How to Make Credits in SWTOR

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 efficiently at level 80.

Updated for 7.3 / August 2023: You can earn 35 million credits in about two hours with the updated methods! This is much lower than last year’s money-making at 100 mill an hour (June 2022), but prices on the GTN for items you might want to buy have also gone down with the credit anti-inflation measures put in place by the developers. For example, a black-black dye is about 450 mill on my server, and a white-white dye is about 300 million, the two rarest dyes on the market which used to go for close to 1 billion, and an Ultimate Cartel Pack is 65 mill making a hypercrate about 2 bill, versus the 6-7 bill I was seeing at its height.

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 80. 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 yellow 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.

How to Make Credits

Earning credits in Star Wars: The Old Republic is incredibly easy if you know what to look for.

  • Step 1 – Earn Tech Fragments through any method you’d like
  • Step 2 – Exchange them for rare crafting materials
  • Step 3 – Sell the rare crafting materials to other players on the GTN
  • Step 4 – Profit!

#0 Tech Fragments

You can spend 4,000 Tech Fragments on a rare material called an OEM or RPM used to craft augments.  While the price of these will vary over time, they are worth millions on the GTN as they are used to craft the best augments in the game. You can buy these rare crafting materials from the Spoils of War vendor in the Supplies section of the Fleet. There’s no level requirement, as long as you have 4,000 tech frags, you can purchase these rare materials.

UPDATE: At the time of updating this guide in August 2023, [OEM-37] on my server are going for 35 million on the GTN, and [RPM-13] are going for about 40 million on the GTN.

You can also exchange leftover Conquest Commendations for Tech Fragments at this vendor!

There are lots of ways to earn Tech Fragments in 7.3, here’s my quick quest list and here’s a full guide.

  • Completing your personal conquest grants 500 Tech Fragments.
  • Exchange 200 Conquest Commendations for 200 Tech Fragments in the Supplies section Conquest vendor
  • Any individual daily or heroic mission grants 30 tech fragments for each mission.
  • The “[WEEKLY] Searching for Allies” quest to complete 3 random Flashpoints via the Group Finder with no Flashpoints filtered out gets you 300 tech frags, and just running through the Group Finder in general gets you a pile of tech fragments, especially as Veteran Flashpoint Bosses drop around 60 each too.
  • You can get 2,000 Tech Fragments total from running all the bosses in a Story Mode operation.
  • You can get 850 Tech Fragments from the Galactic Starfighter weekly to run 4 matches, with wins counting double.
  • You can get 1,500 Tech Fragments from the PvP weekly to run 12 matches, with wins counting triple.

One thing to keep in mind is that Tech Fragments are also used to purchase your Tactical items and Legendary Implants for gearing up at level 80. You may want to gear up before you use your tech fragments to earn credits – or you can ignore gearing all together!

#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.

Your goal is to earn Tech Fragments to buy the rare crafting material explained above.

Solo: If you are playing outside of a guild, you can get 500 Tech Fragments just for completing your personal conquest goal of 100,000 points on your character, and you can complete conquest solo on as many of your characters as you want. You’ll also get 200 Conquest Commendations, which you can exchange for even more Tech Fragments.

Guild: If you conquest with a guild, and your guild reaches their conquest goal, you’ll get an additional 300-500 Tech Fragments for every character you reach your personal conquest goal on. In addition, if you’re conquesting with a a guild, you’ll also get a Flagship Encryption for each characters who completes conquest, which will sell for 6,000,000+ credits on the GTN depending on your server!

This means if you’re in a guild going after high-yield conquest planets, you can earn 35 million credits in a week easily simply by completing conquest on four characters, and exchanging the currencies you earn for rare crafting materials and selling those and the Flagship Encryptions on the GTN! If you’re playing solo without a conquest guild, you can still easily earn that much over the course of two weeks on four characters each week.

Super Easy Conquest Objectives for Credits

Here’s my super easy list of conquest objectives for level 80 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. My favorite is to earn a reputation item of any kind once per day.

SWTOR Conquest Guide

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!

