Have you ever wondered where those special food and drink items on player vendors in bazaar came from?

Perhaps they were player crafted using baking skills! Here are some tips on learning to use tradeskills in EverQuest.


EverQuest Tradeskills

With a tradeskill, you can make certain items by assembling the necessary pieces. Some tradeskills require you to seek out a merchant and buy a book or kit specific to that skill. Others (like Fishing) only require you to purchase the proper equipment.

Before you can learn most skills, you might want to visit a merchant that specializes in that trade. He or she will sell you a book that outlines the basics for a certain skill. Once you've read it and acquired the necessary kit, components, and/or ingredients, you can make pottery, bows and arrows, bread products and more.

To make an item, you need all of the ingredients and the right kind of container. You can find tradeskill objects located in most cities, the Plane of Knowledge, and other heavily active areas. You can also buy some tradeskill containers that can be put into your inventory from merchants or other players.

Some recipes may require a more advance tradeskill container. An example of this would be a combine required for a quest.

If you're skilled enough, and lucky enough, you'll succeed in your creation. A new item will show up in your inventory. Keep in mind that you'll occasionally fail, with the possibility of losing all items in the container. However, both successes and failures can lead to increases in a given tradeskill.

Note: Never stack items when combining them. All items in the combination must be separate.

Available Tradeskills and Associated Skills

  • Alchemy: Create potions (requires medicine bag – Shaman only).

  • Baking: Make a variety of baked goods (requires oven and a mixing bowl).

  • Blacksmithing: Make metal items (requires ore and forge).

  • Brewing: Make alcohol (requires still).

  • Fishing: Catch fish (requires fishing pole, bait and an appropriate body of water).

  • Fletching: Make bows and arrows (requires fletching kit).

  • Foraging: Fish food in the wild.
  • Jewelcrafting: Make jewelry (requires jewelry kit).

  • Poison Making: Create poisons (requires various ingredients – Rogues only).

  • Pottery: Make clay objects (requires clay, pottery wheel, and a kiln).

  • Research: Construct spells (requires a spell research kit).

  • Tailoring: Sew clothing and cloth items (requires sewing kit).

  • Tinkering: Construct mechanical objects (requires toolbox – Gnomes only).


The Tradeskill Window

When you open a tradeskill container, the Tradeskill Window will pop up.

This can be changed to be the default setting under the Options screen (Ctrl O).

If the experiment container (see below) opens instead, you will need to use CTRL Right Click to open to open the container.

Search Section:
With this section, you can use the Search Recipes button to search through a list of known recipes based on minimum and maximum skill levels and partial names. Once you search for the recipes, a list of Known Matching Recipes will appear. It lists the Recipe Name and the level it becomes Trivial, easier to make.

Select one of the recipes by using Left Click to highlight it. In the item slot area on the right, the items needed for the recipe will appear. If the items are surrounded by red, it means that you do not currently possess the needed ingredients. If they appear in green, it means that you do have them.

Favorite Recipes:
This option allows you to Add, Remove or Show your favorite Recipes list. To switch back to search, click on Search Recipes again.

Skill and Container Section:
This area of the window displays the Tradeskill Container that is currently open and displays what your current skill level is for the skill that uses that container.

Experiment:
Click this button to use the old tradeskill interface to experiment with recipes you don't know. Before opening a container, you can also use Ctrl Right Click to open up the old window. As mentioned above, you can set the default for this toggle under the Options menu.

Combine Section:
  • Item Slots: There are 8 item slots that display the items needed for a recipe.

  • Combine: Click this button to combine the ingredients for the selected recipe.

  • Auto-Inventory: Click this button to automatically put what is on your cursor into your inventory. This is particularly useful when you are creating several items in a row.

Close:
Click this button to close the Tradeskill Window.

Acquiring Recipes

You can purchases recipes from tradeskill venders, other players, receive them as a quest reward or quest task, or find it as a loot drop. Some recipes may require more than one type of tradeskill to complete the final version.



EQ Traders Corner
Here are some more detailed tradeskill guides and FAQs that our friends over on EQ Traders Corner have put together over the years:


Before you start... A few words from Niami
by Niami DenMother (Tunare Server)

If you've never tried a tradeskill before, there are a several things that you should know.


The standard, or "main" tradeskills are: Baking, Brewing, Fletching, Jewelcraft, Tailoring and Smithing. All other tradeskills are restricted to certain races (tinkering), certain classes (alchemy, make poison, research), or are level capped (fishing). The standard skills could, theoretically, be raised to 200 by a level 1 character, but we don't recommend it. ;)

Remember that training points can only be spent on tradeskills early on. Once you hit a skill of 21 in the standard tradeskills, you MUST gain skill increases through hands-on-practice.

