Guides:Panfilling tips

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Panfilling tips

Panfilling refers to the activity of creating food (meals, stews etc) usually in frying pans inside a forge. It is commonly used to skill priests because of skill gains it provides for soul depth. Other non-priest character types also gain skills as well including mind logic, cooking, hot food cooking, and soul. For every 10 mind logic you gain the ability to queue an additional action making this a very attractive option to consider for priests and non-priests alike.

Meals vs stews vs ?

MamaDarkness completed a very detailed study into meals versus stews for soul depth gain. This information can be found on Wurmpedia. Until very high levels stews are the best approach to gaining soul depth while also being the easiest to dispose of.

Filling pans

Filling pans does not have to be exceptionally painful. It can be easier to perform then the way most people initially try it.

1. Go into settings, change the Shift-drag setting to default to 1 and enable shift-drag
2. Place 100 empty frying pans into a forge
3. Place two satchels, backpacks or cauldrons in your inventory
4. Put 100 of one vegetable (corn in the example)

in one backpack (or whatever item you place in step 3 above) 

1. Put 100 of the second vegetable (onions in the example)in the second backpack
2. Expand the backpacks so you can see the summary line for the each vegetable (corn – 100 and onion 100)
3. Use the ctrl key to select the corn(100) and onion(100) lines in inventory
4. Hold down the SHIFT and ENTER key while left clicking on the bottom vegetable item – the top menu bar should change from words to dashes
5. While continuing to hold down the shift and enter keys drag the vegetables across each frying pan in the forge. Each drag should result in 1 onion and 1 corn being placed into the pan
6. Continue until all 100 frying pans are placed
7. Repeat the steps for all forges

Cooking the food

When all pans in all forges have been filled then complete the following steps:

1. Place sufficient kindling in your inventory for all forges
2. Right click on the health bar and select "Show SB". This will result in a new line showing sleep bonus appearing on your stamina/food/water/health bar. When sleep bonus is enabled the line is white. Having this displayed makes it less likely that you will forget to turn off sleep bonus later
3. Go into settings and have it display the skill tracker window
4. Setup the skill tracker window to show cooking, hot food cooking, soul depth and mind logic
5. Turn on sleep bonus
6. Light all forges (no need to add logs or other fuel, kindling should be enough – High ql Steel and Flint with Woa will significantly speed up the process)
7. In about 4 minutes you should see a dramatic change in the skill tracker window and also in the skills tab
8. After no change in skill tracker for 1 minute, turn off sleep bonus (generally this is about 5 – 6 minutes after lighting the last forge)

Emptying pans

Emptying pans is usually not a wonderfully loved task and part of the reason is due to the way that most people go about it initially. Here is a way that makes it a bit easier:

1. Place an empty small barrel or cauldron in your inventory
2. Open the inventory of a forge
3. Right click on the name column and select "Expand all"
4. If you have only frying pans in the forge then the pans will all be open making it easy to see the stews
5. Click on the first stew and while holding down the CTRL key work your way down the entire forge inventory of stews selecting each one
6. Drag the stews to your small barrel or cauldron
7. Expand the barrel or cauldron, right click the stew and select pour on ground
8. Repeat until all forges are empty

What if someone else fills the pans for you?

If someone else fills the pans for you it is important that you cycle all pans through your own inventory before lighting the forge otherwise they will receive the skill gain instead of you. Here is one way to do this:

1. Empty your personal inventory as much as possible
2. Place an extra cauldron or backpack on the ground
3. Open the forge inventory window
4. Drag the items in the forge to your personal inventory
5. Drag all remaining forge pans directly to the empty backpack on the ground
6. Move the pans in your inventory back to the forge
7. Move the pans from the backpack on the ground to your personal inventory
8. Move the pans in your inventory back to the forge
9. Once all pans have been cycled through your personal inventory then it is safe to light the forge

Best way to setup the forges?

It is possible to use cauldrons and backpacks to fit far more than 100 pans in a forge. As an example you can fit 8 cauldrons each containing 32 pans for a total of 256 pans in a single forge. While this is appealing from a maximum number of pans in a forge viewpoint it actually makes emptying pans more difficult because expand all doesn't open all the pans resulting in alot more clicking as you open the pans.

Does pan quality matter for soul depth?

Soul depth does not seem to be impacted by the quality of the pan used. Pan quality does impact the ql of the meals/stews produced so if you intend to eat the cooked food then this may be important to you.

Maximizing nutrition

When you sacrifice a rare or use a refresh it provides you with 99 nutrition which in turn provides maximum skill gain. It is recommended to always have 99 nutrition whenever possible.

Sleep bonus

Sleep bonus provides double skill gains. With the amount of work and cost involved in panfilling it makes sense to always use sleep bonous when cooking the food. Turn it off when cycling, filling and emptying pans.

Setting up a cookhouse

When setting up a cookhouse a primary consideration should always be reducing the number of clicks required. If you are trying to create 30,000 stews then even one fewer click per forge can make a huge difference.

Here is one possible layout for 20 forges holding 100 pans each for 2,000 pans total. Notice that the width and length is about 2 tiles so you will be squeezing the forges together very closely. The key is to make it so the panfiller can open any of the objects in that diagram without needing to move location. You want to eliminate opening and closing windows more then once.

<-    ->
2 tiles
XXXXXXXX
X      X
X   C  X
X      X
X   P  X
X      X
X      X
 B F W
AAA
 
P = Panfiller
X = Forge
C = Cauldrons or backpacks on ground
W = Water barrel
F = Food storage bin
A = Altar(s) for sacrificing rares
B = Bulk storage bin holding kindling

Hiring a panfiller

Some people enjoy panfilling and actually hire themselves out to assist you with your panfilling needs. The safest way to work with them is to keep your account information to yourself and have them fill the pans for you using their own character (or their own alt).

The section "What if someone else fills the pans for you?" is an important section to review in this case.

Another consideration is the cookhouse itself. The more pans you have in your cookhouse the longer the interval is between times when you have to log in to cycle the pans. In this scenario 4,000 pans truly are better then just 2,000 pans.

Vegetables

Another part of the panfilling job is getting enough vegetables in the first place. While it is certainly possible to farm all the vegetables yourself an alternative is to purchase vegetables from a dedicated farmer. Often these farmers have very high farming skill and 1,000+ tiles of active farmland.

When you have purchased the vegetables a likely requirement will be transporting them from the delivery location to your cookhouse food storage bin.

• Using large crates your wagon can hold about 2700 vegetables.
• With 100 backpacks the number increases to 10,000 depending on the vegetable type.
• If you use rafts, backpacks and satchels 80 - 100 k of vegetables can be transported in a single wagon where each item is inside it's predecessor. Adding flasks inside the satchels can bump the number even higher to approximately 500,000 vegetables per load (again depends on vegetable type - usually corn, garlic, onions are good lightweight choices)

Be warned - it can take a long time to load and unload the wagon especially when using the last option!

An alternative approach for those purchasing vegetables is to ask their favourite farmer to build an onsite cookhouse for you to use. This saves a lot of time shipping vegetables however it does require that you travel to their cookhouse.