Alchemy and Foraging

[tyndayl]

With the DON expansion alot, if not all, higher lvl (250+) alchemy recipes require some foraged (ie Ranger/druid ability) from DON zones, from what is posted on the Quick Trivial list here in EQtraders. I have at my disposal 2 computers and 2 druids and 2 rangers with 150 and up foraging ability. I have personally seen some of the items posted "foraged" drop out of the DON instance zones, but have also seen them foraged...

THE BIG QUESTION:: How do i make Macro Forage keys or is there a Way to Create some sort of Macro, either in EQ file edit or General HOTKEY formation ????

Someone told me Macros are illegal in EQ.... , but i know creating hotkeys that read as follows are permitable and quite simple, but only Macros 5 times , becasue only 5 lines are on each hotkey editor....

/doability 1 , pause 1000 ;
/doability 1 , pause 1000;
etc....

"doability 1 " = forage, on Do Ability tab.
"pause ##" = time for forage button to repop.

The exact format is not correct on this ... its been a while since i experimented with this but is something very close to this format... I think spaces and commas and semicolons may vary and is very sensitive to placement... etc


PLEASE anyone who knows a link or anything about foraging ... Help Me

I am sitting here needing lots of those items to take me to 300.

If you know of an alternate method to 300 alchemy that would be great too!
Thanks

[Prelgor]

My foragers use a very simple foraging macro. Put the following in a social:

/doability 1 (or wherever you have Forage)
/pause 5 (just to give things time to sync up)
/autoinv (dumps the goodie into your pack)

The re-use timer on Forage is pretty long, so it seems too difficult to tell it to forage now, again in like 2 minutes, then again in 4 minutes, etc.. I just bind the social above to my left turn arrow. Any time I turn (which happens often enough just in normal play), I forage, if the ability is available. On a druid with maxed forage, that's plenty often enough to have me destroying stacks of roots fairly often.

Creating some method of, say, auto-foraging overnight while AFK would probably be frowned upon by the Powers That Be.

[Verdandi]

Foraging by using in-game tools like these is perfectly permissable. My little bard uses one just like Prelgor's. What is not acceptable is when people use other software on their computers to affect gameplay, including making them forage while afk.

To get the most out of your foraging hotkey, you can set it something like:

/pause 400, /doability 1
/pause 600, /autoinventory
/pause 400, /doability 1
/pause 600, /autoinventory
/doability 1

Even though the pause is on the line before the doability or autoinventory, it will be done after the other command on the same line. That's just part of how the pause command works in hotkeys. So when you press a hotkey that reads as above, it will doability 1, pause 400, autoinventory, pause 600, doability 1, pause 400, autoinventory, pause 600, and then doability 1 again. That gets you three forages out of one hotkey, the most that can be done legally.

[mithridate]

Forage refresh is 105 seconds, I believe.

[Akishka]

Mine looks just like the one Verdandi posted. Although you should watch it cycle carefully the first few times and make sure that your pauses are long enough. I don't quite understand it but there is something about the variability with the speed that your computer talks to EQ which makes it need to be adjusted sometimes.

Oh, but sometimes I take out the last line of the macro and replace it with /tell X push the button again!! That way if I'm actually playing on one computer, I don't have to pay as much attention to the other

[mewkus]

Another option is to make a hotkey that does forage and autoinventory, then tie it to either your left or right cursor key. That way, when you move around, you'll automatically forage.

[Xodar]

I sometimes head to a zone and forage for something if I have a specific need while I chat. Being a ranger I had pushing 1 button at set intervals figured out long ago. A couple of tips:

I originally used the hotkey location where I had my archery key of old, and then used my gamepad to press it like archery (~4times a seond). I found this resulted in me seeing a message "you must wait longer before you can forage" about 30% of the time. That apparently happens when you hit the forage key just as the server resets it, but it DOES reset the forage timer even though you did not forage. Once I set the delay up to 8 or 9 seconds I hardly ever see this happen.

Rangers get critical forage AA. It's a bit of in joke in the community, because it's not exactly game impacting for a lot of rangers, but it's $$ for tradeskillers. I execute a double forage ~70% of the time with Nature's Bounty 3, that speeds things up.