Chef Archive
Thread: APEX Foods Guide to being a high-volume Chef
Howdy from Tempest. I got an email from Stewbacca regarding how I manage my factories. Stewbacca, like me, is a high-volume Chef and wanted to know if I wanted to swap some trade secrets. I started the email then thought "what the hey, I’ll just post it on the boards." So here is my ‘guide" to being a high volume chef.
Let me preface this by saying I won’t be putting anything in this about resource stats. It is server specific and chef ready to take the next step to high-volume should already have a good understanding of the crafting.
I have been a Chef on Tempest for over a year now. I keep my prices reasonable and my vendors have done on average 5 million per day for as long as I can remember. This is a guide on how I do it.
Chapter 1: Marketing
If you don’t have one already, get a brand name. You should have a brand name on everything you make. It is what identifies you from the rest. All chefs make the same foods. I am the only one (although I see my foods on allot of vendors in the bazaar vendor search) that makes APEX Foods.
Put the waypoint to your vendors on everything you make. Every food on my vendor ends with [Cor 400,-5555] [Nab -2840,2340]
Most chefs like to put some reference to stats on their label. I decided after destroying 400 crates of pre-CU foods labeled like this, that I would not do it any more. This is personal preference and I personally have not seen any effect on my sales since I stopped doing it.
Name your vendors with your brand name. You need to get your brand name on everything you can. I cannot stress enough how important it is to get your brand name out there. To illustrate this, here is something you can try. First, create a character on Tempest. Then log in and start asking people if they know where the APEX vendors are. I have not tried this myself, but I bet you don’t even have to mention foods and you will get a WP quickly.
Get enough merchant to be able to set several vendors and name your vendors for the foods located on them. You should not have more than 3 or 4 different types of foods on any one vendor. The vendor items allowed are in the same tree as vendors allowed. You can’t be a high-volume chef without being able to stock a high-volume so you have to get this tree anyway. It will also make it easier to keep up with stock at more of a glance.
Naming your vendors for the foods on them has 2 purposes. First, it makes browsing your foods much easier for your customers. If they can’t find what they want or give up on page 14, you just lost a sale. The second reason is an example. You are the customer and you are looking for a Vegeparsine because someone told you it was the thing to have and your regular chef doesn’t have it in stock right now. You hate going to vendors that don’t have what you are looking for, but you pull up the planetary map anyway. You see the foods option and get the list of vendors. The first 3 are labeled "Company A Foods" "Company B Drinks" and "APEX – Vegeparsine and Thundercloud." Which one you going to first?
Make a specialty food. Try to find something that the other chefs on your server are not making. Mine was Ahrisa in my early chef days. It ended up catching on and every other chef started making it, but I started a good customer base with just that food.
SPAM SPAM SPAM. I have not spammed Coronet in a long time. No need to now. Starting out, go ahead and be shameless. Keep it short and keep the /pause at least 2 minutes. Those that it really bothers can /addignore.
Chapter 2: Buy It All
I am assuming that you have been a chef for a while now and are ready to take the next step. This means that you should have a bank roll by now. I buy all of the resources I use for foods except when there is an exceptional flora currently available.
This means I purchase from other players all of my grind quality resources. There are usually a few great resource dealers out there per server. Get to know them well. Let them know you will be frequenting their vendors and tell them what you need the most. I can usually get these resources for 2 CPU and less. The only time that I will drop a harvester is if there is a very good resource. I will also usually buy all I can of this type resource as well.
I employ about 20 to 30 hunters to gather meat and milk for me. I will usually give the milk contract to just a few because I don’t need much. 120k will usually do me for a while.
Meat on the other hand is something we can never get enough of as a high-volume chef. When a good nutrient meat is available, I buy it all. I send out the email to my hunters and say "Get all you want, I’ll buy more." The last offering of Endor Insect meat was 2.4 million units at 40 CPU. If you don’t have a huge bank roll, you may want to hand out 100k unit contracts. No worries. If your vendors are stocked, you will get it back. My hunters are my best customers. It’s a trade more or less.
Acquiring your resources in this manner will free up time for other things. That way you won’t get burned out.
