, which you can find out by watching the GTN over time for both pricing of the finished item, pricing of the materials, and general availability.

If you want in on the crafting game but figuring out what to craft seems like too much of a hassle, you can instead gather materials and sell them to players who are crafting!

#10 Cartel Coins

Lastly, subscribers get 500 cartel points per month, and everyone can get 100 cartel coins per month for free if they use a security key on their phone.

If you’re a subscriber, you might want to convert these cartel coins to credits. To do so, you buy an item from the Cartel Market for Cartel coins, wait for the timer to wear off in your inventory, then put the item up for sale on the GTN. The hard part is picking what item to get. You have two options: buying and selling a tried-and-true Cartel item, or taking a gamble on something less proven. The first option is very easy – good item to resell include the Master’s Datacron, the Commander’s Token, Hypercrates, and Black / Black dyes.

Just make sure to check the GTN for the credit value of the item before buying- to find out what item will get you the best value, look up it’s lowest price on the GTN, then divide that big credit number by the number of cartel coins it costs. So for example if an item can be sold for 2,000,000 credits on the GTN, and costs 1,000 cartel coins, you get 2,000 credits per cartel coin spent. The item with the highest credits-to-cartel-coin ratio will likely give you the most profit – just keep in mind prices on the GTN fluctuate, and it may be harder to sell some items than others, but those four are pretty easy to sell.

The second option requires a little more thought – other items, like armors, weapons, decorations, might be worth more, but their price fluctuates more and you may have a harder time selling them. One thing to look in to is the front page of the Cartel Market, which shows items that are only available on the market for a limited time on sale. Some of these as garbage deals, while others might be in scarce supply on the GTN as they haven’t been sold on the market for a while. You’ll have to decide if you want to take the risk for a bigger profit or instead buy and sell those trusted items mentioned earlier.

How to Make Credits

Making credits in Star Wars: The Old Republic can be as easy or as hard as you want it to be. Complete your conquest every week, and run heroics for easy credits. If you have a stealthing character, jump in to Master mode flashpoints for a quick route to credits through gear. Turn in your Jawa Junk and Tech fragments for materials you can sell on the GTN. And lastly learn to play the market and craft if you want to join the big leagues. I hope this video helped point you in the right direction of making at least a million credits per hour,

Nope: PvP

Not good credits: PvP used to be a decent way to earn credits in the previous expansion, but as far as I can tell is not a really good way to earn credits anymore. You should be getting gear at a decent rate at least.

The PvP daily quest to win one match grants 18,000 credits and the weekly to win 10 matches gives 23,000 credits. Each match also rewards you 5 -20 thousand credits, depending on if you win or lose and the type of match. You also get a box full of gear for completing a match or completing a daily or weekly, which has a chance of having crafting materials in it which can be sold on the GTN, however the crafting materials are not worth a ton, for example the blue Processed Isotope Stabilizer sells for 15,000 credits on my server and the rare purple Solid Resource Matrix is only worth 150,000 credits which you might get from the weekly.

Ranked PvP

Ranked PvP offers better rewards including the gold-bordered Legendary Embers, which are one of the most valuable crafting materials in the game. The only catch is that the daily and weekly rewards are based on winning the competitive ranked matches, not completing them… and the solo daily doesn’t even grant embers.

Galactic Starfighter

Galactic Starfighter however still offers great rewards. Completing the daily will get you an awesome pile of 10 Processed Isotope Stabilizers just for playing two matches or winning one! The weekly gets you a pile of 60, which on my server would sell for about a million credits total.

Unfortunately, no matter what mode you play, PvP is not going to make you a millionaire quickly. If you enjoy PvPing though, you can use one of the other methods in this guide to make credits between matches including heroics, gathering, crafting or playing the GTN. You can easily earn almost a million credits per hour even from easier activities like heroics, and doing more difficult activities like Master mode flashpoints will make you more credits than you know what to do with. Good luck out there, and may the GTN, be with you!