Drak's Guide to War Supply Crate Farming

By NachoParty Updated: 2026/10/01

This Is A User-Submitted Guide!

Wowhead only updates official guides, so information might not be up-to-date.

IntroductionI’m DraknorgothNacho PartyHorde Defense Network (HDN)

My guide serves as a living document and single source of truth detailing the advantages, disadvantages, etiquette, addons, zones, sharding, spawn behavior, timers, travel, and processes.

Please note that this guide assumes that your character is maximum level.

Recommended viewing is via devices with larger screens such as desktop/laptop computers and tablets rather than smaller mobile devices such as phones.

Why you should trust this guide:

My community has been farming War Supply Crates since they were first introduced in the pre-patch for Battle for Azeroth (2018). We are the original and the best crate farmers!

Our knowledge is the culmination of years of testing, observation, and some insider sources.

Information in this guide is considered to be basic level and appropriate for general audiences. More advanced information is reserved for my officers.

War Supply Crate FarmingThe following section discusses the details of War Supply Crate Farming, one of the most complicated World PvP activities.Advantages
(Crates)What makes War Supply Crate Farming the best gearing activity in World of WarCraft?

Looting a single War Supply Crate rewards:
60 Conquest

50 Bloody Tokens

150 Honor

PvP Recipes (low drop chance)

Infused Heliotrope (low drop chance)

Fastest gear farm due to gaining roughly 200 Conquest per hour per zone.

Gear a character from no gear to full epics in a matter of hours if Conquest is uncapped.

Most accessible gear farm because there is no gear or skill requirement to join.

Easiest, largest, and most consistent gear farm due to the strength of a 40-player raid.

Good source for not only PvP gear, but also PvE gear since Conquest gear can be upgraded to heroic raid ilvl.

PvP gearing is deterministic, which means buying specific gear compared to the random drops seen in PvE content.

Disadvantages
(Crates)What are some of the challenges that may occur while War Supply Crate Farming?

Early in the season, Conquest is limited by the seasonal cap, but the farming is still fast.

Because the War Supply Crate farming raid is a more casual gearing raid, there may be difficulties fighting organized counter raids from enemy guilds:

Typical War Supply Crate farming/gearing raid characteristics:

All alternative characters (non-main)

Undergeared

PUGs

Not in Discord

No specific raid composition

Typical enemy counter raid characteristics:

All main characters

Fully geared

Same community or guild

All in Discord

Specific raid composition

Etiquette
(Crates)What are the DOs and DON'Ts of War Supply Crate Farming?

DOs

Follow instructions.

Give 100% effort.

Stay together.

Fight for crates.

Respect each other.

DON'Ts

Don't queue. It doesn't cause shard changes, but it does mean that someone is not participating in your event.

Don't go AFK.

You do NOT need to be in Silvermoon. While a shard may remember a player, you have no way of knowing which shard will have the better timer anyway unless you do a deep investigation and question every player who joins your raid ahead of time about their timers (if they even know).

You do NOT need to cap your groups at 39. It does NOT cause re-sharding. I had this confirmed by an ex-Blizzard employee. Having a waitlist makes it harder for new crate groups to form. That's bad. Anyone who caps at 39 is essentially sabotaging their own faction by reducing the number of organized groups available to contest the opposing faction for War Supply Crates.

Addons
(Crates)Please check CurseForge for your crate tracking addon options. I don't recommend any particular addon over the others. Zones
(Crates)Currently, there are 5 zones in the Midnight expansion. Please note that War Supply Crates found in any legacy zones (pre-Midnight) now only drop Honor as of patch 12.0.5.

Midnight

Eversong Woods (EW)

Harandar (HD)

Slayer's Rise (SR)

Voidstorm (VS)

Zul Aman (ZA)

Sharding - Basics
(Crates)What is sharding?

Sharding is when servers (realms) are divided into separate instances to handle the level of overpopulation that would normally cause lag or crashes.

This is not to be confused with phasing, which is what happens when your quest progress changes the world around you, causing you to be in a separate phase where you can only see others who happen to be on the same stage of the quest that is creating the phase. Phasing does not cause sharding.

Characteristics of a shard:

Shards sit at the bottom level. Datacenter > Server (Realm) > Zone > Shard.

Please note that Connected Realms do not factor into this because they are simply one server on the backend even though they appear to have separate Realm names.

Can have people on a shard from one server or a collection of multiple servers.

Sharding has a toggle to activate it that may be automated.

Sharding relies upon a state table that has an order of operations. It tracks and prioritizes various states (statuses) to determine when to activate, deactivate, or move players between shards. The exact contents of the state table are unknown to the general public.

Population caps are at zone level rather than shard level.

Your server may be connected to multiple shards. For example, if your server is Illidan, you end up on a shard with only people from Illidan, or people from Sargeras, or people from a collection of different servers.

It's possible to control which shard to end up on even if you're in a group. To be clear, this is not directly related to the leader of the group, at least not at first. The first person who enters a zone determines the shard. For example, if the first person who enters the zone is from Illidan, the shard can be any of the shards that are typically accessible for that person.

If your group has tried to find the desired shard and failed, the most reliable method is to take someone in your group from the desired server, have them leave the raid, have them enter the desired zone, have them confirm that the shard is correct by checking a crate tracking addon from CurseForge or by locating your target, and then having them reinvite everyone in the raid to form a new raid. This person is often referred to as the anchor for a desired shard. Repeat this process to get multiple raid groups onto the same shard.

It is easier to control your target shard in legacy zones as their populations tend to be lower (fewer shards), and harder to control in current content zones due to higher populations (more shards).

Sharding - War Supply Crate Farming
(Crates)Different shards will be encountered when flying from zone to zone.

