Bio Engineer Archive

I wouldn't call it a 'long' grind, as long as you have a slew of resources (see the FAQ for estimates) you can pretty much crank it out in a week or so. The hard part is the DNA sampling, and for that I'd recommend picking up enough in Exploration to get a good /maskscent, enough in unarmed to be able to defend yourself, and enough in Pharmacology to be able to use a good stimpack B.

Personally, I ran my own harvesters (keeping Survey IV for a long time) to get a slew of medic type resources built up first, selling the excess to fund the harvesters.

After that, well, I've been a Master BE for well over a year, although I rarely make creatures (except the occasional 'house' pet or a mount for a new player). Mostly I make tailor tissues and most of those I only bother with the +12-+15 range as the cost of the meat to get much higher is prohibitive. The market is tough on my server these days tho, and there's quite a number of BE's around. It pays to develop working relationships with a couple of popular tailors so that you have a steady income.

I don't bother with chef additives unless the chef supplies the meat (I have more high end flora than I can probably use in a year). Your mileage may vary depending on who you play with and what contacts you've made.

Is it worth it? That depends on what you make of it and whether you enjoy dealing with other people. If you like helping new players, then being able to help them with inexpensive pets and pet stims is rewarding in and of itself.

Being able to make a lot of money as a BE is a completely different question and will vary tremendously from server to server and even from planet to planet. I used to think I was doing well with some 600k in sales each week, but I never managed to accumulate more than a couple of million credits at any one point (What can I say, when you find 30k of high quality herbivore meat on sale in a single stack for 900k then your cash reserves take a sudden big hit!).

Nowadays I'm lucky to make enough regular sales to keep up the maintenance on my house and factory. That's a side effect of *not* spending hours collecting high-end DNA to make 'uber' pets tho. As well as having a vendor on a remote planet. (plus an overall side effect of JTL and the Jedi quests, folks are way too busy playing starship pilot with the lucrative income that comes from that to be bothered shopping for 'stuff' that's of no use to them in space whatsoever.)

Is it still 'fun' for me? It sure is, although my character is also a dancer which is also fun and social.

I don't plan on ever dropping BE tho, I get a great deal of satisfaction out of helping new players and of seeing my tailored tissues end up in custom outfits on people who truly appreciate what they have.

It's a time intensive profession, either time in shopping, time in resource gathering or time in developing and maintaining business relationships. But that's pretty much true for any of the 'elite' or 'hybrid' crafting type professions. Like any crafting profession you have to find a 'niche' or 'style' that's both comfortable and enjoyable for you. Some BE's enjoy the challenge of gathering a wide variety of DNA and doing the complex combines needed to make a truly memorable creature, others enjoy the challenge of the mass-production and marketing aspects involved with chef additives, some enjoy the challenge of collecting enough of a scarce resource to do a BIG run of some of the more challenging tissues (building a stack of say, 2000 eggs with high oq, pe and fv, as well as a big stack of high quality scaley hide at the same time is quite a challenge. Doing that and then working with a tailor to *give* away a dozen identical outfits with +25 Dance/Music wound healing to a musician band and/or dance troupe in preparation for a major player run event is a *big* achievement, but one that results in no badges and nothing except peer admiration.)

So, if you work BE as a 'social' profession (working with chefs and/or tailors), it's a lot of fun. If you work with folks who prepare 'Welcome' kits for new players by supplying low level pets and/or mounts and pet stims it's also a lot of fun.

That's assuming that your idea of 'fun' is 'social' in nature. If it's simply 'mercenary' (a.k.a. 'Get rich'), then it can also be fun, but it can also be very frustrating unless you have the contacts with chefs/tailors or tamers.