The OverAchiever: Eat cookies, feel better

Every Thursday, The Overachiever shows you how to work toward those sweet achievement points. This week, the calm before the storm.

We're between two major holidays at the moment, and frankly, both of them are kind of problematic. I was accustomed to thinking of Noblegarden as a happy event with a not-too-onerous time commitment, but after fighting off a horde of egg hunters in competition for the 500 Noblegarden Chocolates necessary for the Swift Springstrider, I'm not so sure that's the case anymore. Under the worst-case scenario, some poor bastard new to the holiday who wants all the achievements and the mount could find himself hunting a whopping 865 chocolates.

"But you don't need the mount," you point out. "Getting the Strider is entirely optional."

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Oh, and next Thursday, we're on to Children's Week. I think we all know what to expect during Children's Week.

So you know what? Today we're going to do something dumb, silly, and fun to make ourselves feel better before Children's Week hits and we lose all faith in humanity again. We don't often talk about tiny, one-off achievements in this column, but I think we can afford to make an exception. Yes, folks -- it's time to make some cookies.

The achievement in question is a very small one that often gets overlooked in the General category -- You'll Feel Right as Rain. (In case you're one of the few people on the planet not instantly aware of The Matrix reference, it's here.) I'm not sure why it's not a cooking achievement, but then again, you don't absolutely need cooking to do it, so perhaps that's why. If your character's maxed cooking and has a few extra Cooking Awards sitting around from dailies, you'll find this achievement extremely easy to do -- as in, less than a five-minute time commitment. If not, it'll require a little effort and/or money to track down what you'll need.

At 505 cooking skill, a player is able to learn and make the Chocolate Cookie, which can be purchased from the recipe vendor for the cost of three Cooking Awards. The Cookie itself is incredibly easy to make, with only one Simple Flour and one Cocoa Bean required per cookie. To the extent that this achievement is in any way difficult to do, you'll have to get enough materials to make at least 91. That's easy enough for the Flour (any regular cooking vendor will have it), but the Cocoa Beans can only be found in the bag of Imported Supplies, which are sold by the special vendors in major cities next to the cooking daily questgivers. There are 40 Cocoa Beans contained in each bag, so if you're starting from scratch, you'll need three Cooking Awards to get enough on top of three Awards if you don't already have the recipe. Depending on your realm, you may also find the beans on the Auction House, or (because neither the Imported Supplies nor the beans they contain are BoP) you can buy them on an alt that has a few Cooking Awards sitting around and mail them to the character that wants the achievement.

Once you've got your beans and your Flour, start baking. (The Chef's Hat, if you have it, will save a lot of time.) If you're not a cook, you'll have to find someone with the recipe, or at least find Cocoa Beans on the Auction House, and have them made for you. Either way, make sure the end result is at least 91 Chocolate Cookies in your packs.

Now here's the tough (ha) part: eating all of them. Interestingly, eating the cookie doesn't trigger the global cooldown, so you just spam-click it until you've reached 91 stacks of the Satisfied buff. You've got 20 seconds after each cookie to eat another one so the buff stacks, so unless you are called away from your computer for some world-ending emergency in that period, you should be fine. At 91 cookies, bam! There's your achievement.

Because the Flour can only be purchased in stacks of five and the beans can only be found in stacks of 20, you're likely to have materials for at least 95 of these things sitting in your packs. Go ahead and make all of them. Assume a fetal position in front of the monitor. Suck your thumb if necessary. Dream of the misery to come, but for now, everything's OK.

Because cookies.

Enjoy working on achievements? The Overachiever is here to help! Count on us for advice on patch 4.3 achievements, our guide to Mountain O' Mounts, and a good, hard look at what's wrong with archaeology and how Blizzard could fix it.