(N)EverQuest Scrolls

+5 stamina +5 agility +5 dexterity +30 hit points weight 7.2 stackable

For anyone aspiring to be a baker, the Halas 10lb Meat Pie is the first real sign you get that mastery proper is in sight, and is also the first really profitable item you get a chance to make. But, like the Misty Thicket Picnic, the recipe is complex with many combines, and requires several tools that would need a decent level in other skills if you have to make them yourself. Hence this guide.

To make it, you will need to either buy mammoth meat from other players, or be able to hunt for it yourself (mid twenties); and the skill up process will require you be to able to safely access Jaggedpine, which would take a mid-teens player from either the Surefall Glades entrance (past the Bloodsaber defiler), or from the bottom of Blackburrow. A set of 20 combines will cost close to 100pp to make, giving up to 6 stacks of Halas 10lb Meat Pies.

Using stat foods and drinks

To have an effect, the item must be the first food (or drink) item encountered when scanning your inventory, which will make it the next item to be consumed. The engine scans your inventory in columns from top left to bottom right, going into each bag as it is encountered in the same sequence. If in doubt, you can see the effect on your stats when it is in the right slot.

However, you don’t really want that hard to quest/loot, expensive item to be chomped when a cheap ration or foraged root would do just as well. So force feed the cheap stuff to reset your hunger timer; just make sure the food you want to eat is in a top slot (one of the main inventory slots), and right click on it until you are full. This will get through items at roughly twice the rate they would be consumed naturally in your inventory, but better that than losing the good stuff.

Baking Skill

I have been making HMP successfully at 180 baking skill, with a high rate of success – not bad when HMP trivials at 226. Even someone who doesn’t want (or isn’t able) to get baking over 200 can successfully make this. My preferred approach to skill ups on any trade skill is to pay attention to the masters of the art, which means www.eqtraders.com, and Xanthe at http://www.geocities.com/shadowknight57/; her baking guide is the best one to refer to for quick and cheap trade skill mastery. The baking guide is at http://www.geocities.com/shadowknight57/baking.html. This guide hasn’t been updated recently, and optimal skill up paths resulting from GoD, and access to Abysmal Sea, are now rather different.

You can take the incremental approach she suggests, with several stages; or you can just make one cheap, high skill level item until you reach the appropriate level. The disadvantage of this is that it is very monotonous, but the advantage is that, with fewer successes as you start, there is less junk to sell back to vendors. You can also find one location that works, and stick to it.

I took batwing crunchies, followed by fish rolls then patty melts. To start with, Freeport is a good base for this, buying bat wings at the casters guild (second floor, first female vendor) in West Freeport, with frosting either from East Commons (one run, buy in bulk), or fish from the docks in East Freeport. Fish rolls will get you to 135, but, in common with Xanthe, it seems to me that the last five skill points become harder to get as you approach the trivial level of the item you are making, so I usually move on to the next level if the items are cheap enough to make.

An alternative skill-up path is to make meat fillets – buy the meat from the same vendors as you will use for the pie later, in Shadowhaven or Thurgadin, and combine with your filleting knife in a spit. Trivial is 143, which lets you skip fish rolls entirely, and is fewer mouse strokes in total, although possibly slightly more expensive to use than the first route.

The next level is harder; patty melts require meat and bread, which are commonly available in many places – I chose to use Shadowhaven and Thurgadin for this, Thurgadin being convenient because I was working on the Coldain prayer shawls at the time; but they also require cheese, which can only be bought in Jaggedpine, and a non-stick frying pan, which takes a decent smithing skill if you have to make one. Depending on your faction, the cheese, as well as the frying pan molds, can be bought from both the residents and the Brell gnolls in Jaggedpine.

Using GoD

However, this stage (patty melts) can be done in Abysmal Sea very rapidly – use the Find tool to reach the Baking vendors, and the General vendor nearby (between two brewing vendors) sells cheese. Frying pan molds are also available in Abysmal. Note also that hailing the vendors for any skill type in Abysmal will result in a free quest that will allow you to level to 31 in that skill for no cost. This will allow you to skip batwing crunchies, for example – although I would still make metal bits to start smithing, for obvious reasons.

