Chef Archive

you must have missed all the sticky threads above?

You can use macros to skip through the entire crafting session with the exception of selecting the resources. You must do that step by hand. An excellent macro is listed in the armorsmith FAQ.

The basic macro layout looks like this:

/ui action toolbarSlot##;
/selectDraftSchematic ##;
/pause 5;
/nextcraftingstage;
/nextcraftingstage;
/createprototype practice no item;
/createprototype practice no item;
/pause 1;

The first line selects the toolbar slot holding your crafting tool. This goes from toolbarSlot00 (the top-left) to toolbarSlot11 (top-right) to toolbarSlot23 (bottom right if you have the double row). The next line selects the draft schematic (more on this later) to pick the item you want to craft. Next is the resource selection window, which must be done manually. The "/pause 5" gives you time to enter all the resources, adjust this higher if you can't get everything in and loaded before the macro continues. The next four lines progresses through the remaining crafting windows, making the item in "practice" mode, from the "practice no item" options on /createprototype. If you want the actual item to be put into your inventory, remove those options. Finally is a short pause to make sure the crafting tool finishes before you go on.

The draft schematic selection is the trickiest part of setting this up. As you gain any crafting skills, new schematics are placed in your datapad, with the schematic number increasing as it goes. The schematic number can be different depending on what crafting tool you are using, since it starts at 0 for the first item craftable in that tool type. So schematic 0 in a weapon/droid/general item tool would probably be something like a chance cube, schematic 0 in a food/chem tool is probably Bofa Treats. You can get a rough estimate on what the schematic number is by going to your datapad (it cannot have been resorted), and counting all the food items starting from the top, going left to right. Say you did this and got 35. Open up a crafting tool, and type in the command "/selectDraftSchematic 35" to make sure you're right. If it's the wrong item, check where in your datapad the item you got sits, and adjust up or down to get to the item that you want.

To use the macro, first put multiple crafting tools into your toolbar. Then, copy and paste the above text into the macro box, one block for each tool. Change the toolbarSlot commands to match up with the slots you put the tools into. So if your tools are in F2, F3, and F4, the first block will have toolbarSlot01, the next toolbarSlot02, and the last toolbarSlot03. Change the /selectDraftSchematic lines to the number of the item you want to make.

Finally, you probably want this macro to repeat itself, so you can grind at blinding speed. Save the macro, put it's icon into your toolbar, then edit the macro to end with "/ui action toolbarSlot ##", where this time the ## is the slot the macro sits in your toolbar.

You may find yourself finishing with the crafting tool before the first has finished, leading to "Unable to start crafting session" errors. You can get around this by either using more tools, or putting a pause at the end of the macro just before it calls itself.

Another method (which I used myself) takes advantage of having a multi-button mouse. In the Windows control panel (or maybe a separate mouse configuration program, if the mouse is non-Microsoft) map the center button to double-click, and another to "Enter". AFAIK there's no way to set up that mapping in game. Now you start the session, hit the mouse button for "enter" (assuming the schematic you want is the one selected, which the tool will remember next time)), use the center mouse button on each resource (double-clicking automatically inserts the resource into the first available slot), then the "enter" mouse button three or four times to finish it off. If you have your crafting tools in your hotkey bar, you can keep your left hand on the function keys, your right on the mouse, and blaze through crafting as fast as you can click two mouse buttons. With this method I was able to start a new Ithorian Mist every 8-10 seconds.

Red, excellent explanation! I would like to make the following comment.
A lot of the crafting macro's have this little pause in them to allow the resources to be put in the slots. When you tune the macro a bit that is no longer needed (the pause) so you can craft as fast as you can:

/nextcraftingstage;
/nextcraftingstage;
/createprototype practice no item;
/createprototype practice no item;
/pause 2;
/ui action toolbarSlot##;
/selectDraftSchematic ##;

So when you put 4 of these next to each other on F1-F4 it will go like this:

F1, error message (ignore), tool opens, schematic is selected, add resources
F2, tool selected with F1 finishes crafting, new tool opens, schematic selected
etc....

The pause 2 is the time needed for 1 tool to close and a new one to open.