Chef Archive

This is my guide to grinding chef, at least what worked best for me. I gathered this info both from the forums and from personal experience. I'm going to divide this into 4 parts: materials required. grinding survey, grinding to mixology 2, and grinding to Master. Please feel free to use what you need and forget the rest. I will not cover the grind to Novice Chef, because I really don't remember what I did =)

Part 1 - Materials required and Schematics Used

This is what I used to grind my way up:
11k fruit
84k corn
84k water
204k wheat
6 food crafting tools

The exact amounts of resources required may vary depending your critical failure rate.

Schematics
Wastril Bread (practice) - 73xp
Ithorian Mist (practice) - 178xp
XP required to mix 2 - 76800
XP required to Master - 742400

If you choose to buy the materials, you can skip to part 3, and then you can lend me some money, cause you have a lot more than I do! For you cheapo's out there, continue to the next part.

Part 2 - Grinding Survey
I'm including this part because some people out there may not have ever surveyed before. Hopefully, this will make it as painless a process as possible.
The first thing you need to know how to do is macro. Macroing is not very hard, and if you do a search, you should be able to find many guides to it in the forums that will go into more depth than I will.

This is the basic macro you will need for surveying:

/pause 10;
/sample;
/pause 100; <--- this will vary on what your HAM is like, edit as needed
/sit;
/pause 10;
/stand;
/ui action toolbarSlot00;<--- this is the toolbarslot your sample icon will be in

Pretty simple, right? Now all you have to do is find a good place to survey for something, (the higher the better), start the macro, and go have coffee, talk to your spouse, or something else RL related. Train yourself up to Surveyor, and start mining for the materials you need. Try to mine for one resource at a time, and use the best harvestors you can afford. Make sure you check the base extraction rate (BER). For personal ones, 3-4 is good, for mediums 5, and for heavy extractors I don't know, as I couldn't afford them. I would suggest you spring for mediums if you can afford it.

Once you have everything, continue to part 3.

Part 3 - Mixology 2 is my Friend

As a novice chef, the best food you can grind is Wastril Bread. This delicacy takes 10 fruit and 25 cereal to make. It has 3 slots, so you have to click fast! This is the macro I used for grinding it:

/pause 2;
/ui action toolbarSlotxx;<--slot your crafting tool is in
/selectDraftSchematic xx;<--this number will vary, experiment to find the right one for you
/pause 3;<-- I found 3 gave me enough time to double click on the resource, make it higher or lower as needed
/nextCraftingStage;
/nextCraftingStage;
/createPrototype practice no item;
/pause 1;
/createPrototype practice no item;
/pause 2;
/ui action toolbarSlotxx;<---next crafting tool
/selectDraftSchematic xx;
/pause 3;
/nextCraftingStage;
/nextCraftingStage;
/createPrototype practice no item;
/pause 1;
/createPrototype practice no item;
/pause 2;

And so on, for each tool you have. You will have to create two macro's, as there is not enough text space to do it in one. Get some A5 35 and continue to part 4.

Part 4 - Iron Chef Tatooine!

You have mixology 2 now, congrats! Mix yourself a drink, and continue the grind with Ithorian Mists. These take 20 corn, 20 water, and 40 wheat. The macro I used in part 2 should work fine here, except you may have to give yourself more time to get the resources clicked in. Ithorian Mists will be your friend right up to Master Chef.

And thats about it really... if anyone needs any more information, or has a correction, please add it to the discussion, and we'll go from there!

I was about to point you to dictionary.com but then i saw your handle.

Otherwise nice little guide. Adding the macros , the xp needed, and even a nice little surveying macro is a nice touch.

Some more info regarding harvesters:

You don't need the surveying branch of artisan to use harvesters (since you can do basic surveying just with Novice Artisan), but the increased range makes the search for high-concentration spots easier. And if you're going to be sampling, the increased rate helps some too. And something Kant didn't mention is you're going to need to get some survey tools. A flora is all you really need, although if you want to try out some of the other recipes, you'll want a mineral, a gas, and maybe a chemical.

Personals have a maximum base extract rate of 4, which is pretty easy to get. Heck, if you get Engineering IV and some steel, aluminum, and ore with high UT you can make them yourself. They cost 30 credits per hour maintenance (whether they are running or not), and 25 units of power per hour (only while extracting)

Mediums have a maximum BER of 10, which is a little tough for the architect (need all great successes on components and final combine). A BER of 9 is pretty easy to get, I was told these are the "cast offs" for their attempts at 10. They cost 60 credits and 50 units of power per hour.

Heavies seem to have a max BER of 13, although since Fusions can be made with 14, this may be incorrect. A BER of 12 is pretty commonplace (for architects stocking heavies, at least). They cost 90 credits and 75 units of power per hour.

Power can either be purchased (from the bazaar or resource vendors), or mined with generators. Note: there are only three types that can be used in harvesters: Wind, Solar, and Radioactive. In the bazaar listings, there are categories for Energy (liquid), Energy (gas),and Energy (solid). Wind and Solar are under liquid, along with "Liquid Petrochemical Fuel". Petro can not be used in a harvester. Radioactive is listed under solid, along with "Solid Petrochemical Fuel", which again can not be used.

