Festival - Your Noodle Cart Making Friend

In case you missed it Pandaren Treasure Noodle Carts are the latest hot thing in World of Warcraft dining. It's great, they serve everyone the soup they need for raid buffs and are fun too.

There's quite a quest chain to go through to learn how to make them, but it's nothing compared to the complexity of creating the cart kits themselves. See to make a cart you need 6 different types of meals, and 5 of those meals require 4 different ingredients in the form of pepper or rice, vegetable, fish, and meat. So each time you want to make a cart you have to see if you have 5 of each kind of meal, if not check the ingredients for that meal and see if you have the 1 rice/pepper, 5 fish, 5 meat, and 25 vegetable required to make it. This is a lot of brain power if you aren't sitting around with 24 different kinds of materials in your bag while poking at your cooking interface.

In TTGF we have a pot luck kind of food thing going on. People dump mats into tab 3 of the guild bank and they're turned into the various foods required. Folks are more than happy to use their cooking tokens on ingredients for sale by Nam Ironpaw in Halfhill, but they need to know what to use them on. Even though our bank gets organized pretty regularly it's still difficult to tell what all is in there, and not all of those pieces are even used for the Treasure Noodle Carts.

Nobody Ever Eats the White Foods

Initially I just bugged Lyon about what we needed, because it was a hassle to figure out. Then I got off my duff and made a spreadsheet google doc that everyone could edit. It was still a pain to look up each ingredient and fill out the spreadsheet to see what was missing, but at least it had some math in there to automate things a little bit. As soon as I got that sorted out, I immediately went to Corveroth, our resident "there has to be a better way" guy, and asked if he could devise an addon to let us see information in game. Corv really stepped up to the plate and made this addon that I love called Festival.

What Festival does is look at your bags and guild bank to see what you have in the way of mats. It will show you how many treasure noodle carts you have already, how many of the dishes you have prepared that go into them, and also the individual mats needed to make those dishes.

The color coding is quite simple. The goal is always to make more noodle carts. So the first thing Festival does is see which of the meals you have the most of and divide that quantity by 5. It uses that as the target value because each recipe creates 5 of a meal. If the current plus creatable count for any other meal is greater than 80% of the target, the item is colored green. If that count is less than 20% of the target, it's colored red. Otherwise it's yellow.

Hey TTGF, we need Scallions.

So when you see a meal or ingredient showing green those are low priority for restocking. When you have several meals that are green and one that is red, the red one is where those cooking tokens should be spent. If everything is green it's time to make some noodle carts to clear out those mats filling up your bank.

Festival is installed like any other addon and will open a tab to the right of your guild bank automatically. You can also toggle it on and off with a small button on the upper right area of the guild bank. You can open Festival at any time using the slash commands /festival or /fest. You can see when the last scan was underneath Festival at the top, and the little yellow arrow in the upper right will quickly scan the whole guild bank again.

If you try Festival I'd love to hear what you think. I think it's fantastic. It has made Noodle Carting much easier to manage. You can download Festival from WowInterface.