Lowbie Gold Guide: Letherworking

Thandra @ Llane Screenshot by tamed lion

Awhile back I created a hunter with the plan of leveling them up to be my leather worker though I've been debating more and more about just power leveling it on my main, but thought hey, at the vary least this could be.

Keep in mind that I haven't been playing this hunter as much as I would like and primarly the way this character has been making gold is by making low level leather working items and I only been playing them a little here and there, sometimes just signing on to buy leather craft a few items, auction them and sign off.  At this time my hunter is level 23 and has six hundred sixty gold eighty one silver and nighty copper, the only help I really gave this character was some bags, two 20 slot leather working bags I bought from a vendor and a couple embersilk bags I made on my mage.

I'm sure some other more seasoned people would be able to make more then that in the time I've invested in my hunter, but its still more then your average player would most likely have by that level, and since I was about the only one doing it, I had next to no competition with the items I crafted.


So How did I do it?  Well primarily through the use of two add-ons to do the same thing I've been doing with higher up crafted items.  TradeSkillMaster which since I started to use, I don't know how I did without this thing, TradeSkillMaster on its own isn't anything much, but with the modules it makes gold making a breeze, and a good general add-on that has been around for a long time, and I've always had but didn't do much with Auctioneer.

And I suppose before I go much father, I'll show you what I was selling using TradeSkillMaster's Accounting module.

Crop from Items Tab from Accounting Module for TradeSkillMaster

As you can see from the screenshot one of the very first items I could make a profit on was Embossed Leather Boots which I sold a total of 16 of, you may also notice a few other things I sold that where not leather working items but I didn't do those as much, I mainly just did the boar meat early on cause of a post from tarouwowguides.com, and figured while I'm leveling this character I might as well try to sell those and they do sell pretty well, so if you want some initial bank find some low level boars and get killing.

The point of this post though is to show you that even someone who just started the game and didn't go with two gathering professions can with a little knowledge have enough gold to get there epic land mount and with no doubt have enough for there flying mount by the time they reach level sixty.

I'm not sure I've created enough screenshots to who you everything of how I set up my TradeSkillMaster but there are some video's on YouTube that show how to set up this add-on but I'll try to cover some of the information as I can.



So lets start at the begin.  I started this character some time ago and started leveling them but I was neglecting there trade skills though I had picked up leatherworking and skinning and was just gonna rush to level then work on getting there professions up, but then I thought huh, I wonder if I could make gold while leveling leather working.  I started killing and skinning more to get there leather working up to a point where they could create there first green item and opened up TradeSkillMaster.

I went into the leather working and disabled everything that wasn't that green item and then went to Auctioning tab on the right and created a category called Light Leather Armor and as I've been leveling my leatherworking anything that was made with light leather was added to that catagory, and then when I got medium leather I added a category for those as well.

Auction Options in TradeSkillMaster

Make sure in the auctioning options that you unchecked the box to hide advance options, pictured above.

Screenshot from one of my items in Letherworking

Under my general category settings I have the threshold set to 125% of the crafting cost and the fallback to 300% of the crafting cost.

Now under the crafting settings I have it set to que up the things I can craft only if its going for 50% above the crafting cost or more, that way I have everything set for something above the crafting cost cause I want to be making a decent price listing these things or its not worth my time, normally I go with 150% for my threshold, but I chose 125% for the low level leather working just on a whim.

There is also a option to get TradeSkillMaster to use your fallback in your que for profit in case a item is not listed instead of nothing which helps you queue something that isn't listed which frequently mine aren't, I forgot a screenshot, so maybe I'll add that later.

Now that we have that set up we want to go to the  auction house and do a auctioneer scan followed by a scan with TradeSkillMaster, you could just do the scan with TradeSkillMaster, but it may not grab as much for auctioneer which I have TradeSkillMaster set to use Auctioneers market value to figure material cost.

One thing I should have mentioned before this is do we already have materials, if so then just go ahead with the scan, if we don't do we have enough gold to possibly buy them?  That might depend on your realm and whats currently listed.  If you don't feel you have enough you can always farm yourself, but if you think you got enough to play a bit with open up your leatheworking at this point and click the button at the top of the window and hit your restock que, you may need to go to vendors at this point to buy thread and other things but you can then craft your items and go to the auction house and open up the post tab to post items.

if you need materials before you can craft in the auction house under the TSM side bar there is a option to search for crafting materials to make your items, pay attention to the per item price, if its above the market value you probably want to avoid buying those materials until a later time or go farm them yourself.

I hope this post proves useful to someone out there, please let me know in the comments below.