Refer to Xanthe and eqtraders for the recipes.

Other Skills

You need to make or locate a dairy spoon (67), ceramic lining (36 pottery), pie tin (35 smithing or 115 pottery), filleting knife (76) – and will want to have a non-stick frying pan for baking skill ups, although this isn’t necessary to make the Halas 10lb Meat Pie itself. You will need a smithing skill at least approaching the trivial of the filleting knife to make the attempt, which means that you might as well make the pie tin through smithing rather than pottery. The pie tin and frying pan smithing recipes require a ceramic lining, which has a pottery trivial of 36. I would suggest skilling up smithing as far as you can before boredom strikes, then risking the filleting knife combine, at which point you will have dairy spoons coming out of your ears.

You might also need a non-stick frying pan for your baking skill ups; this will mean a trip to Jaggedpine to acquire the molds, from either the gnolls or the Jaggedpine residents, and a trip back out to a forge to make it, all of which is very time consuming if your skill isn’t high enough (trivial is 91).

In Shadowhaven, the Fordel area has smithing vendors suitable for basic skill ups near the food vendors: Smithy Edcar (128, 136), Robert Blackhand (179, 115) and Rusty Blackhand (194, 118). You can buy water flasks in the Cleric/Paladin guild from Adept Delf (28, -250).

Do not put any training points into smithing; you will have to make more than enough metal bits to make these trivial, and so any skill points applied earlier would be wasted. Make metal bits until you have at least a backpack full; this probably won’t be enough, and you’ll have to make more. The standard skill up path will then have you make skewers to 38 (I’d move on at 33), dairy spoons to 67 (again, move on at 62), and banded bracers to 91.

• Metal bits are 2 small pieces of ore and one flask of water.
• A skewer is a skewer mold, a flask of water, and one metal bit.
• A dairy spoon is a scaler mold (that’s right), two metal bits, and a flask of water.
• A filleting knife is a scaler mold (yes), three metal bits, and a flask of water.
• A banded bracer is a bracer mold (small, medium or large), one sheet of metal, and a flask of water. Buy the sheets from the vendors, even though you can make them – it isn’t really any more expensive allowing for failures, and making metal bits is bad enough.
• A non-stick frying pan is a non-stick frying pan mold, ceramic lining, metal bits, and a flask of water.
• The pie tin is a pie tin mold, metal bits, ceramic lining, and a flask of water.

Before you get to the point of making the pie tin, you should skill up on pottery and make a couple of ceramic linings (allowing for smithing failures). The Stout area has a pottery vendor, wheel and kiln right next to a water vendor – Hintol Balkortak (-436, 1385). Make medium jars with a block of clay, a medium jar sketch and a flask of water. Destroy what you make, do not attempt to sell them back or fire them; you will lose more money if you do. The ceramic lining needs one ceramic lining sketch, a flask of water, and a small block of clay. Take the unfired ceramic lining and fire it in a kiln with a quality firing sheet (that’s correct, no flask of water).

Getting it Together

HMP is a complex recipe with many stages. You will need a lot of free slots to make the attempts and store the intermediate products; for this reasons, I suggest making the common items first (creamy fennel sauce), then producing each fillet in cream separately. Two completely empty backpacks would seem to be a sensible minimum for this, as well as one free top slot for your mixing bowl. Inventory space required will be: one container slot (mixing bowl); 3 tools; 12 ingredients; 6 giant slots for final results (and possibly one or two extra slots for working storage). Fewer slots will be required if you buy things as you go.

You will also want to be based in a zone with access to as many ingredients as possible; this guide assumes that you are in Shadowhaven, although I believe that Thurgadin will also work; but Abysmal Sea is the perfect location. You can find everything you need from vendor stocks in Shadowhaven, including what you need to skill up (apart from fresh fish for baking, which I suggest skilling up for in Freeport, see above), apart from wolf and mammoth meat, and eggs. A trip to Halas should give you plenty of wolf meat by buying back what players have sold to vendors; mammoth meat is rarer, but I find that if I offer not to hunt mammoths, players will give me what they have already looted for free. It also drops more commonly from mammoth calves than from full size mammoths, I think.

