Tuesday 13 November 2012

Ironpaw Tokens & Cooking Materials Shuffling

Ironpaw Token Shuffle - Veggies, Meat & Fish
Over the last few weeks, I've been talking about making gold with cooking materials & fishing quite a bit here. That's because right now, it's about the only thing I'm really doing in game alongside dailies & some leveling! About 2 weeks ago, I did a post about how to make easy gold with Pandaren Cooking & in the comments it was pointed out to me that I missed an obvious trick! I edited the post at the time but it also got me thinking a little clearer about this whole Ironpaw Token Shuffle.

I went back to The Undermine Journal, to the Cooking section under the Gathered category & just stared at it a while. I realised that for me, at least, it didn't go far enough so I built another little spreadsheet for that extra step. This screenshot (from The Undermine Journal) shows how much it would cost to make a container of meats/fish or vegetables from each material available on the Auction House. In effect, it's the cost of an Ironpaw Token, dependant on which raw material you use. I've included the 100 Year Soy Sauce & Black pepper section because those are still selling well on my server & from this screenshot, you can easily see that there is profit to be made just by converting the cheapest raw materials to Ironpaw Tokens.

The Undermine Journal, Cooking page, Ironpaw Token Calcs
But what if you don't want to sell 100 Year Soy Sauce or Black Pepper? What if you need cheap materials to level your cooking Ways? Out comes the calculator to work out whether those 20 cheap Redbelly Mandarin are actually cheaper than 5 Raw Crocolisk Belly via an Ironpaw Token or should you just buy the Raw Crocolisk Bellies? (Just in case you don't know, 20 x  a meat or fish or 100 x a vegetable can be converted to an Ironpaw Token which in turn can be exchanged for 5 x a meat/fish bundle or 25 x a vegetable bundle)

That's where my spreadsheet comes in. I wanted to put some clever gizmos in there to make it even easier but my spreadsheet skills are extremely rusty & I just couldn't get my head around it! So I took the basic Undermine Journal data (columns C & D) to start with - this is just the same data as the screenshot earlier. Then I took the Container Cost & divided it by either 5 or 25 (meat/fish or vegetables) for columns E & F.
Calculate Ironpaw Token Shuffle Costs
So what does this actually do for me that I can't do quickly in game? For me, it quickly identifies which raw materials to buy to shuffle to the other materials I require. Currently I need Giant Mantis Shrimp but at 34g80s each, I don't want to buy them directly. My spreadsheet shows me that even if I use 100 Pink Turnips to convert to an Ironpaw Token & then buy 5 Giant Mantis Shrimp, I will save 42 gold! (purple dots).

It's going to be fairly rare for 100 vegetables of any sort to be a cost effective way of buying just 5 meat or fish - Giant Mantis Shrimp are just exceptionally expensive on my server today but using a single 20 stack of meat or fish can easily be cost effective to buy either 5 meat/fish bundle or a 25 vegetable bundle.

You can see that the Raw Turtle Meat & the Reef Octopus (red dots) are both really cheap today & in column F, it shows them at a converted price of 1g66s & 1g59s respectively - that means using either of these to buy a vegetable bundle (25's) will be the cheapest way to buy any of the vegetables except Pink Turnips & Mogu Pumpkins. The Reef Octopus is so cheap today that it's also the cheapest way to buy Wildfowl Breast, Raw Crocolisk Meat & Raw Crab Meat as well as all the fish below Jewel Danio in the fish section!

I've added this spreadsheet onto Google Docs & fingers crossed, in an editable, downloadable form. Just click Ironpaw Token Conversion spreadsheet and you should go straight to it. Feel free to edit it to suit yourself but please, only edit a downloaded copy. I tried to put a macro in for easy sorting but it didn't work (or I couldn't make it work!) so don't worry if you get a 'contains a macro' warning - I couldn't find it to get rid of it!

I hope this helps make the Ironpaw Token Shuffle a little easier & quicker for you. If you have any problems downloading or editing it, let me know either in comments, by email (top right under profile) or on Twitter @NevAHAddict & I'll do my best to help.

Edited: I had to change to Google Docs link above to return the file to it's original format. Please, please, download a copy before you edit anything. Thank you :)

Edited yet again! Following some feedback, I've extended this spreadsheet & uploaded a version 2 to google docs - I've also added some more analysis in a second post Ironpaw Tokens & Cooking Materials Shuffling - Revisited so to make sure you've got the most up to date version, pop over to the Revisited post & click the google docs link there :)


Image © USDAGov under Creative Commons licence

12 comments:

  1. Thanks for the excel sheet. I know TUJ can provide some info but most of the time it's old. What I mean is: by the time you get to AH and check on prices the info you can get from TUJ is not correct. I do the same thing in many cases. Created simple enchant mats,living steel, leather conversion excel tables to have accurate info about items. Great write up, I don't know why Jim never come up with this, but heck ... doesn't matter... :) he is on vacation right?

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    1. I was tinkering with the Wow Armory API and noticed that the auction data provided by blizzard seemed to be a once an hour snapshot of the AH. So I don't believe it's TUJ's fault for being old data.

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    2. Glad you liked the spreadsheet :) I only used the TUJ data as an example - I usually run an auctionator scan & plug in the actual server data from there.

      As for Jim - maybe he's not a spreadsheet guy? lol I used to use Excel 8-10 hrs a day in my job so it's second nature to me (well, it was!).

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  2. Great work Nev and thanks for your effort.

    I think even once you're maxed out on your ways, this will run the course for the xpac as an 'easy' way to get gold, even for those who have no other professions otherwise.

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  3. Yes, I think so too - there will most likely be price differences across the various mats so I'd guess there will always be some profit somewhere, especially as people max out their cooking & perhaps stop doing the daily for tokens. I hope so anyway :)

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  4. Definitely a good read. I've never used Auctionator but I will be trying to load it today and see if I can get values on my server for this.

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  6. Fantastic idea. I've been doing this just for myself, but haven't thought of doing this to make gold. I love it, thanks for the idea.

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  7. I see the potential of this spreadsheet, but I'm having a really hard time interpreting how to use the data for straight profit.

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    1. Hey Landon - it took me ages to get my head around it too don't worry :) Basically in the screenshot above, the 2 red dot items are almost as cheap as the very cheapest vegetables on the AH - if there aren't enough cheap Pink Turnips or Mogu Pumpkins, the two red dot items are your next cheapest way to get vegetables via the Ironpaw Tokens trade in.

      The meat/fish column & the veggies column are the single unit prices of any material, if you use the item on that row to buy any of the other items so for example - Reef Octopus is the cheapest fish but is only good to convert for the more expensive meats & fishes & the most expensive of the veggies.

      I wanted to try to put in some kind of formula to say which stuff is best used to convert to other mats but I just couldn't make it work so you still need to use your brain! It does put it all in one place though so I hope this helps clarify it a bit more for you.

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    2. I'm going to spend some time with it. I think the spreadsheet has a lot of use, it just doesn't blatantly guide you from "buy this" to "sell that".

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  8. Nice post Nev!! I downloaded the spreadsheet and cant wait to have a play later. But like Landon it did take me a bit to get my head around it. :)

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