Welcome, traveler! Herein you will find detailed instructions on how you, too, can acquire the legendary Coldain Prayer Shawls. You do realize that this is no small undertaking, don't you? The rewards of the shawl quests are rich, but the demands are many.

Ok, here, take the amount of work that you are right now envisioning you will need to put into the whole thing, getting from nothing to the eighth shawl. Now, if you are a pessimist by nature, multiply that amount by ten. If you are an optimist by nature, multiply it by a hundred.

That is how much effort will go into just getting your tailoring to a minimally acceptable level. Let's not even get into what smithing will require....

You also need to get your baking, brewing, fletching, jewelcraft, and pottery up to similar levels. You need to get items off of creatures in Iceclad, East Wastes, Kael Drakkel, Cobalt Scar, Great Divide, Siren's Grotto, West Wastes, and Velketor's Labyrinth, among others. Some of these critters cannot be soloed by a single person of any level or class. Unless your trade skills are all already where they need to be, you will not have the eighth shawl with only a few weeks of work. Even if by some strange twist your skills are all up there and you don't have this thing yet, you'll still need a lot, a lot lot lot of time and help to get it that fast. Think of this as the epic quest for tradeskillers.

Now, that said...I obviously love this quest and love trade skills or else I would not have taken the time to compile this guides to help others through it. I just want you to realize with crystal clear understanding the magnitude of what you are undertaking before you make yourself and the rest of Norrath miserable.

One note for the faction-conscious: this quest will require the deaths of countless giants and their wolves. If you are aligned with the giants, you will want to make sure you are willing to sacrifice some giant faction (or the time to repair it), or have friends willing to invest a LOT of time helping you collect things. In some cases you can buy what you need from others, but you'll still have to be extra careful if you want to maintain giant faction.

Still with me? Alright, let's get to work!

If you are looking for a guide that will give you a list of recipes to follow, then I recommend Xanthe's Trader's Workshop Trade Skill Guides. It is one of the best such guides out there. If you are doing tradeskills solely for the sake of the shawls and have no interest in them for any other purpose, this may be a priceless resource for you. There are also numerous guides listed in the Learn A Skill area. As some of those are outdated and awaiting replacement, you may wish to also peruse the many newer guides under discussion in the skill-specific forums on the Message Boards.

However, keep in mind that all such guides are generalized to work for as many people as possible. Your race, class, diety, level, faction changes, playing style, and time available will all influence the ease with which you can use any given recipe to practice. If you have any interest in tradeskills for the sake of tradeskills and are willing to take your time to enjoy and learn as much as possible in this process, it will be worth your while acquire more information about each skill and all of the options available to you. Fortunately, EQ Traders is a comprehensive site that tries to offer every conceivable tidbit of information that may be useful to a tradesperson. Therefore, I suggest you take the following steps to familiarize yourself with the site and get started with your skills:

First, go to the EQ Traders Recipes page. Select the skill you would like to improve. Print that page. Then go to Supplies sorted by Skill and again select the skill you want to improve. Print that page.

To figure out how to raise your skill to the level you desire, look over both pages that you just printed. Specifically, look for recipes that require ingredients that you know you can find easily or that are listed on the supplies page as available somewhere within reason. If necessary, refer to the additional guides at the top of the Trade Supplies page, for help with things like pelts, foraged goods, and more. For some skills, like jewelcraft, fletching, or pottery, just about everything will be on vendors if you find a good city in which to work. For other skills you will have to practice the fine arts of merchant mining, Bazaar hunting, auctioning in zones where things drop, or even rolling up your sleeves and slaughtering greens. If you have a powerful budget then the Bazaar might work great for you. If you need to keep a close eye on your finances then you may find that it only depresses you. If nothing else, you can have a good laugh over some of the outrageous price tags! By no means let it make you feel like you can't do this if you can't afford Bazaar prices. Don't be afraid to get creative or do the legwork for yourself!

Once you get a feel for which recipes are feasible and which are not, look at where they become trivial and plan out an order to do them from easiest to hardest. It is possible to go from 0 to 200+ on a single recipe that trivials at that high, if you wish. The official word from is that the difficulty of the recipe has no bearing on the rate at which your skill will improve when you use that recipe, as long as it's not yet trivial. However, there is some (albeit controversial) statistical evidence collected by players that indicates there is a greater chance of a skill-up when you succeed on a given combine, as would happen more often with recipes that are closer to being trivial. Either way, it is definitely more fun if you use at least a few different recipes that trivial at gradually higher levels.

If you want to give this trade skill stuff an honest try, look for a few recipes that sound fun (gnome kabobs!) and throw them in for the heck of it. When working up your skill, keep in mind that just because something is trivial does not mean that you are guaranteed to succeed. There is always a 5% chance of failure no matter how good you are and how easy the item. You may also have to get your skill a good 30-40 points beyond the trivial of the item before you reach that minimum failure rate. Therefore, depending on the value of your ingredients and the cost and trouble of increasing your skill, it may be worth it to get a bit beyond where the item trivials. Likewise, if a skill is very hard to raise and your quest ingredients are easier to get, you might be better off making several attempts at a skill below trivial than to try to get to trivial skill first. For formulas that give you an approximate idea of what success rate you will have on a given recipe at a given skill, see the What sort of success rate should I expect? article in the FAQ section was derived from the message boards. Keep in mind that those formulas were derived from data collected by tradeskillers and were not provided by any official source, so they are only approximations.

