Currently there are two crafting skills that can obtain Bulk Order Deeds (BODs). I'll first go over those skills, and how to get to the skill level at which you receive BODs, and then I'll get into how to optimize your BOD experience. Pre-requisite reading (requirements and rewards): http://uorforum.com/threads/renaissance-blog-the-bulk-order-reward-review.568/ Tailoring Tailoring is the cheapest and quickest way to get into the BOD game. It takes about 40,000 cloth and about 2,000 leather to reach GM in Tailoring. Your path should look like this: Code: 0-30: buy skill 30-50: Fancy Shirts 50-55: Fancy Dress 55-74.6: Robes 74.6-99.6: Oil Cloth 99.6-100: Studded Gorget Your macro should look like this: Code: Use Item by type: Sewing Kit Gump option: Make Last Pause 4.5 sec Use Item by type: Scissors Wait For Target Target By Type (whatever you're making) Oil cloths can be turned into bandages here, which I don't believe was the case on OSI. The other items will be "unraveled" with scissor s back into their original cloth or leather (you'll get about half back). Once you reach 70.1 skill, you can start picking up BODs from your local vendor, so skip to below to see how to do that. Blacksmithing Blacksmithing is a much more expensive skill to GM, but the BODs from Blacksmithing are, in my opinion, more interesting and fun. And the low-level rewards are also better than tailoring's low-level rewards. Your path to GM blacksmithing should look like this: Code: 50-72: kryss or cutlass 72-90: short spear 90-100: plate gorget It is expected to take around 48,000 ingots to GM Blacksmith via this method. If you begin with your Strength as low as possible, and keep it locked, you might be able to do it even more cheaply. Your Blacksmithing macro looks much like your tailoring macro: Code: Use Item by Type: Tongs Make Last Pause 3.0 sec Use Item by Type: Tongs Smelt Item Wait for Target Target by Type (kryss/cutlass/short spear/plate gorget) Like Tailoring, you can begin getting BODs before reaching GM in the skill, at around 70.1 skill. In fact, for a cost of about 30,000 ingots (rather than 48,000 to GM), you can get to 95.0 Blacksmithing, which the only difference between this and GM for BODs is the ability to be given a Valorite BOD. And since the "good" valorite BODs will only be given to you about 5 times per year (seriously, see below for math), it may be worthwhile to get three accounts to 95.0 before taking any of them to GM. Getting your BODs Getting your BOD is simple; just walk up to the appropriate NPC (Tailor or Weaver for Tailoring, Weaponsmith for Blacksmithing) and say "Order Status". They'll either offer you a BOD, or tell you how long you need to wait to be offered one. You can get one every 6 hours. In addition to the one-every-6-hours allotment, you can reset your 6-hour timer by turning in a completed BOD (large or small). Of course, the best time to do this is right after you have received one. Most people save up a handful of completed BODs, get their one-per-6-hours BOD, and then one-by-one turn in their completed BODs for new empty ones. Organizing your BODs BOD books are rewards that come from turning in low-end Tailoring BODs. They can hold up to 500 BODs and have various filtering capabilities. This is generally the best way to organize your BODs. Some players enter their BODs into spreadsheets, or other programs (http://uobod.de/) that do a better job at keeping track than the BOD books. Filling your BODs I find it handy to create macros to fabricate 10, 15, and 20 of a given item type. It looks like this: Code: For: 19 Use Item By Type: sewing kit Make Last Pause 4.5 sec End For Say "Done 20" Why 19? Because I make the first one manually, so that the item type is stored and created via "Make Last". I have 6 of these macros, one for each of 10, 15, and 20 items by using either sewing kits or tongs. To fill your BOD, one easy way is to make a macro like this: Code: Target Item By Type Pause .15 sec Loop Re-target the item type you're filling a BOD with, so it's in the macro. Then open the BOD and click on the option to fill it. Then play your macro. It will fill the BOD very quickly, without a ton of manual pointing and clicking to target. The math behind BODs Tailoring BODs are relatively straightforward. No one really cares about Bone, since it's tough to make, nor leather or studded. Nor Horned or Barbed, since they're very rare. They're valuable, but just take a long time to fill. The real money is in cloth (for Clothing Bless Deeds) and Spined. Spined Large BODs often give mask dyes, which all the Trammies love, and are 5x as common as Horned and Barbed BODs… so they're reasonably obtainable. Blacksmith BODs are much more confusing. There are still the large and small BODs, as well as 9 different materials. Additionally, there are weapon BODs and armor BODs. And of the Armor BODs, there are large-fillables (i.e. plate gorget, ringmail sleeves) and