Gold Farming with Mining and Herbalism Professions
Posted on 2008 under Addons & Macros, Lich King, Professions, WotLK | 9 CommentsIn another post, I mention that two gathering professions can make you some sick amounts of gold. But that typically it’s either Herb/Skinning or Mining/Skinning because of the lack of ability to track both Herbs and Minerals at the same time.
However, in combination with the Routes, GatherMate and GatherMate_Data, Herb/Mining becomes more viable.
Aside from the super-nice routing feature (see the other post on that!), it also displays spawn points on your mini-map. You can filter which spawn points you want to see, and you can scale how big they appear on the mini-map. The way it works is that when they are outside of the range that you could detect it, the mini-map displays an icon that represents the specific herb/ore. Once it’s in range, it turns into an empty circle, IF you are detecting that type of spawn…in other words if you have Find Herbs on, ore spawn points will always display the ore pictures, but herb pictures will turn into empty circles when you’re in range to detect the yellow dot. If you see empty circles, and they stay empty for a split second, then you know that nothing is there and you can move on.
So here’s what I do now (now that I dropped Tailoring and re-leveled Herbalism to go with my mining)…
I have a macro:
/castsequence Find Herbs, Find Minerals
I have that bound to a key. Clicking that key will toggle tracking herbs and ore every time I click it. (There is a global cooldown of 1 second, but that’s ok.)
Next, I setup my route to track the most-valuable herb and the most-valuable ore in a given zone. For example, in Shadowmoon Valley, I make a route for Nightmare Vine and Adamantite Ore. This path will cover most of the map. If I miss a few spawnpoints of Felweed or Fel Iron Ore, I’ll live. The route will go near enough to many of them anyway for me to track them.
As I’m flying around following the route, I look on my minimap to see what kind of spawn points are around. Then I hit my macro key to switch the tracking back and forth between ore and herbs. But because of Cartographer I know WHICH one I should be tracking. For example, if there’s a stretch of route that has herbs and no ore, I can tell because of what is being displayed in the minimap, and I don’t need to switch. If I’m coming to a cluster of spawn points that has both, I’ll keep one on (Herbs, for example), and when I enter that cluster, the herbs turn to circles…THEN I’ll click the macro and switch to Ore, and check those empty circles.
It’s tough to describe, but if you have either Herbalism or Mining and use Routes you’ll see what I mean.
If you need help getting your Herbalism or Mining profession up to speed quickly, probably the best guide I’ve seen for speed leveling is Penn’s.
Here’s a video tutorial I created to show how to setup Routes:
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by Derek, on August 3 2008 @ 9:07 am
Wheres can download this addon ?
by Varonin, on February 20 2009 @ 6:27 pm
I’m an alt-oholic. But it’s turned out to be a good thing and is something I think you should share this tip as a topic.
There’s a fortune to be made in the low-level ores. Before TBC, a stack of copper ore would barely fetch 1g…look at it now. My alts are getting rich by selling low level ores on the AH. It’s nuts.
My point? When in the market for a big purchase with my mains (such as epic and cold weather flying), I can draw substantial funds from my low level alts because they can just quest and instance for their gear until they reach flying mount status. Considering you can easilly make the regular flying mount money from TBC zones while questing and grinding, they only have to have spell and repair funds until they reach 60ish.
You don’t have to choose between being a gold farmer or an alt-oholic. Sure, farm when you can or just want to do something mindless…but kill two birds with one stone. Gather, gather, gather.
by Lifhunt, on April 30 2009 @ 7:23 am
hey a question is there anyway to load routes or w.e cause i just picked it up and i havent rly got a lot of nodes on the map this is 4 icecrown or herbs so my route would b like a few things? any download or something to load a mre detailed pathway in?
by Lowir, on October 23 2009 @ 7:53 am
Cmon help me please. I tried this, but on my vista, when i download the gatherer and gathermate and the data on that, its says In game that Routes can find any data from those. can u help me?
by Peter, on December 8 2009 @ 9:48 pm
Do you make this much money with just herb?
by smokey, on December 29 2009 @ 6:49 am
use carbonite, just go into options click guide and import all the nodes and herbs then right click on map and goto show then select nodes and herbs
by tote, on January 13 2010 @ 11:35 pm
Get carbonite instead and you can load all the gather points for every zone. Does the same as mentioned for gatherer more or less. If you need instructions on how to load the data just post another comment and I’ll let you know as i dont have it in front of me now.
by ILFactotum, on February 1 2010 @ 5:06 pm
Thanks for this info, I was wondering how to get a neat looking herb/ore map. I haven’t actually tested it yet but it looks promising. I’d like to add a few extra bits of info that are required to follow your tutorial. First, if you were in my position you’d notice that there was no data under the gathermate data section when you went to create a route, so in order to import it you have to open up gathermate (Taken directly from the routes website): http://www.wowace.com/addons/routes/
type: /gathermate
* Go to ‘Import Data’ and then to ‘GatherMateData’ (left side)
* If you already have herbs/mines of yourself, select ‘Merge’ from the ‘Import Style’ dropdown, otherwise ‘Overwrite’ is ok.
* Select which sources you want to import (ea: Mining/Herbalism) and tick their respective boxes.
* Hit the ‘Import GatherMateData’ button on the bottom.
Also, you need to set up a macro and bind it to a key. I didn’t know how to do this, but you just have to :
1. Hit esc key to open up the wow menu. Click Macros. Click the New button in the macro window that pops up, and then name your macro.
2. Then, copy paste this into the macro window:
/castsequence Find Herbs, Find Minerals
3. You’re now done with creating your macro, but you now need to bind it to a key. You can either drag and drop it into your actionbar or bind it to a key of your choice. I chose to bind mine to the “`” key which is diagonal from your “q” key. In order to do this type the following:
/script SetBindingMacro(“KEY”, “macroname”); where Key is the key you’re binding it to and “macroname” is the name you gave your macro, in my case it was Findherbs/minera
Hope this helps
by ILFactotum, on February 1 2010 @ 5:13 pm
Oh yes, and make sure that your key and macroname remain in quotes!