Shard IDs can be found using a crate tracking addon from CurseForge.

We cannot know the full amount of active shards as they have no limits to their numbers, but we know that a fraction of those are used for War Mode.

Shard IDs can change when flying from zone to zone and the shard IDs should always be noted.

Shards can also persist and have the same ID when flying from zone to zone, but the duration of that persistence is unknown due to many hidden variables.

In order to help shards persist (not guaranteed), it is recommended to keep at least one player in each zone while the rest of the raid does the rotation, especially while the raid is initially forming.

The below actions or events can increase the chance of a shard change in a raid:

Raid leaders leaving the raid.

Ignoring a zone for long enough by not entering that zone.

Which factors do servers consider when deciding which shard to use?

Members of the same group stay together except in extreme circumstances.

Recently grouped players stay together if possible.

Keep players from the same server together if possible.

Guildies stay together if possible.

War Mode players always together on War Mode shards.

Sharding does not care about faction balance. That's why you can see two raids from the same faction on one shard.

Shards remember which shard a player has been to and will continue to remember for an unknown period of time. If your raid has not been to a specific zone yet and someone new joins who has been to that specific zone, then the shard for that zone may be the one belonging to that new player. Joining your crate raid in Silvermoon does NOT fix this.

Spawn Behavior
(Crates)What happens when War Supply Crates and Flying Machines spawn?

Each zone has only one location where the Flying Machine that carries the War Supply Crate will appear.

The NPCs Vidious / Ziadan in Midnight will announce that the Flying Machine has appeared.

The Flying Machine can sometimes appear briefly and then disappear, but this is NOT a real spawn unless the NPCs Vidious / Ziadan in Midnight announce it.

Each zone has several pre-determined locations where the Flying Machine can spawn the War Supply Crate.

The War Supply Crate can spawn in different ways from zone to zone.

For the following zones, the Flying Machine will land on the ground and spawn the War Supply Crate OR the Flying Machine will spawn the War Supply Crate high in the air with a parachute that floats slowly toward the ground:

Eversong Woods (EW)

Harandar (HD)

Voidstorm (VS)

For the following zones, the Flying Machine will spawn the War Supply Crate high in the air with a parachute that floats slowly toward the ground:

Slayer's Rise (SR)

Zul Aman (ZA)

War Supply Crates/War Supply Chests despawn 60 seconds after being claimed.

If left unclaimed, War Supply Crates despawn 10 minutes after landing.

Timers
(Crates)When do War Supply Crates spawn?

Timers of around 18 minutes and 20 seconds are the most common.

Timers are linked to shards.

If there is a new shard ID, then there is a new timer.

Similarly, if the timer for a zone has changed drastically by several minutes, it's probably a new shard.

Delaying the loot time of a War Supply Crate does NOT affect the spawn time of future War Supply Crates. Otherwise, we'd all have perfect timers for every rotation.

Travel
(Crates)If timers are tight between zones, it is recommended to use Hearthstones or Mage Portals to speed up your travel.

General

Note that Hearthstone CD can be reduced from 30 minutes down to 15 minutes if in a Guild via Hasty Hearth.

Mythic+ ports to dungeons and ports to raids can also be useful, but note that the Mythic+ dungeon ports tend to share cooldowns with each other and that the cooldowns are 8 hours, so this is not a method that can be used frequently.

Midnight

For Harandar and Voidstorm, their portals can be found in the middle of Silvermoon.

Harandar also has a portal to Voidstorm.

Voidstorm also has a portal to Harandar.

Wormhole Generator: Quel'Thalas can help Engineers travel to specific zones in Midnight.

Personal Key to the Arcantina can be used essentially as a 15-minute hearth to Silvermoon.

Dundun's Abundant Travel Method can be used to travel to the current Abundant zone.

Warping Wise can be used to travel to a random Midnight zone.

Process - Reactive
(Crates)At the beginning of any War Supply Crate Farming session, the raid is reacting to the War Supply Crates spawning.

Raid members are spread out to cover each zone and note the times at which War Supply Crates spawn per zone/shard.

All raids must do this at the start of any War Supply Crate Farming.

Because the raid is reacting to the War Supply Crates spawning, the raid may not be fast enough or numerous enough to win the War Supply Crates.

Process - Proactive
(Crates)After the raid knows the War Supply Crate timers for each zone, it is possible to determine the optimal route in order to get each War Supply Crate.

At this point, the raid is predicting when the War Supply Crates will spawn, so the raid can move together as one group and get War Supply Crates quickly and consistently.

If the timers are too tight between 2 zones, it means that the zones are synced, and only 1 of those zones is chosen to farm.

If too many zones are synced, note the zones with the timers that are furthest apart and choose those zones to farm.

Alternatively, for a multiple-zone sync, disbanding the raid and then reforming it can provide a chance to change shards, hopefully with better results for timers.

If at any point the timers/shards change, the raid is moving back to Reactive mode to get new timers until it can get back to Proactive mode.

If the raid is consistently fighting large groups of enemy players and the fights are taking long enough for the raid to miss War Supply Crates in other zones, a choice must be made to either fight the enemy players in the hope that they will eventually give up and stop attacking the raid or else ignore that zone and farm the other zones instead.

Other GuidesPlease see my other Wowhead guides here:AcknowledgmentsIf you have any polite and constructive feedback that you'd like to share, feel free to send it to me, and if I act upon it, resulting in an improvement to the guide, I'll happily add you to the acknowledgments.Special Thanks
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Comments

Comment by FuryXHD

https://www.curseforge.com/wow/addons/rdys-crate-tracker
Link doesn't work

Drak's Guide to War Supply Crate Farming

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