Guide: Bowcrafting

[Eastwood]

Bowcrafting!

A great skill when you are brand new to the server and need to earn gold from the ground up.
Pros
-Extremely Safe- Lots of lumber under protection of the guards, almost 0 PK risk.
-With my simple lumberjack and bowcrafting macros you can watch some tv while harvesting and crafting. You still need to use your mouse, but it takes very little attention and almost no clicking.
-Decent money, easily over 5k an hour, especially as your skill and str rises and you can recall to various towns to sell at the best price.

Cons
-Kinda boring
-If other people are selling bows/crossbows around Brittania at the same time you can step on each other's toes for the best NPC pricing.
-There's not a whole lot of value in being a GM bowyer, you can make exceptional bows very early on, and can buy a GM made Heavy Xbow for 200 gold on this server.

I posted a really easy lumberjack razor macro in the Lumberjacking Skill guide, getting boards is easy, making bows and selling them is the time consumer.

A simple bow making in the backpack macro. I usually grab about 500 boards and turn this on and surf the net for a few mintues while these bows are made in the shop I intend to sell them. I do about a stack of 500 then move on to the next NPC vendor.

I get a 1000 boards per battle axe, carpentry tools are worn out occasionally, carry at least 2 on you and replace when 1 breaks every couple of lumberjacking trips. And my newbie dagger used for bowcraft has not worn out in the thousands of bows I have made with it.

Double Click (this will be your knife, whatever you use to fletch)
Wait for Target
Absolute Target (I always reset this for a new batch of boards)
Wait for Menu (Any)
MenuResponse 2
Wait for Menu (Any)
MenuResponse 1
Pause 4.00 sec

A lot of these are optional. Menu Response 2 then 1 makes bows. It will be a lil differant for Xbows and Heavy Xbows. I also toss a spirit speak macro into the mix to raise the int of my gatherer for now.

I've found that Bows stop raising skill at Real 67.5, conveniently displayed skill at 70.0 No more gains on regular bows. I make about 4300 gold per 1000 boards on regular bows at this point, selling to two different and fully refreshed purchasing NPCs. I sell them 500 boards worth of bows, and then take another 500 out of the bank and sell to a differant NPC who's purchasing at full price. So about 4300 gold for 1000 boards. That could be increased if you spread those 1000 boards between more NPCs paying at full price.

At 70.0 displayed, 67.5 Real skill bows stop giving increase. At this point you make optimal money, switching to x-bows to gain skill will cause a major decrease in profit, but in the efforts to reach GM its what you have to do if you want to advance.

0-30ish Train at bowyer NPC
30-70 Make regular bows, you can stop at 70 for max profit if you chose.
70-90? Make regular crossbows
90-100 Heavy Crossbows

Good Luck

[Lazarus]

My first craft skill ever was bowcraft. Its a good way to start a brand new char. You can use lumberjacking for strength gains and BC/F for making money.

[Rammar]

Heres what it took for me to GM Bowcraft:

~30 - bows - 22.7k board
68.1 - xbows - 28.6k board
90.7 - heavy xbows - 31k board

for a total of 82.3k board from NPC bought to GM.


Selling these to NPCs yields:

bows - 4.3gp/board
xbows - 3.9gp/board
heavy xbows - 3.4gp/board

Don't forget that you can sell to both Bowyers (8 old world) and Weaponsmiths (18 old world), but it can take a (very) long time for them to start buying at decent prices again.

[Light Shade]

This is what it took me to GM Bowcrafting:

~30.0 - 70.0 = 25,342 Logs
70.0 - 90.0 = 24,658 Logs
90.0 - 100.0 = 33,705 Logs

Total Logs Used = 83,705 Logs

GM'd It Today. Logs/Boards Make No Difference.

Still pretty consistent with Rammar's Findings.

L/S