Cooking questions

[John Deere]

Hello, I'm fairly new to the game and have a couple of questions concerning the cooking skill please.

First, is it worth getting and GMing?

I heard you can make your own scroll paper but is that really better then buying from NPC?

I want want to train it up but when the menu comes up, it asked if you want to make a certain number of fish steaks for example. That does not seem to be working, it always cooks all that I have in my backpack. Am, I doing something wrong?

Thank You

 

[Basara]

1. It depends on what you defile as "worth getting and GMing". One person's answer can be completely different from another. There's a number of magical things you can do with cooking, and whether it's worth it depends on your opinions of those, or the ability to make normal stuff for in-game activities (exceptional tags and engraved foods for parties, etc.).

2. It's easier to buy blank scrolls, but on some shards this can be difficult if someone other than you is trying to buy at the same time, as with 2 or more buyers you can quickly make all the mages, necromancers and the others that sell it (real estate broker? - plus cartographer if counting blank maps for training cartography) all waiting for restocking (and they all have different, random, timers on the reset). So, you can make paper while waiting for reset, and fairly fast if you have insane amounts of raw material (like some lumberjacks). That, and some people really like doing it the hard way for RP purposes.

3. Fish steak cook all at once, but IIRC like a number of things (raw ribs, etc.), make a skill gain check for each item of the count cooked. So, if you only want to cook a certain amount at a time (such as for a quest), it's best to have the raw fish steaks in a different pack off you (like in a pack animal), move only the number you need into your pack for the actual cooking. Repeat as needed.

The Profession forums (the one concerning "Nutrition", specifically) would be a better place to get advice. I never finished training cooking, but only from concentrating on training other characters.

 

[John Deere]

Ok, thanks Basara.

The main reason I was thinking of taking cooking was because I wanted an easier, faster and cheaper way of getting blank scrolls for inscription. But, considering it takes me an hour to get just 10 bark fragment, I will probably skip taking it and just buy my scrolls.

 

[Henzy]

Well John, first of all, sorry for my late reply, but I just saw your post today....
I am actually training cooking myself, because I want to be able to create woodpulp, just like you, but I want it for a scrollbinder, instead of the blank scrolls, so I think it is definitely worth training.
If I have the time for let's say a couple of days, starting today, I will do a test as scribe, because I would like to make a living (in UO - not in real life) as a scribe. I will make a scroll of each spell (magery and necromancy, for mysticism I need a full spellbook first, since I don't have one yet) and try to sell those to NPC vendors. I will put up an excel-sheet with the cost for blank scrolls and reagents respectively and the price for which I sell the scrolls and thus find out which gives the highest profit. (Since I have a GM Miner and GM Tinker the Scribe's Pens are for free)
Regards,
Henzy of Drachenfels