Cooking thread. 0-61

[Bubba]

Awesome info! I started making stone cheese today but I can't find a decent NPC that will buy my stuff to break even. Most NPCs are willing to buy it for 68-69gil each (it costs me about 300gil each to make). Anyone know any NPCs I can unload my cheese to without sustaining major financial loss?

[Zafron]

This is in response to a question about chiefkabobs and boiled crab in the DRK forums:

I haven't tried boiled crab yet. My cooking level is only 69 actually, but on fireday with support i usually get 2 chiefkabob synths out of 12 synths.

1 synth of chiefkabobs only yeilds 6 chiefkabobs, so it takes 2 synths for a full stack.

comparison by synth(assuming you are selling on jeuno AH):

2 synths of mithkabobs(2 stacks) go for 6k-1k(AH tax) for 5k.
2 synths of chiefkabobs(1 stack) go for 8k-.5k(AH tax) for 7.5k.

added bonus of chiefkabobs is you can sell in higher volume(14 synths on AH per character against only 7 synths of mithkabobs)

It would be nice profit if I could synth nothing but chiefkabobs AND they sold quickly. There are always 20-30 stacks of chiefkabobs for sale when i put mine up, and it usually takes few days to sell.

Not the great money maker i was hoping for. It probably helps if you grow your own peppers, gharlic, and onions, i haven't tried that yet.

As for getting my skill to 69, from 55 i went

stone cheese to 61
colored egg to 66
sand'oria tea to 69 where i am at right now.

If you have high fame you can break even on stone cheese selling back to npcs, but you will lose money on the eggs and SanD tea if you just buy the ingredients.

The expensive ingredient for colored eggs is Lizard eggs. I should have tried Bird eggs instead. They are cheaper and from the mystery tour recipe list they still work. If they do work you will be close to breaking even on colored eggs as well.

Selling to npcs, I think you can break even on SanD tea if you grow your own sage which is the pricy ingredient. You can do it with herb seeds and wind crystals in either a ceramic or earthen pot(I used earthen). But you need at least 2 successful yields to get 1 stack of sage. So from 10 pots you are looking at 3 maybe 4 stacks if you are lucky, and at this point 4 stacks of synths will net you about 1 skill point. Thats alot of effort, and to me it isn't worth disrupting my already set gardening system.

Post 70 doesn't look very promising. All fire crystal synths, 6 or more ingredients for each recipe, and almost no player demand for any of it, with a few exceptions like rolanberry pies and the SAM specific rice balls which aren't till Veteran.

After finals i am going to go through each item on mystery tour and compare cost of synth to npc price to try and find the cheapest route. Anyway this is probably more info than you were looking for but you put alot of effort into that great guide so i figured i'd share my experience.

Hope at least some of this info helps. Good luck ^^

[Tetsura]

Alright thank you for answering my questions

Seems like I'm going to have to get a mule eventually anyway, but i think I'll have to put off serious cooking untill that time. Thanks again, and keep up the good work helping all of us craft noobs :sweat:

[Xephoid]

thanks for the compliment

Originally posted by Tetsura
God bless you Xephoid

Best post i've ever seen for crafting. You've inspired me to start Cooking, which i had heard was a waste of time and money when i started playing but had been a dream of mine when i first read up on FFXI :spin:

Oh but i have one question. Do you know any fast ways of saving money for those that dont have mules? I dont really feel like paying extra at this point just for Cooking ingredients, but i'm very poor and need to save money if i'm to continue cooking.

Again, Thank You

Edit---

Oh, another question. How many Apple pies do you make for the ingredients you listed? I would assume 1 since it coincides with how you've done the rest, but I thought that that might be a little expensive per Apple pie :sweat:

If you don't have a mule, then your leveling would be slower, or more expensive. As now you can't sell nearly as much of the stuff in the AH at the same time, and you can't price shop on the ingredients from different cities.