Chapter 3: Factory Management
Don’t try to stock every food listed in your crafting tool. That is impossible. I am stocking 11 foods right now and that is a lot for me. Pre-CU it was 8. Your goal it to make sure that you have what your customers know you make in stock at all times. To do this, I generally use 24 factories. Right now I am using 42 since I had to start stocking from scratch, but I will go back to 24 when I feel I am caught up.
The first 8 factories are dedicated to Trim and Casks. They stay running all the time. I keep the completed casks stored in the output hopper of the factory it was made in. This is handy since you don’t have to have identical casks in a schematic. You don’t have to worry about getting serial numbers mixed up. They are set up like this:
Cask Cask Cask Cask
Trim Trim Trim Trim
If you store you chemical and gems in the input hopper of one of the factories, you can easily pull your crafting droid, make schematics, andkeep both the casks and trim factories going all the time.
My food factories that I use for production are arranged like this:
1 2 3 4
5 6 7 8
9 10 11 12
13 14 15 16
Here, I am going to explain my procedure for making Breath of Heaven. It is one of the most difficult foods to make in volume. Master the production of this food and you can mass produce anything.
- Start factories 1, 5, 9, and 13 making Intelligent Nanonutrients.
- Start the remaining factories making Alcohol. Name the alcohol something specific in the schematic like "Alcohol – 1A"
- The Nanos will take 3 days to complete. When they are done, make them into supplements and run them in the same factories.
- While these are making, start a second run of alcohol in the remaining factories again while leaving the last run in the output hopper. Name these runs something like "Alcohol – 1B"
- After everything is done, you will want to grab all of the supplements from factory 1 and distribute them evenly in factories 2, 3, and 4. This means you will take 13 nutrients and put them in each of these factories. This will leave you with the crate of 24 still in your inventory.
- Do the same thing with casks. Put 13 crates in 2, 3, and 4. Keep a crate of 24 casks in your inventory.
- Go to factory 2 and grab a crate of each of the alcohols in the output hopper and make your schematic. Use Alcohol – 1A for the first alcohol requirement and Alcohol – 1B for the second.
- Now divide the number of alcohols you have left in 1 crate by 3. If you get your schematic on the first try, you will have 22 left in the crate. 22 divided by 3 = 7.3. This means that this factory will make 13 full crates and a crate of 7 with the alcohol available. Break off 7 casks and 7 supplements from the crates in your inventory for use in factory 1.
- VERY IMPORTANT! Take the items in your inventory (the alcohol used in making the schematic, the crates of 7 casks and supplements, and the resources needed for the run) and place them in factory 1 before loading any alcohol from the output hopper.
- Now you can load the alcohol from the output hopper. It won’t all fit, but you can leave what won’t fit in the output hopper to be transferred to the input hopper later.
- Repeat steps 7 thru 10 for factories 3 and 4.
- Once this is done you can start on the next row of factories. When all is said and done you will have 156 full crates of Breath of Heaven and several partial crates you can put on your vendors.
This covers the basics for now. If I think of anything else important, I will add it later. One important thing to remember no skill points. I have recently discovered pilot. I am having a blast with it. Especially since I can buy anything I want for though, if they know you have it in stock, they will go to your vendor first to get it. Keeping the vendors stocked is the key.
Message Edited by jadeew on 05-26-2005 11:43 AM
Strategiry wrote:
Pretty nice guide Mr. Apex
One thing you might want to talk about is the location of your shop. The general consensus is that a successful shop can only reside in the naboo, dantooine, and corellia. Personal experience has shown this not to be true, as I have been averaging 4-5 mil in sales a day through my one location at my city on Talus (Although I am now on a break, 10 factories can't hold up to those kinds of sales!). If people know that you are carrying high-quality goods for fair prices, they will consider it worth their while to venture out to wherever you are situated. Persevere and they will come to you
I am assuming that they already have a shop if they are interested in this guide, but I agree. Planet makes no difference. If you market properly, they will come to Hoth to get your foods
I do however try to make my WP as easy as possible to remember. 400 -5555 would be an example of this.