While tradeskills in EQ increase with practice, tradeskills cost you money (in supplies), regardless of success or failure. For the more expensive skills (such as jewelcraft), it's wise to not only stockpile some money in advance, but also spend the training points to get to skill 20 before trying the skill.

Low-level players: Before you even train in a tradeskill, you should check to be sure that the materials you will need to practice your skill are available nearby. If they are not easily available, you have to make a hard decision -- do you want to try the skill anyway or do you want to try another tradeskill? For example, if you want to bake, and the only baking supplies within the nearest several zones are batwings, you'll realize you're going to be running through a lot of zones to get some of your more basic supplies. This isn't meant to discourage you, but to make sure you don't spend a lot of training points before you realize the scope of the task ahead of you. (Higher level players tend to move around a lot, so this isn't as much of an issue for them.)

When you see mention of a "trivial" on a chart, it means that at that skill level, you will no longer gain skill increases from making the item. You will, however, still continue to fail quite a bit when making the item. Just because something is trivial does not mean you can do it in your sleep. Eventually, as your skill improves, your chance of failing at making the item will decrease, but there's generally always a chance of failure. (Silk swatches and silk thread are an exception to this).

  • If you fail to make an item, regardless of your skill level, you will receive a message "You lack the skill to fashion these items together" (or something to that effect). ALL this message means is that you failed to make the item (see the mention above about trivials and the fact that things can always fail, regardless of skill). Failure to make an item does NOT indicate whether an item is trivial or not.

  • If you're getting a failure rate that will rapidly bankrupt you, find something that trivials closer to your current skill to practice on. (i.e., don't try to make a silver sapphire necklace the first time you try jewelcraft).

  • For everything but fishing, sell your goods to other players as opposed to NPC merchants where possible. If you sell to NPCs, you rarely will be paid what the raw materials cost you, much less the value of the item. For example, you'd get slightly over 1 gold for a piece of patchwork armor, when sold to an NPC merchant. The going rate when selling directly to players is generally 2 gold or so, depending on supply/demand and individual whimsy.

  • When a recipe calls for two or more of a single item, DO NOT STACK the items. Have two (or more) single pieces of the item in your forge, brew barrel, etc., not one pile of two. Stacked items count as a single item! If you put a stack of 20 of an item in the tradeskill container during a combine, the container will yell at you and refuse to do the combine.

  • The main tradeskills are not level-capped, meaning that with enough time and raw materials, you could master the tradeskill at level 1. Other special skills, such as fishing, make poison, and alchemy may have various limits.

  • Grandmaster: Grandmaster (GM) in a tradeskill is generally considered someone with a skill of 300 in a specific tradeskill. Of the 7 main tradeskills (baking, brewing, fletching, jewelcraft, pottery, smithing, tailoring) you may start by having only one of them above 200 (up to 300), while the rest are capped at 200. For those players that are level 51 or higher, they may spend AA points on the Tanaan crafting mastery AA, but for the beginners that are reading this guide, that's not something to worry about right away. ("Grandmaster" has meant various things over time and was only given a firm meaning with the Prophecy of Ro expansion trophies. Old timers and older information may use it differently.)

  • Specialized tradeskills are capped separately. Regardless of whether another skill is above 200 or not, other specialized tradeskills are as follows: Alchemy is level capped such that you cannot start until level 25, but unlimited thereafter; Poison Making 300; Tinkering 300, Fishing level capped until it reaches 200.

Frequently Asked Questions:

Even the most skilled tradeskiller has questions now and then, but for those just venturing into the world of tradeskills, it can be quite overwhelming!

Visit the EQ Traders Corner Frequently Asked Questions page to explore the answers to the questions below.

    General Questions and Answers:
    • Before You Start Tradeskilling

    • General Tradeskill Questions

    • What effect do stats have on tradeskills?

    • What Does (___) Mean?

    • What is (___) used for?

    • Skill Levels & Titles

    • Commonly Used Tradeskill Related Abbreviations

    More In-Depth Information:
    • Can I get more than one tradeskill over 200?

    • Geerlok and +Tradeskill Modifiers

    • Information Regarding Mana Vials

    • All About Dyes

    • Finding a Vendor's Best Price

    • Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Merchant Pricing, but were Afraid to Ask

    • Advanced and Cultural Smithing Q and A

    • Brewing: Brodder's Diaries Translated

    • Shmoozo's Sewing Kits FAQ

    • Alchemy Frequently Asked Questions

    • Tradeskill Success Rates

    • EQTC Chat Channel?

    • Augments, What They Are And How To Use Them.

    • Old Cultural Race/Class/Deity Template

To discuss tradeskilling in EverQuest, you can visit the Artisans Way (Tradeskill Discussion) message board over on the official forums.