Strongly agree with the above comments on harvesting to make money. I tell people not to leave newbie island until they have at least 100k in the bank to avoid having to do the money shuffle early on...but since you're already here...
The reason you're not selling mats at present is that the demand for q20 mats is almost non-existent off of newbie island. Only crafters below level 20 have any real interest in such materials - and given the craft tree doesn't split up before then, doesn't take very long to get there.
Try putting q30+ materials up on the market, especially weapons (shell, bark, fiber, node) and heavy armor (wood, resin, oil, sap) materials. Grinding both categories takes a lot of mats, and most grinders are only too happy not to harvest them, especially if you can find the best of the breed (big shell for weapons, for instance). Try stacking the mats in large quantities, like 50 or even 99 - makes it much easier as a crafter. Try harvesting only choice mats if you can; the pricing you get versus basic mats automatically goes up 20%, and they tend to sell to players more quickly (who often don't understand that a combination of the right fine/choice mats often makes a better item.)
One other tip - if you need money early on, take the missions offered by the local messengers (delivery) and the kill missions offered by the corporals. Both offer enough after a few missions to start buying better gear.
Also, if you want to explore, make sure to get speedup power. Once you learn how to use it - works only infrequently outrunning a mob that's already on you, but is marvelous for shooting through a hole to get to a safe area - becomes more valuable than any other skill for exploring.
zukor wrote:I didn't think failures had any impact on mats....you don't lose the mats when you fail, do you? Or do you mean the "reduced quality" failures?
This is one of the many reasons to avoid crafting like the plague if you want to be rich (at least until you pass q100 manufacturing, when its not as easy to get mats and set manufacturing becomes tougher given the tree split, meaning less crafters).
Think about it this way. The base item price offered by the NPC is the exact sum of the offer price he'd give you for the raw mats comprising the item. So, every time you make a reduced quality item - and that's what, at least 40% when you're grinding 10 levels up - its as if the mats you used were 10 or 40 levels lower. Add in that most failures don't sell to players, and a significant amount of quality grind gear below q100 doesn't sell at even 50-75% markups. So you're much better off financially selling the raw mats directly to the vendor at a 100% markup and hoping someone bites. I try not to think about it, but if I had to guess taking 6 crafting lines to 100 has probably cost me upwards of 30M dappers.
You can even make the argument that post q100 you might still be better off selling mats. Yeah, there's a markup for scarcity of crafters, but I guarantee you if you put supreme q200 big shell on the vendor you could almost certainly make as much money as you would selling the weapon, with a lot less hassle.
The entire pricing/overseer/vendor system needs a massive overhaul (as I've been arguing since patch 1 was on ATS and I hoped the pricing was bugged), but crafting seems to be almost as low on the priority list as ranged.