Bulk orders are deeds that entitle you to sell a certain amount of objects to the government for a fixed price and a fixed reward of XP. Bulk orders are a very popular means of working up a character and also making money. They create of course a great demand of raw materials which must be fulfilled either by your character or from a vendotronic.
You get bulk orders from other characters who must have Oratory Skill to create bulk orders on behalf of the government. They often sell them in their vendors. Once you have a bulk order in your possession, you have to personalize it. That means the order examines your personal production skill and determines, which items you can produce with your skills and then creates a set of items it demands from you. The number of different items depends on the width of your production skills. The more different skills you have, the more different items the bulk order demands. The higher your highest production skill is, the higher the number of objects per item the bulk order demands.
You personalize the order by double clicking it twice within 5 seconds. Once it is personalized, it can only be used by you. In order to prevent characters from selling personalized bulk orders in their vendors, you can not store them in a vendotronic. Once the order is personalized, double clicking it will repeat what the order demands from you and how long you have left to fulfill the order. Newbies in Stratford can also buy bulk orders from government vendors which are already personalized for them. Non-Newbies can not buy bulk orders from government vendors.
Your next step should now be to manufacture or buy the required items. You have two choices of storing these items:
What this does is, teleport the selected item from your inventory to a specially marked locker in your vault. This locker can hold a great number of items, but you can not retrieve items from there at will! So don't think about abusing this locker as a free storage device. You can destroy the complete content of the locker with the Destroy Bulkstorage button in the same Tab. When you go to your vault and double click the storage, you will get a list of items stored in it.
Now the next step is, to sell the bulk order back to the government and receive the reward. To do this, you go to any government vendotronic and put the bulk order in your Sale inventory. Then proceed normally as described in the common Vendotronic section and sell the bulk order. This action will remove the bulk order from your inventory but will also remove all the items that the bulk order requested, either from your inventory or from the Bulkstorage in your vault. Only those objects are taken from your inventory which are in the sales inventory, so be sure to move the objects you want to sell with the bulk order there or they will not be found! This prevents accidental sale of objects you want to keep. If you don't have all the objects the bulk order required, the order is not sold and you get a message what is missing.
The Bulkstorage is the best way to prepare for selling a bulk order since you don't have to carry the valuable and heavy items to a government vendor. make frequent use of it, it makes your life easier.
There are two types of bulk orders: Simple ones, and prime orders. Simple orders are what you should use until your character has mastered all four levels of a production skill. Prime bulk orders only demand objects of the highest two production levels of the highest skill you possess. For example if you have Blacksmith level 4 it will request only blacksmith level 3 and 4 objects. These are also usually the objects that are the most expensive and therefore give the best reward. Prime Bulk orders are a way to concentrate on those objects that give you the best reward instead of wasting time on bulk orders that demand simple objects and give only little reward.
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