Eggs can be looted from low level snakes, or bought from newbie vendors in zones with snakes – such as Misty Thicket/Rivervale, Qeynos, or Freeport. They can also be foraged in Butcherblock, Skyfire, and Lavastorm (I think). I had a large stock from killing cave basilisks in Jaggedpine, so I used those.

Initial items to fetch are: 2 wolf meat, 2 mammoth meat, 8 basilisk eggs.

The ingredients needed for 20 combines are:

• 20 sage leaf – 47pp1.7.0
• 2 wolf meat
• 20 bear meat (vendor) 2pp1.1.3
• 20 lion meat (vendor) 2pp1.1.3
• 2 mammoth meat
• 15 fennel, 15 flour, 4 milk, 2 benzoin (4 fennel 9pp4.3.6 and 1 benzoin 2pp3.5.8)
• 8 eggs, 8 flour, 8 milk (prices in coppers) – assuming eggs give a yield of 5 dough per egg, this varies a lot

Total cost will be close to 100pp. And the tools required will be: a mixing bowl (vendor bought), filleting knife, pie tin, a dairy spoon and an oven. An oven is better than a spit, as the final combine has to happen in an oven – although if you have a spit, plenty of free inventory slots, and want to make the intermediate stages while medding or camping, this is up to you. A spit also has the advantage of having giant size slots for the final product.

The first stage is to make cream. You will need to make 80 creamy fennel sauces (enough for 4 stacks of 20 fillets). This means you need 15 combines of creamy fennel sauce (yield 6), each with one cream. Two combines of cream (yield 8) will give you more than enough, if successful. You shouldn’t often get failures of these items, but if you do, just make another set.

Cream will need 2 benzoin (from the vendors in the entrance to the druid/shaman/beastlord area, Callowolf MacFuller (122, 1236), Lemsen Frostherb (122, 1216) and Polson Medicinal, 23 on the eqatlas map), and 4 milk. I buy this from the food vendors near the Fordel Hold bank (Akeral (204, -23) or Nicoela (144, 101)). Combine one benzoin, 2 unstacked milk and a dairy spoon in your mixing bowl to make 8 creams. Do this twice.

To make the creamy fennel sauce, take one fennel (from the same vendors at the shaman guild entrance), one flour (from the baking vendors), and one cream in a mixing bowl, giving 6 sauces. Do this 15 times, until you have 80 sauces; repeat earlier steps if you get failures, but this seems to be very rare.

Next, make your dough; you will need 2 stacks of dough for the combines. The yield of dough varies by egg type, but as the ingredients are cheap and readily available, this doesn’t really matter. I used basilisk egg and eggs (one foraged, one looted), which have yields of 5 and 15 dough per combine; other eggs mostly have lower yields. Combine one egg, one flour and one milk in a mixing bowl until you have 2 stacks of clumps of dough. Then you can put away the mixing bowl (and dairy spoon), or even sell it back to a vendor.

You can convert the meat to 4 stacks of fillets by combining one meat with a filleting knife in a spit or oven. Mammoth and wolf meat yield 10 fillets per meat, hence why you only need two meats; lion and bear make one fillet per meat, so you need a stack of each of them.

You will now have 11 stacks of ingredients (4 fillets, 4 sauce, 2 dough, and one of sage leaf), and may have used several more inventory slots to store earlier products and tools. Combine the fillet with the sauce in your oven or spit until all fillets have been made into fillets in cream; failures don’t really matter at this stage.

The final combine requires an oven, and you will want to have 4 stacks of fillets in cream, one of each meat type, 2 stacks of dough, one stack of sage leaf (bought from the alchemy vendors again) and one pie tin. Put them into the oven, combine, and you should now have 6 Halas meat pies. These go into a giant slot, so you should have either 6 free top level slots (unlikely), or a container that can take giant items – large sewing kit, spit, or rallic pack would all work.

Congratulations! If your skills are high enough, and luck is with you, you now have six stacks of Halas 10lb Meat Pies, ready to sell in the Bazaar.