Fish Rolls and Patty Melts

The thing about baking in Everquest is that there are hundreds of recipes for all kinds of interesting concotions, but a large number of them require "foraged" items, and until yesterday I didn't even remember what foraged meant.  I was thinking there were an awful lot of ground spawns out there that I hadn't noticed yet.  Then I realized / remembered that foraging is a special skill that only a few get -- rangers, druids, elves, iskar, something like that, but mostly only rangers get it at full strength.

Except -- I also discovered that these days, anyone can put 3 AA (alternative advancement that you get after level 50) points into forage, and are allowed to forage up to a capped 50 points.  I had been saving up my AA's so I immediately put 3 points into forage and started working my new skill.  I'm not sure what I can accomplish with forage at 50, I couldn't find any information on the web that explained that to me so I just went for it.  Hopefully I can scrounge up some or most of the things I'd like to try in baking, because these days you can't depend on a lot of low level and mid level rangers and druids selling you their foraged stuff, because most of the low and mid level zones are empty nearly all of the time.

In one evening I managed to get up to foraging 12 and foraged 3 pods of water.  Yay.

My goal for the evening was to work on fishing and baking, which I did.  I'd left my character in the marketplace overnight and all throughout the day, and I'd sold quite a few things.  I'm up over 18,000 plat now, which seems like a lot to me even though I know it isn't.  But it's plenty as far as allowing me to tradeskill and even work on alchemy, which tends to be expensive.  Costs for tradeskills and store-bought items have not changed with inflation, so everything that you need to buy from a vendor is much cheaper these days.

I fished off the East Freeport dock for nearly 2 hours.  This is "lazy" game playing, as in you're doing nothing and I was able to go cook dinner and occasionally come in to hit the fish button (I set up a hotkey that would fish twice and place anything caught in inventory, based on reccomendations I saw online).  Ultimately I got my fishing to up over 100, but all I caught in Freeport were fresh fish, sandals, and daggers, and fish scales.  Nothing exciting.  I caught a few Crescent Perch after I teleported back to Crescent Reach however, that was cool, but there's not much you can do with them as it turns out, just one recipe.

I had done a lot of research on recipes that I thought I could try to get my skills up close to 200, but after realizing that it would be a few days before I was able to fish and forage some of the ingredients, I wound up doing fish rolls to 143 instead.  You can buy fresh fish and batwings from vendors so this was very easy to do -- in fact, I wound up with far too much fresh fish, I bought a bunch in East Freeport before realizing that you can buy them in Crescent Reach, and then I wound up catching a ton of them while fishing.  So I had plenty of fish for fish rolls.

Next I decided that I could buy everything I needed to make patty melts, which trivial at 191.  This was a long jump from 143 but since I could buy the materials I could afford to fail a lot.  The only thing I needed was a non-stick frying pan, which, as it turned out, required a trip to the Jaggedpine Forrest for the mold to make it.  Once I got that made, I went to town and made patty melts for more than an hour.  I wound up at 190 baking skill, which I felt was good enough to stop and try something new.

I sold a lot of the patty melts back to the vendors (at a profit, it seemed).  I made so many and I'm not certain regular food like that sells through the bazaar, though I'm willing to try.  I made TONS of patty melts, I was getting only 1-2 skill increases per 40 attempts for a while there.

My next goal was complicated.  I wanted to make Smoked Fresh Fish Pie.  This turned out to require me to brew smoking sauce, which required me to first brew vegetable oil, which required me to first mix lettuce, carrots and turnips into "vegetables".  That was a very involved process, and then I discovered that I needed a tacklebox in order to produce filet of fresh fish, which meant a trip to the Plane of Knowledge.  After that I realized that my fresh fish could not be turned into filet of fresh fish (oddly enough), but several different other types of fish could.  This did not include Crescent Perch.  I fished in Blightfire Moors for a while and was able to catch enough fish to produce 26 filet of fresh fish.  Then it was on to the next step, which was turning snake eggs into egg batter.  I'd collected snake eggs all evening as I was able in preparation for this, so this step went smoothly.

The last step before making the pies was to turn my filet of fresh fish into smoked filet of fresh fish.  Supposedly this was simply combining the filet of fresh fish with smoking sauce in a mixing bowl, but this did not work.  I was given a message that indicated this was not a proper recipe, so I was stuck at that point and decided to log off for the night.

I killed Hadden in Qeynos Hills again.  Still no Fishhook Earring.  I've become concerned with the faction hits -- not that I plan to stop killing him, but I check on guards and such before I approach them now.  Jaggedpine Woods is near Qeynos and I travelled through the ranger glade there to get to the forest, and I was conning everything to make sure nobody hated me yet.  But after checking what faction hits I get from killing Hadden, none are Jaggedpine Tree Folk:  Antonius Bayle, Guards of Qeynos, Merchants of Qeynos, and Coalition of Tradesfolk.  Antonius Bayle is the leader of the city.  Some of these factions I can fix by killing gnolls and bandits, but I have to check to make sure whether it fixes all of them.  But the guards are the important one, they're the ones who will attack you on site if they don't like you.  Merchants just call you names when you try to trade.