Chef Archive
Thread: thinking of chef
First of all, take a gander at the wonderful FAQ written by SciguyCO, here:
http://home.comcast.net/~sciguyco/swg/ChefFAQ2_5.htm
Having said that, the grind is easier, but to take full advantage of the possible xp, you need to collect different resources and crafting macros are your friend. (the ingame legal type) No longer are you only doing ithorian Mist. The new changes to Chef have created a demand for more and varied foods. Eventually, I will get my act together enough to carry a small supply with me to sell on the road.
Oh, and the new Chef threads are stylin.
Not sure how things are on your server, but things are pretty chef saturated on starsider. Also you need a good BE to be there for you, cause as you can see from all the anti-BE posts, getting additives is an issue for a lot of people.
If I wasn't a chef, I would back away from it until the market settles out a bit.
Meplorium wrote:
Not sure how things are on your server, but things are pretty chef saturated on starsider. Also you need a good BE to be there for you, cause as you can see from all the anti-BE posts, getting additives is an issue for a lot of people.
If I wasn't a chef, I would back away from it until the market settles out a bit.
[soapbox]
You hit the nail on the head Meplorium. Sunrunner is also pretty saturated. Where once I was the only chef in my guild and I saw a fellow chef only rarely, now I can't hop to a new planet without seeing at least one Master Chef near the starport. I have also been unable to work out a business relationship with a single BE. It seems they already had their customers picked out or they just went and mastered chef themselves to cut out the middle man. Lets not discuss the begging that has to be done now to get meat, hides or milk. I had to dump Armorsmith and Tailor to get Scout again and to also pick up more combat skills so I can go harvest my own supplies.
Some of this I feel is due to the new WOW factor that chef has and I do expect it to mellow out as time goes on. In the mean time, I will be happy with my @ $500k a week in sales on non-be items (priced reasonably as far as Mokia's price guide goes). I can only imagine the trauma that another chef goes through trying to keep up with their X million credits a day sales rate. I was here before it was cool and I plan to stay till long after the cash cows have gone to the slaughter house. Maybe I'll be able to offer some absurd CPU for the meat from their corpses.
[/soapbox]
You said your choice was between chef and tailor....
Im both... heres a couple of points on each.
Chefing is much, much, much more complex than tailoring. As it stands, the quality of the resources a tailor needs does not matter and to be honest, with the exception of a couple of specific items (gems spring to mind), they dont need a lot of different resources. I managed a large (I had 4 stores) tailoring business using 10 lots. Sure you need the BE components for tailoring too and I can see that due to the demand for chefing components currently, tailoring ones may be hard to come by but I had a long term deal with a BE. As a tailor you would basically need polymer, fiberplast, metal, copper, gems. Most of these are non-specifics and since quality doesnt matter, managing harvesters from week to week can be very easily. (Mine would sit in one spot for weeks on end and Id just dig up whatever spawned.)
Tailoring does require a lot of different items to be made in a range of colours which is one drawback. Your vendors can end up with a great deal of stock (mine carried between 900 - 1500 items generally.) I havent been following the proposed vendor changes so closely any more but there was a plan to limit how much stock one vendor could carry. For a tailor, this isnt good, they depend on the ability to provide a huge range of goods. Some people cope without vendors as tailors, I for one couldnt. I did some business as I travelled through starports but most were vendor sales.
As crafting professions go, its fun, its low maintenance and not bad profit margins, however it is popular. Many, many people head to master tailor, some because its currently one of the easier crafting professions, some because they just like playing with clothes. Also remember on the whole, you will be hand making your items as a tailor. There isnt a great deal of point in doing a large factory run of same colour items. They just sit in crates forever (maybe with the exception of sure sellers such as black dusters.) Sure you can just run a schematic for a few but to be honest, I found it easier to make the things by hand. It does of course take time.... The new lootable schematics added for the tailors have given them something else to play with too which is nice 
You can also provide components to the armorsmiths and architects which gives you another avenue of business. Prior to mastering BE on a second account, I would also buy the BE tissues, make them into the tailoring components and sell a small amount of those for a little bit of profit. It wasnt a lot but the conveniance of having tissues ready to use made them appealing to some other tailors and I did make a little money doing this.
Chefing is much more time demanding on the resource side. You cant park harvesters and just dig up whatever spawns. The amount of resources you need is also vast. We use so many different types of flora that you always seem low on lots. They are also, of course, quality dependent, you have to be prepared to buy in the resources sometimes. You'll probably spend a lot of time surveying (account for this when planning how to spend skill points) and moving harvesters around. If you cant tolerate this, avoid chef. The food and drink market currently is somewhat saturated on many servers. Lots of people rushed to master chef post revamp and have set up vendors or shops so you wont be in any minority. You may also find that the older chefs have a very established customer base and are well known. They have resources from many many shifts ago and can be depended upon to produce high quality food and drinks regardless of the state of current **edit**s. Taking this into account, breaking into the chefing market can be a little difficult.
)Kind Regards,