The ranger no more so now who dose the skinning and geting meat?

Everyone has the ability. Use the radial menu on the corpse and choose meat, hide, or bone.

You can make a simple macro that is similar to a loot macro to save yourself some time by eliminating the need to pull up the radial menu on each critter corpse.

First, name it something simple like "hide" (assuming that you want a hide harvesting macro...)

Then, enter the macro like this:

/harvest hide;

/macro hide;

Obviously, if you want to harvest bone or meat instead, change "hide" to "bone" or "meat".

You don't need a pause...it'll continue to loop indefinitely until you type "/dump" or logout.

Unlike looting, which can be done with a macro during combat, you can only harvest once you are out of combat.  It's not really an issue though.  After killing a bunch of critters and exiting combat, you simply move your mouse pointer over all corpses within 15m of you and they'll be harvested automatically.

Are there items, skilltapes, abilities etc that can increase the ammount of creature resources harvested?  Is harvesting creature resources in demand?  Are there shifting qualities across planets at different times?  Im curious to know since I was a pre-nge rifleman/ranger and I truly loved what I did. 

Originally posted by Foomerang

Are there items, skilltapes, abilities etc that can increase the ammount of creature resources harvested?  Is harvesting creature resources in demand?  Are there shifting qualities across planets at different times?  Im curious to know since I was a pre-nge rifleman/ranger and I truly loved what I did. 

Not sure if there are any clothing items that can be used to increase your harvesting skills.

As for demand, AS still needs wooly hide.  Meat and bone?  Dunno how much chefs need those resources any more; I think the Chefs now can make their own supplements that the BEs used to make from good bone or meat.

Everyone can milk now, too, and since there is no maskscent anymore you don't need to mask scent to avoid spooking the milking target.

I think Chef's can still use meat

Yes, chefs still use meat.

Bone can be used to make some simple items which are crafted by domestic traders (clothing) and maybe structure traders (not sure about this part....)

I recommend that everyone use a harvesting macro when killing critters whether they need the meat/bones/hide or not.  The reason is because you can get special choice cuts of meat, pieces of hide, or bone to use for collections.  When you complete those collections, you can get schematics to make special items.

I think the special item from the choice cuts of meat is a rack of dried meat!  That item should be the same one you can see around NPC cities.

The item for the hide collection is a huge "faux" Bantha fur, I believe.

I'm not sure what the item from the bone collection is.  You can google it I'm sure though.

As a Droid Engineer I should inform you that a Mustafarian Mining Droid filled with harvesting modules gets much better returns on the amount harvested per creature, and does so automatically.  I've created droids up to around 112 skill at collecting with uncapped components.

*thumbsup*

More about the harvesting collections...

The bone collection gives you a human skeleton.  I think this would be great as a display item for a medic (like mine that has a small clinic in his home) or a Dark Jedi/Sith.

Also, harvesting egg from lairs and other critter nests will give you a "buff" that allows you to collect twice as many eggs per "search" on a lair for a short period of time.  This can be used repeatedly as the cool-down timer resets.

Milk is apparently the hardest harvest collection to complete... Completing this collection will give you something similar to the egg finder "buff" but for milk.  I guess if you're a chef and you need lots of milk, this could be useful

The eggs and milk have nothing to do with the harvest macro that is discussed above, but I thought it may be useful info for someone that wants to complete the entire harvest collection.

Collections are fine but can I make money with harvesting??

Thanks.

I do believe there is at least a small market for harvested bones, hide, and meat.  How lucrative that market is, I don't know.

Some clothing requires hides and some require bones.  There are food items that require meat, and maybe even bone or hides...the latter two, I am again unsure of.

Clothing and Foods are the domain of Tailors and Chefs...both of which are Domestic traders.  Try to find an active tailor or chef on your server and ask them if they are willing to buy high quality harvested goods, or maybe they're interested in large quantities...  Ask them the price of course, and see if it's worth your while.

Certain items of furniture require hides.  I don't recall presently, but some may also require bone.  Furniture is the domain of Structure traders.  As with my suggestion above, find a structure trader that is actively making and selling furniture and see if they're willing to buy harvested goods.

I'm sorry if that isn't more helpful.  Good luck! 

Originally posted by Gindacca

More about the harvesting collections...

The bone collection gives you a human skeleton.  I think this would be great as a display item for a medic (like mine that has a small clinic in his home) or a Dark Jedi/Sith.

Also, harvesting egg from lairs and other critter nests will give you a "buff" that allows you to collect twice as many eggs per "search" on a lair for a short period of time.  This can be used repeatedly as the cool-down timer resets.

Milk is apparently the hardest harvest collection to complete... Completing this collection will give you something similar to the egg finder "buff" but for milk.  I guess if you're a chef and you need lots of milk, this could be useful

The eggs and milk have nothing to do with the harvest macro that is discussed above, but I thought it may be useful info for someone that wants to complete the entire harvest collection.

I'd have to agree, the milking collection is the most time consuming to complete.  "Exceptional milk" doesn't drop very often.

The buff you get from completing it though is very handy if you're into milking.  It allows you to collect the milk after only one "you continue to milk the creature" interlude.  That is, you collect the milk in one third the time.  This means you don't have to hope the creature you're milking stands still for the entire milking process.

This is especially handy when milking aggro creatures, like say savage humbabas.

Not sure how chef works now with milk, but back when I had a Master Chef, the biggest need for milk was for bantha butter, and the stats on the milk didn't matter for making bantha butter, as it was a component for some dishes.