WoW Gold Farming Strategies From ElonCS's Midnight Stream

ElonCS spent nearly three hours on stream recently doing something that sounds boring on paper and turns out to be oddly compelling to watch: gathering lumber on three accounts simultaneously, answering chat questions about the WoW economy, and slowly building toward a 100 million gold goal in WoW Midnight. If you showed up expecting a highlight reel of big auction house scores, you probably left disappointed. If you stayed, you left with a clearer picture of how serious gold-making in WoW actually works — and why most people who try it don't get far.

The stream centered on two parallel projects: a "zero to token in vanilla zones only" challenge ElonCS is running as a series, and a lumber-farming grind targeting 36,000 total lumber across multiple expansion zones. Neither is glamorous. Both are instructive.

The Lumber Play Explained

The lumber economy in WoW Midnight is tied to the housing system — a newer addition where players can furnish and decorate personal spaces. Lumber is the raw resource. The gold-making angle is to gather lumber, craft housing decorations from it, and sell those decorations on the auction house.

ElonCS runs this on three accounts simultaneously — what he calls "manual boxing," emphasizing that each account requires actual manual input. No automation. On stream he estimated roughly 300 lumber per hour on a single account, with a current market value he put at around 212 gold per unit for ironwood. He cited a figure of approximately 140k gold per hour for his multi-account setup, though I couldn't reconcile that figure cleanly from the stream context, so take it as a rough directional claim rather than a verified rate.

What he was clear about: lumber sells slower than materials from current content. You're not flipping it same-day. The trade-off is consistency — once you've built up stock, sales come in week after week.

"Getting a huge amount of lumber is still the best in my opinion," one viewer noted in chat. "And once you get it, you will get consistent sales week after week and it adds up."

ElonCS agreed. He's explicitly waiting to accumulate all 36k lumber before starting to craft and post — no partial starts, no trickling product onto the market. The discipline of that approach is part of the strategy.

The Methods Ranked (Per ElonCS)

The stream is a rolling Q&A on gold-making, and a few clear tiers emerged across the conversation.

Cross-realm flipping is ElonCS's primary income source and the one he comes back to repeatedly. He runs four accounts — three EU, one NA — and posts across multiple realm populations rather than targeting the highest-priced servers. His reasoning: diversification beats chasing peak prices on thin markets. "Pick one full pop, one high pop, one medium pop, one low pop, one new player," he told a viewer asking about server selection. The NA account also serves a practical purpose — it offsets posting throttle limits so he can stay under the 250-auction-per-character ceiling without canceling.

Viewers checking in throughout the stream reported real results: one said he'd hit 15 million using ElonCS's TSM flipping profile, another reported 20 million since December, a third cited 9 million since January. These are chat claims, not audited figures, but the pattern of them is notable. Either the strategy has genuine repeatability, or ElonCS has assembled a uniquely motivated viewership — and those aren't mutually exclusive.

Abundance runs are the raw gold method he recommends most for alt accounts. The mechanic involves a toy called the Dundon Abundant Travel Method, bought from the Abundance vendor once and usable across characters to portal directly to the activity. Each run takes about three minutes, yields 300 materials after the first run (the weekly bonus skews the first run lower), and he estimates the method can generate around 30k raw gold per hour with enough alts cycling through. The setup cost is low; the limiting factor is how many characters you can manage.

Mining and herbalism is what he recommends for players returning to the game or starting fresh — not because the ceiling is high, but because it's accessible. "Midnight stuff sells instantly," he noted when a viewer asked about the sell-rate gap between current content and older materials. The knowledge point system means early returns are slow, but once you've invested in your profession tree, the curve improves.

Professions (crafting) got the most skeptical treatment. With patch 12.1 incoming, ElonCS flagged that alchemy in particular is facing a price collapse: the ability to convert rank one glass into rank two glass through crafting will flood the market and crater vial prices. "Concentration alchemists will take a huge hit," he said flatly. His general read on professions this late in the season: margins are thin, competition is brutal, and anything new from a patch gets priced into zero within hours. "It's going to take about two hours before the margins are dead on the new potions — and not even that long maybe."

What the Stream Gets Right — and Where It Gets Complicated

The most useful thing ElonCS said across the entire stream wasn't a tip. It was this:

"Best gold per hour is doing something you don't mind doing and can actually put hours in. A 300k gold per hour farm that you can only do 10 minutes is worse than a 50k gold per hour farm that you can do hour after hour."

That reframe cuts through a lot of the WoW economy content that optimizes for ceiling numbers without accounting for the human element. You can watch a dozen guides on the best farm of the patch and still make less gold than someone methodically running abundance on six alts every morning.

There's also a genuinely honest moment when ElonCS cops to a bad gamble. He bought over a million gold worth of a material ("Moes," though the exact item name was unclear in stream context) on a speculative bet that patch changes might drive prices up. Then walked it back almost immediately: "I don't think anything is going to happen with the price. But I was feeling for a gamble. That is no way I advise, guys. So don't do that."

The willingness to document his own bad bets in real time is actually what makes the stream worth watching if you're trying to learn. You see the reasoning, not just the results. You see a viewer report that Twilight Blade has a mean market price of 300k, and you watch ElonCS recalibrate his advice on the spot. You see him spend three hours grinding lumber across three accounts while admitting it's "maybe not the most enjoyable thing."

That gap — between what a strategy looks like on a spreadsheet and what it actually costs in time, repetition, and sustained attention — is what most WoW economy content papers over.

The 12.1 Wildcard

The upcoming patch is sitting over everything ElonCS discusses like a weather system. The import/export housing feature could increase demand for auction house decorations. New consumables will exist but get undercut to zero quickly. Exploration XP nerfs are rumored for next season, which has real implications for the zero-to-token challenge. The glass conversion recipe change kills alchemy margins.

His overall read: adapt your setup before the patch, not after. If you want exploration XP for leveling, capture it now. If you're concentration alchemy, figure out your pivot. If you're in lumber and housing decor, the import/export functionality probably helps you — someone will post a viral house build with auction house items in it and cause a temporary demand spike.

That last point is speculative, and ElonCS says so. "I don't know if that will happen," he acknowledged. But the fact that he's thinking three steps ahead — farming lumber now, holding stock, waiting for a demand catalyst — is exactly the distinction between treating WoW's economy like a game and treating it like a system.

The real question isn't which farm to run. It's whether you're building a system or just looking for a shortcut. If you watch this stream with that question in mind, you'll see ElonCS answer it over and over — not in any single tip, but in three hours of showing up, doing the repetitive work, tracking the numbers, and adjusting. That's the whole lesson: the players who actually accumulate gold at scale don't find the best farm, they build the habit of showing up when it's boring.

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— Derek "D-Block" Washington, Gaming & Interactive Media Correspondent, Buzzrag