Make a food cart?

[Falcii]

I have 9k gold to spend on making a convincing food cart. *technically* some should probably be used on a weapon and armor or *whatever* but...eh, I'm sure I can strip one of the first mooks we kill and be fine.

What are some flavorful magic/mundane items one could use to make a really good/convincing food cart? I definitely want a beast of burden to pull it, and probably need enough room to cook, maybe a big pot and a mobile fire/water source? Anything by wizards or paizo is fair game!

[Maat Mons]

Sadly, you'd need 15,000 gp to get an Everful Larder, which is the most efficient way to feed people long-term.

[Daisy]

A couple of field provisions boxs (MIC) and one eternal wand of prestidigitation would allow feeding a bunch of folks very tasty food.

[Pugwampy]

Why do you want to make a food cart ?

[Falcii]

Why do you want to make a food cart ?

We are starting a new campaign and the shtick is that every pc comes from very humble origins and is struggling to get by. As such our dm has requested we spend half our wbl (9k at 5) on backstory significant items which exemplify how we have kept ourselves afloat.

My character gave up on her dreams of becoming a scholar and got a job selling food in the stands of a giant Mad Max (but secretly more TAZ petals to the metal) style race to scrape together enough money to get by and support her found family. I also happen to be the only person playing a t1 build (persistmancer) so I'm comfy throwing more of my wbl at the flavor so the difference in power is a scoche less severe.

[NichG]

The economics of D&D are weird so it's sort of hard to calibrate how much is actually reasonable to invest in a cart...

Lets say you're selling meals at 5sp a pop ('good' quality daily meals), with 2sp worth of ingredients per meal. A food truck serving a lunch rush in a modern city might get say 400 customers per day, which would mean 120gp per day of profits (minus any labor/maintenance/tax/permits/etc). So with that in mind, a 4500gp food truck would seem downright reasonable - make your investment back in just over a month!

But thats with modern population densities and scales. And a 5sp meal is pretty expensive given that a trained hireling only makes 3sp a day! So more realistically, your meals are going to be capped at something like 1sp or probably less, and probably a thinner profit margin as well. So lets say you make 2cp profit per meal, still serving 400 customers. So now its 8gp a day, and it takes about a year and a half to pay off the investment. That's probably reasonable, especially if you started by renting the most expensive parts of the cart.

But are D&D locales really going to have that kind of consistently dense stream of customers? If you get 40 customers a day instead of 400, now it's 8sp a day of profits (certainly better than being a laborer, but not amazing) and it takes 15 years just to break even on the investment, much less pay for your own costs of living. At that point it might make more sense to invest in ways to reduce your own costs of living rather than in ways to make the food cart more cost effective. For example, a Ring of Sustenance costs 2500gp, which (sleep aside) pays for itself after about 7 years assuming the alternative is eating 'poor meals' each day.

So maybe the economic priorities to spend on here would be: 1. Something to help you get more/wealthier customers, and 2. Things to keep your own costs down (either ingredients, or just your own survival costs)

A few hundred gp to get someone to make a Permanent Image on the cart to make it look fancy enough for nobles to frequent? Annoyingly, it doesn't look like Sympathy can be made permanent - that spell would be perfect (if extremely high level/expensive) for this and is such a plot spell with expensive components, its weird that its just a few hours per level...

Trained wyrmling brass dragon so you can make kebabs on its fire breath as part of the show and to dissuade bandits? But then you have to keep it fed...

[Maat Mons]

An untrained laborer makes 1 sp / day. That makes your 9,000 gp starting wealth equate to 246 years of a common person’s pay. Having assets worth more than most people would see in 6 lifetimes doesn’t seem like “humble origins.”

As a 5th level divine caster, you can provide for 15 people for a day with one casting of Create Food and Water. Putting food on the table isn’t going to be an issue. The difficulty of making rent will depend on where you live. Then again, if you spend 1,000 gp of your starting wealth, you can own a simple house outright, so no rent to worry about.

