Chef Archive

Syd,

As a Novice Chef, here's my experience:

1) Harvesting is not absolutely necessary if you have enough income to be able to afford to buy resources. However, buying them limits your selection in some cases and increases your cost per unit by a factor of 3 to 5. The type or quality of resource you need may not be available or may be too expensive to be worth buying.

2) As a brand new Novice Chef, using a combination of buying and harvesting resources, I was able to make about 1000 credits per day of profit using only the public bazaar. That's playing only 1 to 2 hours per day and sometimes only 5 to 6 hours per week. If I had a house and a vendor, I might have been able to make more.

3) Typically I only made 2 or 3 different items at any given time. I made one item for profit, another for grinding XP and another just for something different and/or my own personal use.

I found that being a chef requires a lot of roleplaying (which is what I wanted anyway) or at the very least, interacting with people.

I'ma bit stuck right now.

I like a bit of originality in my characters and am looking for a goodadditional profession to pair with my newly accomplished Fencer. I've done the Master Musician/Dancer thing already else-server so that's out. Medic I find hugely dull. There's about a billion Creature Handlers, Smugglers, BH, etc already. Not really interested in being "uber" - so the other combat professions don't seem right. They'd mess my char's RP up anyhow.

At first, I was sure I was going to go Tailor - but the thought of stocking a vendor with 1000 odd items and having to maintain them every seven days ... *shudder*. Alternatively (and probably preferably) a tailor should spend as much time as possible in the shop, acting as the helpful fashion consultant and whipping everything up on the fly - or some approximation thereof. However, Fencer's going to be hugely time-consuming and generally in places that won't likely be good for a tailoring business.

So the pragmatist in me says hey - what about Armor or Weaponsmith? That'd really help the Fencer side of the character out and would fit in nicely from an RP standpoint. Yet research shows me thesefolks spend all their time either clicking or harvesting or, in a pinch, clicking enroute to the harvesters! I don't mind a little leg work, but I have no intention of borrowing other people's lots. That's just too close towork to be fun.

So then I had an idea, "Hey, self!" I said to myself, "What about Chef? There's never any around, resource requirementsseem decentAND they make a product with practical purpose!" I had just talked myself into it when I came to the forums for a little research - whoops! A huge stream of negativity - force 10! We're talking Death Star level discontent here.

So I guess my question is, what's the straight scoop? The stack bug sounds like it's being fixed, and I'm sure at some point, the devs'll sneak a little milk into the game. More worrisome, I'm not hearing much on spreading the usefulness around to more than two or three items - and I can really see how this class could lose itself on the dev radar screen. How much harvesting is actually necessary? What's the approximate income for a Novice Chef? A master?

What do you folks recommend? Do the Chef thing - or should I maybe just wait around for Politician? *heh*