Mining power is done with a wind, solar, or fusion generator. All generators cost 60 credits per hour in maintenance, and need no power to run. If you go this route, you'll probably want to stick with solar since solar power tends to have a larger PE (giving you more "power units" per unit of actual resource), and the solar generator harvests more quickly than wind. Fusion generators are the fastest, and radioactive concentrations can get into the 90s%, but the generator itself will cost around 100k. You'll need to survey for power the same way as your other resources, with a "solar survey tool", "wind survey tool", or "mineral survey tool" selecting the "radioactive" class of minerals.

If your looking for radioactive. Dont sample it. One of the things that was put in game was that if you sample radioactive without a harvesters you will be poisoned., I havent tried this first hand to see if its true or not. But the dev's had it in the patch notes awhile back.

---

Fodder650 wrote:
If your looking for radioactive. Dont sample it. One of the things that was put in game was that if you sample radioactive without a harvesters you will be poisoned., I havent tried this first hand to see if its true or not. But the dev's had it in the patch notes awhile back.

---

Very good point. Sampling radioactive gives you both wounds and battle fatigue. You will get a warning about this, so you shouldn't run into it accidentally.

Also, radioactive can be harvested with mineral harvesters, and unless the concentration is under 10% (assuming a 4 BER personal), you're extracting more power than the harvester uses.

---

Fodder650 wrote:
If your looking for radioactive. Dont sample it. One of the things that was put in game was that if you sample radioactive without a harvesters you will be poisoned., I havent tried this first hand to see if its true or not. But the dev's had it in the patch notes awhile back.

---

Poison is not the right word, because it is not damage over time. You get something like 100 or 200 pts of damage in each of your HAM bars* . Usually what I do is I survey once just to find out the quality and see if it is worth putting down a harvester, and then immediately go back to town for healing.

Anyway, the point I am making is that I wouldn't say don't survey radioactive, but just be cautious.

To confirm something. I wanted to see what would happen, so I put my OOC hat on, and sampled radioactive.

After the third sampling, I had about 1500 BF, and 1 less wound than I had points in that stat (only HAM, the other 6 stats were unaffected), and I was incapped. I got up in the normal amount of time, but couldn't burstrun, sample, or do anything that requied HAM. I went to a doctor and he healed me up, and no lasting ill-effects have been recorded.

I said sample once! once!

What I like to do is get a full Action Buff(Action, Stamina, Quickness) and then sample while crafting. I pick a good wheat spot and sample that.

thank you Kant for making this and sirv for stickying good job guys

Noted SirVimes i have been corrected.

Also when your creating your macro for the grind. Make sure you understand there is a max length for macros. It wont hit you the first time you make your macro. It might be a day later when your macro suddenly dies in the middle. As I learned here on the forums the way around this is to create a second macro with the last crafting tool or two in it. And have the first macro call it.

Also, concerning the macro, the way to learn your schematic number for /selectdraftschematic isnt easy. Best way i found was to open one tool. Start at 20 and climb 5 until your into foods. This is all depending on how many different artisan and elite artisan items you can create. A lot of times if you find that schematic 20 is alcohol (anovice chef recipe) you will have to go up 1at a time from there. Do not do this piece with your crafting droid out or near a public crafting station. Or the number you think is wastril bread wont be when your not neara crafting station. Also note that as you level up the schematic number CAN change since your adding new items. Its annoying but using a macro will make your grind easier. The way i found to get around it was to do cooking experimenation as soon as i had my grind items. I did entree 1, mix 2, and the complete cooking tree. This meant i had to redo my macros less often. As well as sell level 4 experimented tat sunburns for money sooner.

Also while Im a fountain of grinding knowledge. If you have the resources to do this. Make a factory run of Wastril Bread crates. Label it "Purina Pet Food" and sell or give it to CH'ers. If your giving it away for free dont experiment the uses up. Since your UXP comes from after they use the stack. It never hurts the next day to see you got 500 or 1000 xp because your food was used. The less grind items you do the better. As a business person this is a good give away item. And you will get repeat paying business from it. A lot of CH'ers do not have the forage ability because they couldnt afford to waste the 5 points for it.

Hope this helps

Chauffeur Chaudder hoping today is my day for Expert Bartender status

Two things to add...

Do not wear armor while sampling. The additional HAM cost will slow you down. I was able to run a macros witha short delay (can't remember how short, but under 20 seconds), and with the correct pausing you can almost sample at the same speed and just using the /sample command with no macro.

Radioactives...they kill off 300-400ish HAM. I know this very well as a friend of mine was grinding through doctor and we found that he could get more XP healing my wounds from sampling radioactive than sitting in a busy cantina. I was able to get three samples in and blammo total black and instant incap. After 90ish seconds of him healing me, I'd march to the cantina (usually within 100m) and get healed up. The dancers made good cash and xp of us those night.

5 Starred this post. Sooooo helpful.

For the record, Wastril bread is the 145th item listed in my Schematics, yet is Schematic #25. I guessed it outright with my 3rd guess.

Sorry, had to brag. Usually not that lucky!