[aglondier]

What edition are you playing?

Pathfinder has the downtime building rules that could be adapted to this easily enough. A Kitchen (two 5'x5' squares), a Storefront (two 5'x5' squares) and a Storage (four 5'x5' squares) would make for a decent 10'x20' stall, covering your basic setup. Using the downtime rules, this stall would give you a +11(4+2+5) bonus to your Profession check to earn money.
Ignoring the ruleset specific stuff (Goods, Labour, Influence), the cost to build the stand is 470gp (160+120+190).
Considering the rules tend to handwave things like walls and roof, it would not be unreasonable to have the stall built into a wagon, but a heavy wagon (10'x20') only adds an extra 100gp. Two oxen to pull it around is another 100gp (50gp each).

With that setup, you can man it yourself to gain the +11 bonus to your Profession check for income, or just have it manned by "unskilled npcs" and have them take the 10, for a Profession (cook) skill check total of 21 (for a weekly income of 10gp 5sp, or a daily income of 2gp 1sp, assuming 2 days off a week for rest and religion), effectively garnering you 21sp profits per day (2gp 1sp). That is after all expenses are covered profit.

Spoiler: Components

Show

Kitchen
Earnings gp or Goods +4
Create 4 Goods, 4 Labor (160 gp); Time 12 days; Size 2–6 squares
A Kitchen is used to prepare food. It contains a stove, sink, and small pantry with basic cooking tools and supplies. a Kitchen for a business that serves food, such as an Inn, probably also has Storage just for foodstuffs.

Storage
Earnings gp +2
Create 3 Goods, 3 Labor (120 gp); Time 8 days; Size 4–8 squares
Storage is any room used to store objects, keeping them out of the way for later use. Most Warehouses are just multiple Storage rooms built into a single building. A low-cost shop may allow its customers to browse items in the Storage area. A door to a Storage room includes an average lock.

Storefront
Earnings capital +5 (of a type the building already generates)
Create 5 Goods, 1 Influence, 3 Labor (190 gp); Time 12 days; Size 2–4 squares
This is a simple storefront, holding a wooden counter, a ledger, shelves, and other necessities to run a business.

Others have suggested magical addons, so I'll leave it there. Though, hiring skilled workers would improve your income. For example... (though you would need a Leadership (cha mod + level) score of 12+ to hire them)

Craftspeople
Earnings gp, Goods, or Labor +4
Create 3 Goods, 2 Influence, 4 Labor (200 gp); Time 2 days; Size 3 people
Craftspeople are trained in a particular Craft or Profession skill and make a living using that skill. Examples of this team are alchemists, carpenters, leatherworkers, masons, and smiths. A typical carpenter is a 4th-level expert with 4 ranks each in Climb, Craft (carpentry), Diplomacy, and Knowledge (engineering and local). Craftspeople in other fields have a similar skill arrangement.

[rel]

If 3.0 material isn't a problem, stronghold builders guide should have some useful options.

If custom magic items are on the table, that should also solve things easily.

barring those 2 options, you will have to get a little creative.

You can buy a standard wagon for 35gp and a carriage for 100gp. A really nice wagon, larger than normal, and covered like a carriage might cost more than either, but probably not a lot more.
mundane supplies and construction are also cheap, setting up the wagons interior isn't going to cost much more than buying it. Let's say 500gp gets you a really nice food wagon.

To pull your wagon, pick a suitably tough and nonthreatening looking animal and apply the warbeast template so you can buy it. At only 100gp + 75gp per HD you can easily afford something tough enough to eat a stray fireball without dying and strong enough to see off any sneaky bandits or orc raiders hoping to loot your wagon while your away delving. Let's say 1000GP for a pair of draft animals.

An unlimited supply of clean water is probably the most valuable thing in a modern kitchen. To set that up, include a cistern with a spigot as part of your wagons setup and buy an eternal wand of create water to refill the cistern when it runs low. A CL 5 eternal wand will cost 2100gp and generate 40 gallons of water per day. Which is probably more than you need. if you include 2 cisterns and put a burner under one of them you can even have hot and cold running water.

