Calg's Profession Planner

Levelling a crafting profession by a written guide costs more than it needs to. The guide picked its route once, in the abstract, and it has never seen your server's auction house.

This works out the cheapest way from the skill you have to the skill you want, using your own prices, and tells you exactly what to buy.

Why it beats a guide

Two reasons, and the second is the one that surprises people.

It knows what things cost where you play. Mat prices differ wildly between servers and between weeks. A route that was cheapest when the guide was written may not be cheapest now.

It credits what you make on the way. Craft blasting powder for skill-ups, then spend that powder on grenades, and the powder was never a wasted cost — you would have bought it anyway. A guide that adds up "mats for step 1" plus "mats for step 2" double-counts it, which is why guides steer you towards odd one-off crafts when spamming explosives is cheaper.

Using it

/pp opens the window. Pick a profession, check the skill range, read the route.

• From is read off your character, and follows your racial bonus — a gnome's engineering caps at 315, the same character's cooking at 300. Editable, so you can plan an alt or a profession you have not taken.
• To is where you want to get to.
• Route is the plan: which skill range, how many to craft, what it costs. The colour of the skill range is the difficulty band it starts in — orange is a guaranteed skill-up, yellow 75%, green 25%.
• Shopping is the same plan as a buy list, with the mats you will make yourself already netted out. Vendor mats are marked, so you do not go to the auction house for flux.
• Send to Auctionator pushes the list into Auctionator as a named shopping list.

Click a step to see its reagents, with the quantity that step needs and what it costs.

Right-click a step to exclude that recipe and re-plan without it. Worth knowing about because a recipe can be the cheapest on mats and still a bad idea — the pattern may cost more than the detour saves, or drop somewhere you have no intention of going. Steps that need a bought pattern are marked buy recipe, and its price is counted in the total. Right-click again to put it back.

/pp plan eng 225 skips the clicking.

Prices

With Auctionator installed, prices come from its scan history, and the addon distinguishes an auction it actually observed from one it interpolated.

Without it you still get a working planner, but a generic one: vendor prices are exact and everything else is an estimate off the item's vendor value. Treat the route as sound and the gold figure as indicative. The footer says which situation you are in.

TradeSkillMaster is not used, even if you have it — its own crafting module already does cost maths.

What the numbers mean

Three figures along the footer, each one hoverable for the detail. They read as a sequence, and the order is a certainty gradient — what you pay, what you get back for certain, what you might get back:

• Outlay — what leaves your pocket. Mats and any patterns, already net of everything the plan makes for itself.
• Salvage — the vendor value of what you are left holding. A vendor always pays it, so it is a floor rather than a hope.
• Resale — the auction value of those same leftovers, if they all sell.

The route is chosen on salvage, never on resale. Assuming 60 rough blasting powder clears at market is how a planner ends up quoting 800g for a 2,400g job. Resale is shown because 200 sapper charges really are worth something to raiders — it just is not money you can count on before it arrives. Treat it as a ceiling, not a forecast.

The honest bit

Some of this data is inferred, and the addon says so rather than hiding it.

Skill-up breakpoints and reagent lists come from the game client's own data, so they are exact. The skill at which a recipe becomes available is not in there for trainer-taught recipes — that number lives on the server and only appears when a trainer window is open. About three in five are exact (recipes taught by a Schematic, Pattern, Plans or Formula carry it on the item); the rest are estimated, and steps built on an estimate are marked.

/pp audit is how that gets fixed. Run it:

• at a trainer — reads the exact skill requirement for everything it teaches, including recipes you already know, and remembers them account-wide. One visit per profession and that profession's thresholds are data instead of estimates.
• with a profession window open — checks the shipped reagent lists against the client's. If you have the profession maxed this verifies hundreds of recipes in one pass.

/pp audit notes shows what it has recorded.

Known limits

• It will not craft a sub-component just to save money. If a step needs Thorium Widgets it prices them; it does not work out that making them yourself is cheaper unless making them is also the cheapest way to gain that skill point.
• Enchanting needs something to enchant. Era has no vellums, so an enchanting route assumes you have gear to put the enchant on. The mats are right; the target items are your problem.
• "Trainer only" is cautious until you have audited. Whether a trainer teaches a given recipe is server-side, so before an audit the filter excludes anything that might need a bought pattern. After a trainer visit it is exact for that profession.
• Auto-detecting your current skill needs an English client. Era has no API that reports a profession by id, so it matches on name. Elsewhere, type the number.
• Skill-up chances are the documented vanilla bands (100/75/25%), not something measured on a live realm. Ranking recipes against each other is robust to this; the absolute gold total less so.

Commands