You can (a) buy from the guild. Best time is during week day, around 5-6 eastern. Most JPs are asleep, and most NA haven't got on yet. So the guild prices tend to be at it's lowest. You can buy it then, all at once (if you buy a bunch one day, then another bunch the next, the price will go up on the 2nd day.

or (b) travel to the vendors that sells the ingredients. That means airship travel most likely. Look up which vendors sells what and under what condition on website such as allakazham, and buy it from them. But that usually means more work for you.

When comes to selling stuff. You can go AH to maximize your profit most of the time, but beware of jeuno's high AH fees, you might be better off doing a bazaar, and leave your character on while you go to work/school/sleep. Either that or travel to one of the other cities to sell it there.

As for apple pies, you make 4 at a time. And they sell very very fast.

[DarkSerge]

what do i do with the stone cheese?? sell back to NPC? or AH?

[tracert]

it makes 4 apple pies...

[Tetsura]

God bless you Xephoid

Best post i've ever seen for crafting. You've inspired me to start Cooking, which i had heard was a waste of time and money when i started playing but had been a dream of mine when i first read up on FFXI :spin:

Oh but i have one question. Do you know any fast ways of saving money for those that dont have mules? I dont really feel like paying extra at this point just for Cooking ingredients, but i'm very poor and need to save money if i'm to continue cooking.

Again, Thank You

Edit---

Oh, another question. How many Apple pies do you make for the ingredients you listed? I would assume 1 since it coincides with how you've done the rest, but I thought that that might be a little expensive per Apple pie :sweat:

[Tifa]

I have worked Cooking up to 60, can anyone suggest a good recipe for skilling up further?

To comment on 50>60:
Beaugreen Sautee took a money loss, but the skillups were just as fast as anything pre-50. I was shocked to see it didn't slow down nearly as I would imagine.
I broke even making Stone Chees from 55.0-60.0, even with high failures at first. Once I hit 57, I was successful nearly every time.
I made Selbina butter myself, this helped a lot to break even. Got a lot of extra butter from HQing it, very nice.

[Borshel]

I found a good alternate to apple pies in the level 42-46 range. If you are a fisher and have a bunch of nosteau herring saved up make Pickled Herring. The recipe is ice crystal, nosteau herring, dried marjoram, and rock salt. This makes 4 pickled herring per attempt and you can sell them back to the cooking guild for 135 apiece. So, a stack of items will make 48 pickled herring, barring any failures, for a gross revenue of 6480. If you were able to farm/fish/garden all the ingredients, you made a pretty penny from 1 stack of items. And this is a much better way to instantly get rid of your nosteau herring than the AH (which sells for about 3k, and pretty much only in Windurst due to this recipe).

[Zafron]

Originally posted by tfung
I broke even making stone cheese from lvl57-60 selling it back to npcs

omg how!? who did you sell to? I can break even on the materials but the cost of the Dark Crystals is killing me.

Edit:

I found my problem. I shipped all my stone cheese back to Bastok where my fame was mucho higher and i was able to break even as well. Glad i saw your post or i would have taken a sizable loss. ^^

I didn't think fame made that big a difference.

[Vairu]

finaly someone bought my carrot broth in jueno

[Vairu]

i use advanced imagery and make sliced sardines, i lose like 55% wind crystals, but hardly any bastore sardine, and i do have like a 20% sucess rate, and i lvl up like 80% of the tries .2 at a shot ^_^

[PrOBy_]

same thing happened to me but luckly i realized that with advanced imagery i could make orange juice with an average success rate and you lvl fairly fast, sure you will loose money but its better to lvl up faster and loose a little money than to waste 1k in a stack of carrots and loose 800 gil (in midgard stack of carrot broth = 200 T_T)

[Vairu]

i can't sell carrot broth ANYWHERE, and in jueno they charge 500 gil to sell a stack of stuff so i lost 1500 there trying to sell 3 stacks which still haven't sold, so i bazaared and nothing there either, can't even sell it back to the guild what do i do with them :mad:

[Vairu]

thx mate i will try to lvl cooking now