Tailoring 1 to 300 in WoW Forever: the cheapest route, priced

The route, priced live

Each row covers 25 skill points. It names the recipe to start that stretch on, the skill at which it turns yellow, green and grey, the reagents, and what one craft costs at the reagent medians. When the start of a row is the only thing you read, read that: craft the named item until it stops being orange or yellow, then move to the next row.

The figure under the list is a floor, not a budget. It assumes every craft gives a point, which is only true while a recipe is orange. Expect to spend more, and expect the bottom rows to show "not all reagents priced" for a while: in a fresh economy almost nobody is making runecloth gear yet, so those materials have no median until enough players reach them. The block fills in on its own as they do.

How skill colours decide the route

Every recipe has four thresholds, and the Forever client stores all of them. A recipe is orange from the skill you learn it at until its yellow threshold, and an orange craft always gives a skill point. It is yellow from there until green, and usually gives one. Green crafts give a point only now and then. From the grey threshold on, the craft gives nothing at all.

The cheapest way to 300 is therefore to spend as many crafts as possible on orange recipes and as few as possible on green ones. That is why the route jumps: Bolt of Linen Cloth is learned at 1 and turns yellow at 25, so it carries you to 25 for two Linen Cloth a craft, and then something newer takes over. Each recipe page shows its four numbers in colour, for example Bolt of Linen Cloth (yellow 25, green 37, grey 50).

A green craft that happens to sell for more than its reagents is still worth making. The route optimises for skill per gold spent; the crafting table optimises for gold made. Read both.

1 to 100: linen, thread and the first leather

The first hundred points run almost entirely on linen. The route as computed on 6 November went Bolt of Linen Cloth to 25, Brown Linen Shirt (learned at 1, yellow at 35) to 50, Reinforced Linen Cape (learned at 20, yellow at 60) to 75, and Soft-soled Linen Boots (learned at 40, yellow at 80) to 100. Every one of those is a trainer recipe in the catalog, so nothing has to be found or bought before you can follow it.

Two details matter here. The boots are the first craft that asks for something a tailor does not make: two Light Leather each. Buy them or trade with a skinner. And most of the early rows also take Coarse Thread or Fine Thread. Thread is a reagent you buy rather than farm, so the route cost moves with its price as much as with the cloth.

Wool Cloth is the odd one out. Classic routes spend a bracket on woolen gear, but at the prices seen on 6 November the cheapest orange craft never needed it: the linen recipes stay orange long enough to bridge straight to silk. That frees your wool to sell, or to turn into Bolt of Woolen Cloth (learned at 30), which was selling for a little more than its three Wool Cloth that day. If wool becomes cheap relative to linen, the route will switch to it by itself.

100 to 200: silk and dye

At 100 the route turns to silk. Bolt of Silk Cloth is learned at 70 and stays orange until 110, so the bolts you will need anyway are your first skill points of the bracket. After that the route named Azure Silk Hood (learned at 90, yellow at 130), Crimson Silk Vest (learned at 130, yellow at 170) and Crimson Silk Pantaloons (learned at 140, yellow at 180).

Those three are where dye enters the cost. The hood takes two Blue Dye, the vest and the pantaloons two Red Dye each, and the pantaloons switch from Fine Thread to Silken Thread. Dye is a small line on the bill, but it is the line players forget to buy before they sit down to craft forty of something.

Silk is also the first cloth whose bolt takes four of the raw cloth rather than two or three, so the route through this bracket uses a lot of it. If you are leveling a character alongside the profession, the gold guides by level show where cloth drops are worth keeping rather than vendoring.

200 to 300: mageweave, runecloth and patterns

Around 200 the route moves from silk to Mageweave Cloth, earlier or later depending on which is cheaper that day. On 6 November it named Black Mageweave Headband (learned at 165, yellow at 205): three Bolt of Mageweave and two Heavy Silken Thread a craft. Forever's recipe table lists Bolt of Mageweave at skill 105 and Bolt of Runecloth at skill 170, earlier than many Classic route guides assume, so check the recipe page before you plan around an old list.

Past 225 the shape of Tailoring in Forever changes. Of the 405 Tailoring recipes in the catalog, 311 have a teaching item, a pattern you learn from rather than a trainer, and almost all of the Artisan range is in that group: Runecloth Cuffs and Runecloth Headband (both learned at 225), the Mooncloth pieces, the Felcloth line. The route marks a row "needs the pattern" when it has to use one, and it prefers a trainer recipe whenever both are priced.

Two cautions for this bracket. First, while few players have reached it, the cheapest priced craft can be a strange one. On 6 November the 225 row named Gilded Gloves, a pattern recipe taking Gold Bars and runecloth, simply because its reagents were the only ones in range with prices. Treat any row here as a starting point and compare its neighbours on the Tailoring page. Second, Runecloth, Rune Thread and Ironweb Spider Silk appear in most of the 250 to 300 recipes, so they are the materials to watch as the economy matures.

What to sell while you level

A route that only spends gold is the expensive way to do it. Some of the crafts on the way up sold for more than their reagents at the 6 November medians on PvP Horde US, and selling them pays for the rows that do not:

• Linen Bag, a trainer recipe at skill 1. Bags never stop selling; it moved roughly 800 a day on that market.
• Linen Reagent Bag and Woolen Reagent Bag, both pattern recipes new to Forever, at 1 and 35.
• Red Woolen Boots, a pattern recipe at 40, one of the few gear pieces with a clear margin early on.
• Small Silk Pack (trainer, 105) and Green Silk Pack (pattern, 120), the silk-era bags.

Margins in a new economy move daily. The crafting table ranks every Tailoring recipe by what it makes after the auction house cut right now, and the professions guide explains why bags and other used-up goods tend to keep paying while gear sells in bursts.

A plan that survives price changes

Put together, the approach that holds whatever the market does:

• Open this page or the Tailoring page before each session, not a saved list.
• Buy cloth for one row at a time. Prices for a fresh economy fall as supply catches up, and bolts made from cheaper cloth next week cost less than bolts made today.
• Keep crafting a recipe while it is orange or yellow; drop it the moment it is green.
• Sell the bags and boots you make along the way rather than vendoring them.
• Past 225, read the patterns your route needs before you commit, since a pattern is a purchase or a find, not a trainer visit.