Most effective method of making money?

1. Breeding Animals - I can usually sell a small group for about 100 each and you really dont need to do anything other than have a male and female of a species and make sure foxes or panthers dont get to them. They will keep breeding on their own.

2. Beer - Have a large patch of field dedicated to hops. Have a brewery to transform the hops into wort. Have a large amount of barrels to ferment the wort into beer. This requires time and some effort. The hops have to grow, you have to assign someone to make wort out of the hops, and then it requires more time as the wort ferments into beer. Rinse and repeat.

3. Art - I usually have an artist creating the most intricate sculptures to sell. This isnt exactly renewable though, since stone is finite and you have to start depending on traders for it eventually.

From the things already said. I always make money also from selling the human meat and human leather (mostly the leather), when a tribe attacks it's always a massacre. And it's much more efficient than to burn or bury corpses.

1. You need a colonist who is Psychopath (doesn't care about butchering people)
2. You need a freezer for corpses (small is enough) - don't forget double walls, doors
3. You need a big freezer for human meat - don't forget double walls, doors, you can have a quite big freezer with just 2 coolers
4. Big storage for the human skins (they are ugly)
5. Set up the area around the butcher table in a way that only psychopaths can butcher people (so your other colonists don't get mood debuff) //EDIT: You can now assign butcher job to exact person.

Your other colonists will get just -6 debuff that your colony butchered humanlike. So butcher them all at once, it's easy to deal with just -6 for couple of days.

The disadvantage is that it may take a while to get a trader who is willing to buy the human skin and meat. You can more easily sell packaged survival meals made from human meat, but don't let your colonists eat them.

Here is example of the small set-up I have in my current colony with shown area restriction:

Animal husbandry. Breed and sell:

• The large herbivore animals. They reproduce a little slower but are worth big bucks. Ban them from the house and garden so they graze the free grass.

-And chickens (if you have any non vegetarian animals make sure they dont eat the eggs, put the chickens in their own special fenced off area if needed.) The chickens aren't worth a ton but they reproduce like crazy and because they mature so quickly you only need to buy 2-3 to end up with a pack of 50 by then end of the season.

Muffalo herd:

you both shear them for wool (100 at a time),milk them and sell them if your herd is too large. All you need is a few handlers and a reasonable sized patch of hay grass.