non-fillables (i.e. norse helm, kite shield) that will never fit in a large. Since the best rewards come from filling large sets, we're mostly concerned about that. Here are some raw percentage chances for a given BOD type: Code: Small: 80% Large: 20% Weapon, given Large: 55.5% Armor, given Large: 44.5% Weapon, given Small: 25% Armor, given Small: 75% Small that fits in a large, given Armor: 54.2% As I mentioned, we're mostly concerned with just two line items there: Large Armor BODs and Smalls that fit in large Armors. This represents a very small number of BODs. See this chart for how this nets out: (If you find any issue with the percentages above, please let me know. I should be able to adjust the charts accordingly. Most numbers were lifted from the Required Reading link, and/or other anecdotal stats presented – such as the 54.2% of armor smalls fitting into larges) How to read this: assuming you get 6 BODs per day (that is, 3 accounts times two "Order Status" requests per day), you will get 274 Spined BODs per year, 44 Horned, and 11 Barbed. Note that this does include non-valuable BODs like Barbed Shoes. Like Armor, we really mostly care about the Barbed pieces that fit into armor sets. It's even worse for Blacksmithing, in which a year of BOD-gathering will net you 909 pieces of either Large armor BODs or small-fitting-in-large armor BODs. This nets out to 441 Iron and only 5 Valorite per YEAR. Without trading (and/or massive time spent filling and turning in small, worthless BODs), the odds of ever filling a higher-end set become pretty grim. On the plus side, 679 + 602 = 1281 BODs per year should be easily filled. That is the sum of the non-set armor pieces (shields, norse helm, etc.) and the weapon BODs (maul, mace, etc.). Those weapon BODs do fit into larges, but their rewards are generally not highly desired. To Trade, Churn, or Sell A big question is: what do you do with all of these BODs? Seems silly to ask, but as the system currently exists, it is very difficult to profit from them directly, since it is so hard fill any higher-end orders yourself, even with three crafters picking up BODs every day. There are three ways to remedy this: trade, churn, or sell. At the moment, I think Sell is the most profitable. Churners and Traders tend to underestimate the amount of cost that goes into filling the BODs (it is FAR from zero, even after accounting for the check of gold pieces you get back in return). And at the moment, there are very few BOD sellers, so profit margins are high. I'll briefly go into the strategies of how to handle each path below. Trade Quite simply, organize a list of your BODs and trade with other folks. The benefit here is you don't have to worry about assigning a gold value to them; it's usually easy to trade similar items with similar rewards. The down side is this takes a lot of manual effort to organize, contact people, etc. And, as mentioned above, filling BODs can be more expensive than people realize (i.e. a 20xSpined Studded set). Speaking of organization, I'd like to propose the following style for describing BODS: Quantity Quality Material Type So for example: 20xSpined Studded Gorget 15xHorned Leather Large 10nIron Mace 20nShadow Tunic That way it's easy to identify the properties of the BOD and make sure you're on the same page with potential traders. Churn Churning is the process of filling your small BODs in order to turn them in and reset the BOD timer, essentially getting you a new BOD. As a rule of thumb, the gold reward for doing this is usually half the cost of the materials (though a higher percentage for cloth, and a lower percentage for spined armor, for example). So you're losing money on this transaction, not to mention the opportunity cost in time. For churning tailoring BODs, it's best to prioritize in terms of cost and time and effort. So on a continuum, Cloth > Leather > Studded > Bone. Frankly, I wouldn't waste time churning studded armor pieces, because of the high failure rate on producing exceptional items (and then sorting through them to recycle the non-exceptionals). For churning Blacksmith BODs, I'd suggest first starting with the non-set pieces (shields and helmets). Of these, shields are ideal since at GM Blacksmithing you'll never fail to create exceptional quality. Next I'd move to weapons, which have some chance of failing to produce exceptionals, but don't take too much in the way of ingots per item. Finally I'd move to Helmets, which have a moderate failure rate and a somewhat steep ingot cost. Be wary of your time! Everything in UO has an opportunity cost, and my current thinking is that Churning isn't worth that cost. But your results may vary if you're better at it than me, or don't have any other opportunities of interest to you. Selling As mentioned above, people seem to underestimate the costs involved in filling BODs, and thus overestimate their profitability from keeping them. Additionally, with