Speaking of burners, the last major item you need is heat. The ability to generate heat on command without mess, smoke or effort is not to be underestimated. A flaming weapon is sheathed in flame on command. Shurikens can be enchanted as ammunition, costing only 86gp each. Buy them at appropriate sizes for burners, fit them into some appropriate tooling and control the heat by adjusting the distance between fire and cooking vessel or with blocks of something insulating and non-flamable like stone.
Buy 10 shurikens for 860GP and add another hundred or so for the fixtures and you should have more than enough heat sources for burners, ovens, heating for water and anything else you might need. Let's say 1000gp for the whole system for simplicity.

You can use a similar strategy with frost weapons to make a fridge and freezer for food preservation. Again Let's say 1000gp for everything.

At this point your basically done. Pay a few hundred GP to hire some assistants, spend another few hundred on masterwork tools, and a few hundred more for magical light and save the rest for buying ingredients and supplies, doing maintenance, and making repairs when things inevitably get broken by your enemies.

Your final breakdown will look something like this:
500 wagon and fittings
1000 draft animals
2100 water
1000 magic stoves
1000 magic fridge
200 masterwork equipment
200 assistants on retainer
200 magical lights
6200 total

[Maat Mons]

Bear in mind, to use an Eternal Wand, you either need to be an arcane caster or make a Use Magic Device check. This character uses Divine Metamagic, which means they’re a divine caster, so probably not also an arcane caster. It would be very difficult to make UMD consistent at 5th level. Also, most divine casters have access to Create Water natively, so there probably isn’t a need for a magic item that duplicates the spell anyway.

Fostburn has Blue Ice which never melts and stays cold forever. It’s explicitly noted to be used in setting for food storage.

The cheapest magical lighting I’m aware of is Liquid Sunlight, from Complete Scoundrel. A half-inch container shines with the light of a torch for as long as the contents aren’t exposed to air. Only costs 20 gp.

[AnonJr]

Bear in mind, to use an Eternal Wand, you either need to be an arcane caster or make a Use Magic Device check. This character uses Divine Metamagic, which means they’re a divine caster, so probably not also an arcane caster. It would be very difficult to make UMD consistent at 5th level. Also, most divine casters have access to Create Water natively, so there probably isn’t a need for a magic item that duplicates the spell anyway.

I kinda lost track, so I'm not sure what kind of divine caster... If they can get access to the Magic Domain, they get the ability to use magic devices like a Wizard - which would mean Eternal Wands (and most wands in general) would be an easy accessory.

[Malphegor]

I forget if it's dmg2 or phb2 but one of those two (and I gotta go to work in like 10 minutes so I can't book dive for a bit today) has the business rules.

Food cart probably counts as a Service or Tavern (albeit a low scale one), rather than a solid property you get it as a horse and cart (from dim memory that's 2,000gp), and your initial region is in the wilderness so it should be pretty cheap in initial startup capital (covering your taxes, bribes, etc to start a legitimate business) but at a penalty to your profit check. Starting in civilisation costs more but also boosts your profit check
As a mobile business starting in the wilderness then... just moving your horse and cart into town works out economically better (a sensible dm might suggest you pay the difference to be able to trade in civilised town's limits)

Be sure to pump up your Profession skill (probably Cook or Merchant depending on the style) and when you find enough gold coming in employ steadily better quality specialists to boost the Profit check each month

[RSGA]

It's DMG2. You'd almost certainly want to do it as a Service business because it's Resources: Low, and Risk: Low compared to the Tavern's Resources:Medium and Risk: High. They have the same Capital costs, so you're paying the same to start up wherever it is you decide to (2k in wilderness and doubling for each better band), but the Resources means that you can save by getting the cart and horses but take an additional small penalty to the Profit rolls.

Also, technically better secondary skills.