"What about the ninth and tenth shawls?"

There are no ninth or tenth shawls. It was originally the common assumption that there would be ten shawls much like there are ten rings in the Thurgadin ring quest series. When the eighth shawl quest was implemented, however, we were told, to quote Absor, one of the EQ developers, "...after a god comes by and hands you the last item in your quest...there isn't too much further you should expect the quest to go. ... We're glad you liked the quests, but there aren't any plans to add to that series. It had a definite end, and we reached it." (The original source of this quote was a post on Graff�'s Boards that has vanished into the mists of time. It is still quoted in this news blurb on Casters Realm.) Many folks out there, particularly those who haven't actually done the shawl quests, still have the vague memory that there are ten. You may inform them with absolute confidence that there are only eight.

For further help...

Still have problems or questions? Make sure that you have read everything on the pages you already printed, go to Learn a Skill, select the relevant skill, and read all of that. Some may be outdated but still have some good nuggets of wisdom. Question not yet answered? Try the General FAQ. Answer still not there? Ok now, go to the Message Boards and select your skill. Check the FAQ at the top of that forum. They are called Frequently Asked Questions because many people ask them, people a great deal like you. Yes, I realize that there is a lot of reading there, but tradeskills are complicated stuff. There is a lot you might need to know, so the investment of time learning about it up front will save you headaches when the time comes that you need the knowledge. If all of those sources fail you, post your specific question in the forum relevant for your skill. Depending on the time of day and week of your post, answers will appear within minutes or hours. When you have made it to the level you desire in your current trade skill, pat yourself on the back! You are that much closer to your shawl.

Do NOT under any circumstances go straight to the message boards and post your questions without first checking for answers in the existing resources. That level of helplessness is annoying. The message board search engine works well and WILL find results if you have your spelling right and pay attention to the settings on the options it gives you. It also won't hurt you to flip back through the last few pages of posts and skim the titles. You're not the first person to work on your skill, so chances are very slim that you have a question that has not yet been asked and answered. Folks on the boards love helping with honest questions and problems and dilemmas, but do not appreciate being treated like personal researchers when the answer is just a few clicks away on the very same site. If you've looked and just can't find it, then by all means post! But please, just take a look around first. If you cannot spare an hour or so just once to get oriented and learn how information is arranged on the site, then you'll never, ever manage to invest enough time to get through these shawls. And who knows, you might even find some helpful information about which it wouldn't have occurred to you to ask!

About MultiQuesting: It is possible to multiquest some steps of the shawls. However, the process can be complicated at best for some of them and requires quite a bit of care. Therefore, I do not go into any details about how to multiquest any of the specific steps. If you want to look into that more, I suggest searching through the Quests Forum on the message boards for "multiquest". Failing that, of course, feel free to post requesting specifics that your search did not find.

Suggestions, Corrections, and Updates

Please post any feedback about the shawl quest pages here. I read the boards religiously and will get it updated much more quickly if it's here and not buried in email. We will also get feedback from the rest of the tradeskill community this way. Note: If you hunt me down in Norrath for any purpose other than to offer me a copy of the spell: Remove Greater Curse, I will growl fiercely in your general direction and be grumpy and uncooperative. You will get much better results if you pursue your questions here on EQ Traders!

In many places I do not have precise trivial levels, but instead have a range (160-165) or a maximum (<140) or minimum (>132). Please post if you can narrow the ranges down at all for those, or have corrections to trivials that you found to be incorrect.

Credits

Not much of what is on these pages is fresh from my own brain. The vast majority of it is information that I gathered from sites all over the place, especially the fantastic suggestions, corrections, and additions provided by the folks on the message boards here. My other main sources have been Allakhazam, Illia's Bestiary, The Dragonslayers Guild, Xilith Tvyn (whose link no longer works), and all the folks who posted their findings on these sites to make things easier for the rest of us. And last but most certainly not least, I owe thanks to my Celestial Knights family and other friends on the Karana server who have helped me along in the quest with their various skills. Those include Sumamael and Cantatus (friends and editors extraordinaire), dear, departed Wathakhorforpyne (for a looong evening of griffon tracking), Xlint (efficiently killing sirens when not charmed and blasting me to bits), Savant (for countless acts of enchanterly generosity to an impatient tailor), Jannelle and Steelheart (kromrif blood finally!), and Arnor, Calandria (Aradyss on Tunare), Ganelon (Lugamus on Tunare), and Dano for all around support. I owe a great debt to these and all my other faithful friends who listened patiently to my ranting and then quietly hauled me off to take out my frustrations on unsuspecting mobs.

Suggestions, Corrections or Updates? Please explain Here!