Chef Archive
Thread: Overwhelmed Master Chef seeks guidance
I made master chef today, yay. So of course I start sporting my new master title. Twenty minutes after making master, someone sends me a tell about making "cake and champagne" in huge amounts for a party they're having tonight. Such huge order, such short notice, I had to turn her down 
Anyways, I put all my time, money and energy into making master, since that's where the good stuff is. Now that I'm there, I have a few resources, a coupla medium harvesters, a troop of personals, no factories, and less than 20k credits to my name. I don't even have a vendor set up yet, grrr.
It's a little overwhelming all the resources required to make stuff, and I don't particularly like hunting for resources (checking harvestors is one thing, but the resource shifts get old fast). And they're so different from item to item ... how is it possible for us to take custom orders without like at least 2 weeks notice?
Anyways, I guess what I'm trying to figure out is how everyone else got their business started and got the ball rolling. Any tricks of the trade on anything would be helpful.
Now I am at 8 factories (contemplating placing 2 more), 10 Heavy Flora Harvestors, 2 Water Harvestors, and 1 Heavy Gas (going out to get another 1 tommarow).
Chemicals, meats and mineral I outsource.
If you don't like tracking down resources you should perhaps try and hire resources gatherers to do it for you.
As far as personal orders, I take TONS of them. To compensate I reserve a couple factories to making on request/obscure/customized items, and all the rest constantly produce my best sellers non-stop. All runs other than the request/obsure/customized items are done in runs as large as possible (1000 runs). If a factory isn't running, you are losing money.
So think you really just need to catch up to the level of production a Master Chef operates out of.
Also perhaps you may want to limit your production for yourself. I know the biggest downside of operating massive operations is that your character pretty much is unflexible. I know my chef character is pretty much done, all time is spent either making food, tracking resources, trainig other chefs, and helping out customers.
Well, one trick for handling custom orders is to have a good stockpile of resources. When something good shifts in, get 50-100k units.
You'll want: cereal, metal, fruits, radioactive, reactive gas, berries, vegetables, domesticated rice, oats, greens, fungi, water...um that should get you started. 
Also, you will need at least one factory (since most of the master level recipes require identical components). I recommend getting another one (or maybe another two) so you can have component factory runs going all the time and still be able to make final items. You will go through Aludians very very quickly.
Hmm, just noticed your starting capital. You may want to focus just on one or two items until you build some some cash reserves. That'll make the resource gathering easier until you can upgrade to 5-6 medium harvs (maybe a large or two). Get a factory and a vendor (requires at least Business III in Artisan), put single stacks up for sale on the bazaar with the waypoint to your store, where you stock full crates. Also advertise on your server trade board. Or whore yourself out in your forum sig like I do.
I think I need to echo Saitek's main point (which doesn't help you particularly, but up and coming Chefs will benefit). Preplanning is absolutely invaluable. If you spend your whole grind only getting the grinding resources and don't stockpile anything for your future business, you're going to have a heck of a time getting the ball rolling. This is one of the reasons why pacing yourself in the grind is so beneficial, as it gives you time to accumulate HQ resources, harvs, factories, vendors, and more.
My advice for you is this. First of all take off your Master Chef title (I know, I know... but really it will help). This will help you to get all the preplanning tasks finished before you put yourself out there as a Master Chef. The less you tell your customers "I can't make that," the better off you'll be. Spend your time collecting an array of resources, building up a bank account (I'd definitely recommend selling some resources to do this... easy to do and they're in demand), getting some factories, and maybe some more harvs. Once you have a decent stockpile of goods and structures, get some food/drink made, and then open a vendor and stock it and keep it stocked. I can't stress how important it is to not have an empty vendor. Most people who visit an empty vendor never come back.
As for my own business, I currently have 4 (moving up to 6 very soon) food/chem factories, 1 equip factory, and 1 structure factory (moving up to 2 very soon). I easily have over 40 heavy harvs, but a good portion of them are mainly for my architect needs. As long as you don't over-extend yourself you shouldn't have a problem prospering. Do what you can handle and move up when you're ready (that applies to getting more/bigger harvs, more factories, more special orders, etc).
