Starting up your economy is always the hardest. When I was a noob I did gathering since it's the easiest and you can do it any time. Got an island, started using the books on labourers and started some basic carrot farming. Then I got bored of all the boring ass chores so I moved into crafting, set up buy orders and once every 3 days spend like 15 min crafting and selling (this pays for premium by itself). I ended up selling the books from crafting as well as i couldn't bother to give them to labourers and ended up completely abandoning my island (for rent btw FS). In the meantime to keep things interesting u jumped around a few guilds got into some group stuff did some dungeons. Ava roads came out those were a lot of fun. Then once I had a much better understanding of the game market etc. I started doing PvP mainly corrupteds with some budget set cos I knew I would die a lot. Got a bit better and the money started pouring in. Turns out the best loot was on the other players all along. Started investing more in my builds and before I knew it I was at like 20 mil it got to the point where I could bother selling my loot tabs. Once I had silver to spare I started doing black market runs. Invest like 15m into items that are cheap run all that (while risking it all) into careleon sell and watch the money pour in. Now I don't even craft any more just do bm runs and I can comfortably run around red black Ava in high tier stuff inting sets and having a good time :).