WoW Forever Launch Week: What to Gather, Craft and Hold

The short answer

World of Warcraft: Forever launches globally at 15:00 Pacific on 2026-11-04. Everyone starts at level 1 with no gold and no Auction House history, and every crafter on the realm needs the same handful of starter materials at the same time. Our count of the beta client's recipes says which ones: Light Leather is wanted by 100 recipes, Copper Bar by 65 directly and far more through Bronze, and Linen Cloth by 316 pieces for one pass through every recipe once you count the bolts.

The plan is simple. Gather the starter materials from the first hour, sell the ones crafters need immediately (leather and linen), hold copper for the first Blacksmithing wave, and keep a stack of Pristine Leather back for the chain armour sets. The beta prices on this page are from a testing economy and will not survive launch, but the ratios they show tend to.

The launch facts that shape the economy

The Invite-A-Friend window is the detail most gold guides miss. For exactly the first seven days, players can bring friends who need no subscription. That adds buyers and gatherers for one week, and then some of them stop. Plan to sell into launch week, not to hold everything for week two.

The demand math

Here is the number nobody else prints. We took every recipe in the beta client that uses each starter material, directly or through the bar or bolt it becomes, and added up what a crafter would need to make each recipe once.

Three conclusions follow.

Copper is bigger than it looks. Smelt Bronze takes one Copper Bar and one Tin Bar and makes two Bronze Bars. The client has 81 recipes that use Bronze, needing 749 bars for one pass, which means 375 more Copper Bars and 375 Tin Bars on top of the 394 Copper Bars used directly. Copper's true one pass demand is about 769 bars.

Leather is the deepest early market. Light Leather's 713 pieces across 100 recipes beat everything else at the low end, and more than half of those recipes are new to Forever. Leatherworking takes 672 of the 713 on its own.

Peacebloom is not a launch item. Fourteen herbs for one pass is tiny. Alchemists will buy some, but Peacebloom's demand is spread thin. It is a gather and sell item, not a hold item.

Beta prices as a guide

On 2026-10-08 the beta scans read Copper Ore at 42 copper and Copper Bar at 46 copper, Tin Ore at 3 silver and Bronze Bar at 2 silver69 copper, Linen Cloth at 13 copper and Bolt of Linen at 45 copper, Light Leather at 40 copper and Medium Leather at 1 silver50 copper. Treat those as a map of where demand sits, not as launch prices. The beta has a level cap of 20 rising to 30 and almost no economy pressure; the launch realm will be busier, poorer and hungrier.

The ratio worth carrying into launch is the one between raw and refined. On the beta, Copper Ore sold for slightly more than Copper Bar, which means smelting lost a little value. When the first wave of Blacksmiths arrives, that flips. Watch for it.

A day by day plan

Launch evening, November 4

1. Pick one gathering profession pair and start immediately. Mining and Skinning is the strongest pair for launch week on the numbers above. Skinning feeds 713 Light Leather of demand; Mining feeds copper for Blacksmiths and Engineers.
2. Do not craft yet. Your first hours of materials are worth more to other players than to your own skill bar.
3. Keep every Pristine Leather. It appears in 126 recipes, starting at skill 80, including new Blacksmithing chain sets.

Day 1 and 2

1. Sell Light Leather and Linen in small stacks. Leatherworkers and Tailors start levelling straight away, and both materials are needed in big numbers. Stacks of five and ten sell fastest.
2. Hold Copper Ore. Early Blacksmiths start on cheap recipes; the heavy copper recipes come a few hours later. In the client, the new chain belts and the Heavy Copper Maul take twelve Copper Bars each from skill 80 to 85, and the Ironforge Breastplate takes sixteen at 115. That is when ore turns into bars and bars climb.
3. Buy vendor goods from vendors. Coarse Thread is in 93 recipes; its client buy price is 10 copper. Never pay more on the Auction House. The same goes for Simple Wood.

Day 3 to 5

1. Smelt and sell Copper Bars when the bar price clears the ore price by more than the Auction House cut.
2. Start on Wool and Medium Leather. Characters reach the second zones. Wool's one pass demand is 729 pieces through Bolts of Woolen Cloth, and Medium Leather's is 554.
3. List Pristine Leather. By now Blacksmiths are into the chain sets that want it.