I will definetly have to echo the advices of my other esteemed collegues. I started very early. I spent like 3 months running nonstop missions dozens a day trying to save money for my first realy decent harvesters and first factory, all before i even reached novice chef. I opened my first vendor way back at about dom arts II, didn't sell much, but was invaluable experience. By the time I had actually reached my goal of Master Chef 2 weeks ago, I had spent about 5 months already laying the groundwork and infrastructure of my business, i already have built a reputation, and i have 4 factories, 4 heavy farms and a host of other harvesters, three vendor locations, and several resource gatherers established trying to help feed my factories.
This didn't happen overnight. Even now, with all that done, i still can't keep up with the demand, mostly due to resource shortages. Takes a lot of planning, and a lot of getting out amoungst the people where they can get to know you. Lots of dedication required.
Hidden-Dragon wrote:
Really hope that we both on the same server, then we maybe able to trade some resources.All of my 7 harvesters are harvesting high quality resources for later use. don't even have a single lot left to harvest grinding resouces. if I keep doing this, really don't know when I can get my master.
Hehe I've had this problem for other professions also. I want to try to make high quality products but it always happens that some new godly thing comes in that I just can't bring myself to grind with.
Agh! Hit Enter! Oops.
Anyway, the reson I do full factory runs is
- If one person wants two crates of a given food, chances are others will want that food as well, or they will come back for more.
- If I can price high for that custom order (which I usually don't - I give discounts because friends ask me ) I can recoup my costs. Example - a custom order for 2 crates of Vegash... That gave me 37,500. Vegash uses 45 resources and 2 factory runs. 45X1000+3000 = 48,000 credits (my cpu of stuff I harvest myself is around 1 cpu). So I only have to sell 1 more crate to break even. And that leaves plenty of food on my vendor (broken up between singles, crates of 5, 10 and 25). If I sell out, I will make over 500,000 credits.
- One harvester run will take (on average) more time than I am currently on line. So if a harvester run is going to take 4 hours, it might as well take 24 hours since I won't make it back to slap in something else. This is for me, and may not be for you...
Also, with my harvesters, I decided to go for the "best available" instead of "most needed". I KNOW I need fruit, but the current fruit is all poor quality (best stat around 500, the other 2 critical ones under 200). I could move to another planet to look for it, but at this time I don't have the time to travel that much (may take some harvesters to Lok once I hit 150,000 tubers...). I figure it's better to stockpile quality components than to have poor quality stuff, so long as you have the time.
I'm REALLY looking forward to making master chef and revealing myself to the Galaxy. I will NOT be advertising until my vendor is stocked with all the goodies I can put together.
I have been a MDE for months.
I made 1.4 million on vechicle day, no gouging, no undercutting, 1 price change. I just sold A LOT of rides.
BUT I've made about 2 million credits as a chef. ANd I've been a master for less than two weeks, And I'm on Talus, a rather backwoodsy planet on Intrepid. There are quite a few cities but not a lot of artisans/crafters.
I have vendors that I cannot keep stocked and i've got factories running 24/7. I have 3 factories and use of about 3 more, but 4 is about all I can keep going at once due to resources.
I was able to get a lot of my better resources from a retired master chef cheap, but I had over 30k of domestic and wild rice, wheat,and cornand about 10k of dom. oats and 15k of wild oats, on top of my grinding stuff by the time I hit master. My guild was able to stock my meat and hides as well; 10 guys with scouting abilities can get you animal goods in a hurry.
But a secondary source of resources is the bazar. I try to hit the bazar in a major city (coronet mainly) 2 or 3 times a week and that cannot be enough. There is generally some decent stuff on there at a low price cause some surveyors don't know what they have or don't care, espically if the OQ is low. And as much as I'd like to use really good stuff to make things thats not always the case. And with the amount of orders I'm getting I will use the best of what I've got, which sometimes ain't so great.
And what is it with the last few shifts? Really good beans, fungi, and tubers, crappy cereals and fruits and flowers. At least thats how it is on Talus on Intrepid.
As for advice:
stockpile resources; beg, borrow, steal. Espically good stuff cause you can't get enough.
If you find a good resource get it, don't matter if its tubers or fungi, you'll need it. Maybe not now, maybe not tomorrow, but when there is a really bad stretch of shifts you can sell high quality tubers to someone who needs tubers.