#2 Operations

If you like running group content, story mode Operations are now incredibly valuable to run, as each boss drops a pile of Tech Fragments. Running through an entire story mode operations will get you about 2,000 Tech Fragments, and most groups can complete a story mode operation in under an hour – so if you can find a group, and run two operations, you’ll have enough Tech Fragments to buy one of those rare materials and have earned about 35 million credits in only two hours!

Boss 1: 150 Tech Fragments
Boss 2: 300 Tech Fragments
Boss 3: 500 Tech Fragments
Boss 4: 500 Tech Fragments
Boss 5: 550 Tech Fragments
 Total: 2000 Tech Fragments

#3 GSF / PvP / FPs

Galactic Starfigher and PvP are both also great choices for earning credits, but to earn the big credits through them, there is a lot more variability in time compared to the other methods.

If you like GSF, you can earn 850 Tech Fragments from the Galactic Starfighter weekly to run 4 matches, with wins counting double. If you got unlucky and lost every game, you’d need to run 20 matches before you could get the rare material worth 40 million credits.

If you like normal PvP, you can earn 1,500 Tech Fragments from the PvP weekly to run 12 matches, with wins counting triple. If you got unlucky and lost every game, you’d need to run 36 matches before you could get the rare material worth 40 million credits.

The “[WEEKLY] Searching for Allies” quest to complete 3 random Flashpoints via the Group Finder with no Flashpoints filtered out gets you 300 tech frags, and just running through the Group Finder in general gets you a pile of tech fragments, especially as Veteran Flashpoint Bosses drop around 60 each too.

#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.

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. Don’t forget you also get credits from a quest on your Odessan base when you increase your alliance commander’s influence level – this is located in your “bedroom” on Odessan and gives you around 15,000 bonus credits each time you rank up and accept the mission on the datapad.

Each Heroic you run will now also get you 30 Tech Fragments – this means if you ran 134 Heroics, you’d have enough Tech Fragments to buy one of the rare materials we’ve already talked about, and sell it for around 35 million credits on the GTN.

UPDATE WITH 7.0 EXPANSION: In the previous expansion, you could make great credits doing Heroics at level 61 or higher, as a type of cosmetic reward was granted that you could then sell for additional credits on top of any credits you earned directly from the heroic quest itself. Now however, those items (the Locked Supply Crates / Alliance Crates, and the legacy-bound armors with Remnants in the name) SELL FOR ZERO CREDITS AT VENDORS. This makes heroics no longer as lucrative as they were – but they are still a decent source of credits for players who are playing more casually. If you happen to get any gold-bordered gifts from the crates these can still sell very well on the GTN!

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 (pre-7.0-expansion). 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

Dailies / 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 and complete them. 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 except maybe Ziost, which can be very fast.

#5 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!

#6 Jawa Junk

Jawa Junk is a special type of item currency that you can turn in for crafting materials – it’s harder to get in the current expansion but if you have some, you can convert it to materials which you can sell to other players for credits.

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.

Update 7.0.2: A great item to purchase to resell is a Solid Resource Matrix, it costs 30 purple Jawa Junk, and is selling at over 2 million credits on my server and is very easy to sell as players need it for augments. You can compare it against the Armor Maintenance and Spiced Aric Tongue items which are special types of companion gifts.

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.

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

#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.

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.

SWTOR Crafting Materials Gathering Guide (by all planets and material grades)

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.

UPDATE WITH 7.0 EXPANSION: With the inflation being so incredibly high in this expansion, “the GTN” is the main way players are making credits in the billions. However this method is fairly out of reach for new players which is why it is so far down this how-to-make-credits list.

#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.

Knowing what to craft can be very tricky. Augments are often considered by players to be an easy path to credits – but if you do the math, sometimes outright selling the materials used to craft the augments is more profitable than actually putting them together and selling the completed augments.

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. You can also half-craft – craft the bonded attachments and components, and sell those without crafting them into a finished product. 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!

UPDATE WITH 7.0 EXPANSION: In the 7.0 expansion the main level 80 crafting items are Blue/Purple/Gold augments and Stims/Medpacs, as there is no true level 80 gear items to craft. This is a fairly saturated market, and there are definitely opportunities to find niches in low-level crafting too!

#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. When Galactic Seasons is running, players can also earn a whole bunch of Cartel Coins by working their way up the track.

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.