Day 6 and 7

1. Sell into the end of the Invite-A-Friend window. It closes on November 11. Some of the extra players leave after that.
2. Count your gold against the mount. A basic mount item is 20 gold in the client. Our riding cost guide has the full picture.
3. Spend your first Legacy Points on gold. Bountiful Harvest if you gather. See Legacy Points.

Choosing your launch professions by the numbers

The demand table points to a clear ranking for a character who wants gold in week one.

Skinning first. Light Leather has the deepest early demand in the client, Medium Leather the second deepest, and Pristine Leather, the most used new leather in Forever, sits in the Skinning tier of the scarce set (the client does not store which creatures drop it, so that pairing is our reading of the item ladder). Skinning needs no nodes, only kills, so it works in crowded starting zones where every ore vein has three miners standing on it.

Mining second. Copper's real demand runs through Bronze, and a miner who also takes Tin has both halves of the Bronze recipe. Pyrite, the low tier scarce ore that becomes Sulfuric Acid for the new Blacksmithing plate sets, is the mining half of that set, though which veins give it is server data we have not logged. The downside is competition: veins are shared, and on launch night they will be crowded.

Herbalism third for launch week. Peacebloom and Silverleaf have small recipe counts. The value in Herbalism at launch is in its scarce herb, Frilled Lichen, which becomes Cerulean Dye for 108 Tailoring recipes. If you herb, keep every Frilled Lichen and sell it or turn it into dye.

Tailoring as a buyer, not a seller. Tailors will burn through Linen and Wool. If you are a Tailor, buy cloth from the Auction House early while it is cheap, before the first Bolt of Linen recipes push prices up.

If you can only pick two, Skinning and Mining cover the two deepest early markets and need nothing but time.

The Auction House on launch night

There is no price history on a new realm. The first listings set the market, and the first sellers set them.

1. List early and list modestly. The first stack of Light Leather on the realm sets everyone's expectations. A fair price that sells is better than a high price that sits.
2. Watch the second faction. Our scans read the two faction houses separately. On launch night one side may have plenty of leather and the other none.
3. Use small stacks. Crafters buy what a recipe needs. Five and ten are the numbers that move.

Our Auction House guide explains how we read beta prices and what we will track at launch.

What to gather where

The starting zones are where launch gold is made, and the beta client ships maps for most of them. Expect them to be crowded on launch night.

Skyborne characters start on Zephras Isle, a new zone with its own map in the client. With every Skyborne player starting there, its nodes will be contested from the first minute.

Requirements

Date

2026-11-04, 15:00 Pacific

Access

Subscription or Game Time

Professions

Mining and Skinning recommended for week one

Group

Solo

Walked route status

Launch week starter zone gathering

Not walked yet

No hourly gold figure is published here until this route has been walked end to end with a timer and a full loot log. Until then this page gives you the inputs (live prices and what drops) and leaves the arithmetic to you.

Mistakes to avoid in launch week

• Crafting gear nobody needs. Every early green you craft for skill is a stack of leather or linen you could have sold to someone who needed it.
• Undercutting to nothing. On launch night prices are new. A deep undercut sets the realm price low for the whole week.
• Forgetting the ruleset. Expect each ruleset to run its own economy. A price on a PvP realm is not a price on a Normal one.
• Holding herbs for a spike. Peacebloom's recipe demand is small. Sell it as you go.
• Spending on convenience too early. Bags matter, but the 20 gold mount at level 40 matters more. See bank and bag costs.

Changelog

• 2026-10-08: First version. Launch facts from Blizzard's posts as gathered in our launch fact base. Recipe and demand counts from our profession extract (beta client build 70124). Prices from player scans of the beta, labelled as a testing economy.
• 2026-10-08: Review pass: removed an unsourced WoW Token claim, restated rulesets from Blizzard's launch facts, labelled drop source assumptions, and named the twelve and sixteen bar copper recipes from build 70124.