Oh and buy a fusion genny to relieve you of your power problems.
I was lucky in that I had been working DE for a while and understood the planning part of it. But I also knew that most of the Chef stuff was dumb to spend time making, so I focused in on a few recipes, and put out buy orders for the resources to make them. Since then I have been paiently adding more resources to my inventory, as I wait (im)patiently for the Patch. BTW, did you know that Chef requires (currently) the second highest number of resources to operate? Weaponsmiths need 63 for #1, and Chef needs 60. 60 different resources to make stuff (seprating generic wood and specific wood, although they could count as 1). But that number will drop by maybe 10 or so when the Patch hits, as the mineral requirements drop off the individual recipies and a "container" is added (hopefully with just one mineral to make all sizes containers).
Were I you, I would focus only on the top sellers (BoH, AFS, Flameout, etc....), and use them to keep myself out of the red, then I'd sell resources until I coudl afford medium ber10 harvs, and slowly ramp up. I'm sure you could borrow someone elses factory if you provided power and maint. I let a few people use mine (when they are down)when needed. Invest in harvs tho, thats your first task. Its the best way to make a nice profit as a broke crafter (by pulling up your own stuff). When you have operating capital, you can buy all your resources (making a smaller profit) and still make money.
I'm quickly approaching master chef, and am doing the following:
1) I have 8 lots available (2 taken up by a house). I am running 4 medium (BER10) florals 100% on the best available floral resources (currently only 2 resources are any good, all the rest have an average less than 400). I am also running 2 factories pumping out subcomponents that I will need for my high end stuff. The other 2 are used for water, metal, or gas as available.
2) Starting now (120,000 xp to go) I am producing probably close to 10,000 sub-components, from that P36 stuff to Soyopro to Sullistan Gin. When I do hit Master, I will be ready to make about 2000 of all the best selling foods.
3) I am also interupting those factories for custom orders, but when I DO get a custom order, I will try to do a full factory run. The reason I do that is:
hehe, doesn't that apply to me, regarding this thread. I recently made master myself, didn't plan cause I had no money and spent it all mining and buying resources to make it. Anyway, my first run of fishaks were very average, still only have managed to sell 1/2 of the run but 2 VERY nice chefs (names witheld because I didn't ask persmission to say their names) have put a bit of time into helping me with the ins and outs. One even let me put a vendor in their high traffic shop to help me out *many hugs for that*
Well, I am going to spend a few days literally planning on paper what I shouldve done few weeks ago. I rushed into it so to speak. Factories were many many KMs from my crafting station, I was even using a -14 food crafting tool. I had no idea that I was using it. Either missed it in the FAQs or it's not mentioned. I now have a +14 food tool, that will help. Read the FAQs properly to see what does what where and all that. Also the chefs own personal experiences will help me a lot. Expect me to put out some nice food that will compete in the market and all that. Ive been doing entertainer XP while waiting for food runs, I know, I shouldve read up on chef. I thought I would easily manage it. hehe, Yet another mistake, this is no where easy as it seems to be (I know its hard but it seemed a manageable hard).
I wish you the best of luck and will just say, getting a chef to 'personally show you some tips' helps immensely. Take a big breath and put it all in your stride. Initial rushing of making the food will just penalise you in the end. Anyway, Im going to either be quiet on the forums from now on, doing lots of reading/planning/searching for relevant help or asking a fair few DETAILED + RESEARCHED questions on what is baffling me. None of this 'Im stuck, help me out. stupid chefs!!' ehehhe
Much appreciation to SirVimes, one of the reasons I took up chef. He seemed to be taking us chefs with much love and to a clear future.. Us chefs who have recently mastered this will have much to look forward to new buffs, so I guess no real need to know it all. Anything besides the basics might not apply after the revamp. hehe.
Sorry for the long post, felt it was needed. Ive used the forums for much gain, havent really shown true appreciation for each of you, you guys are some of the best people in SWG forums by far.
/saute
I already had 90% of everything I needed before even starting chef... by the time I was master, I was down to 200K credits and a pile of heavy harvs.. now I'm at 30 million and climbing, and a slightly newer pile of heavy harvs..