the low population of the server and the short amount of time people have collected BODs, not many high-end rewards have been obtained, making their value at it's presumed all-time peak right now. For these reasons, plus the current bug that allows vendors not to charge their normal fees on BODs, it is an ideal time to be a seller. As more sellers enter the market, I would expect it to reach equilibrium, and Trading, Churning, and Selling to equalize in terms of profitability. BONUS SECTION: Runic Hammer Guide Seems as good a place as any to speak to these. Runic hammers allow you to craft weapons with the ingot type of the hammer to make some spectacular weapons. In addition to the bonuses below, if you happen to make an "Exceptional" weapon with the runic hammer (same chance as with normal tongs and iron ingots), you also get the +4 damage per hit that comes with that. Thus, an Exceptional (+4) Force (+5) is essentially a weapon of Vanquishing (+9). Here's what each hammer does: Dull Copper: Durable Accurate Shadow: Durable of Ruin Copper: Fortified Surpassingly Accurate of Ruin Bronze: Fortified Surpassingly Accurate of Might Gold: Indestructible Eminently Accurate of Force Agapite: Indestructible Eminently Accurate of Power Verite: Indestructible Exceedingly Accurate of Power Valorite: Indestructible Supremely Accurate of Vanquishing As you can see, Agapite, Verite, and Valorite are the three that give you weapons that can be more powerful than even a magic +25 of Vanquishing you'd find on a monster or in a chest. Gold makes solid vanquishing-equivalents, Bronze makes decent power-type weapons, and Copper, Shadow, and Dull Copper are not far from typical GM-made. Blaise adds some details on how to really take advantage of this in Factions:
Thanks! Yes, working on that. I'm currently going through the math on it at the moment, to figure out the best way to approach it. The problem is, my initial impression is that it's actually not a worthwhile endeavor, at least for blacksmithing. For Tailoring, sure, you can flip cloth BODs very easily and cheaply. For blacksmith BODs, there's a decent failure rate on producing "exceptional" items, so it can cost around 3,000 GP for the ingots to fill one of them. On top of that, time spent smelting the non-exceptional items, determining which is which, etc. And then you get back a largely worthless item (gargoyle pickaxe, mining gloves), 800 gp, and a new BOD.
I like gargoyle pickaxes! But I definitely see your point that at the moment its a tedious and largely unrewarding endevour.
Ah, you beat me to it! Due to the heavy cost of flipping Smithy Bods. I am no longer in the camp of thinking that I need 2x 70 and 1x GM smiths. I am truly considering the cost of raising two more GMs from 70 'worth it' in the long run. I think you want every % chance for a Valorite bod that you can possible get. It is, however, my current belief that have 2x 80.1 and 1x GM is ideal for Tailoring. You start getting small spined at 80.1 but you aren't yet getting Large bods. Horned/Barbed of any kind are trash imho. The chances of filling them are too slim, even with trading. By limited two bod farmers at 80.1 you are reducing your dead bod collection by 2.5% before even considering the almost 20% chance of getting a Large bod. With bone/studded/leather worthless and difficult to flip, cutting down on your large bod consumption could be a huge boon. At 80.1 your bod farmer is only allowed to receive cloth, leather, bone, studded, spined Smalls. I would like to see how changing this up would effect your yearly numbers. I have yet to test this, but my theory feels sound. I currently have 1 GM and two 99.1s I was hesitant to share this theory, but I figured it would be worth opening up the discussion. Please let me know your thoughts or ideas! Let's figure this out together, so we can all get better rewards!
If 1 in 5 BODs is a large, and BODs typically have 4, 5, or 6 smalls to a large, then you are correct that the larges will, over time, eventually become valueless (for sets of 5 and 6). Remember though, if you stick to your Tailor strategy, you will actually get too *few* larges. You'll make up for it by getting cheap or free larges from others (for 5's and 6's). But for 4's, you'll have too few, and you're stuck paying market price for the extras you need. For me, I'd rather be less reliant on trading and buying, and more self-reliant (especially in the long run), so I'll stick to the all-GM strategy. But it's certainly a clever idea that you have.
That guide on the runic hammers is revolutionary FINALLY someone is able to put those hammers into a guide ... thanks a lot.
I know this is an older post but it has raised a question for me. If I stop at 80.1 skill; do I stop at this mark on shown skill or real skill?
I don't like your macro for filling cloth smalls. Just pull the cloth you need to make 20/15/10 and run a loop with make last.
