Life skill EXP can be gained without consuming stamina; gathering can be done endlessly, though crafting will require some thought. This is not necessary for basic progression and will mainly benefit you if you want to meet level requirements to craft armor, weapons, and furniture.
Efficient Gathering
Using the data on drop rates, I calculated how much EXP you can get per gathering attempt when crafting certain items. We will prioritize crafting items that give us more EXP. We will also prioritize crafting items that can be used in secondary crafts. Finally, we will prioritize using items that have high drop rates so that we can do more crafts with less gathering. All of the information you need for that is in the spreadsheet.
The trickier part is learning how to efficiently use secondary drops from gathering nodes. While each node has a main item you try to gather from it, they all drop an array of secondary items that you won’t be using in your targeted craft. By finding ways to use these items as well, you can greatly increase the number of crafts you can do after a gathering run.
Let’s look at an example.
Primary craft: Sandstone Polishers (Gemcrafting)
Limestone (node) drops Limestone (item) at a 95% chance. It also drops Limpid Azure Water at a rate of 150%. You can use 2 Limestone and 1 Water in a basic Gemcrafting recipe for Sandstone Polishers. Due to the difference in drop rates, however, you will get about 3 Water for every 2 Limestone, which means you will have 2 Water leftover for each Polisher you craft. If you gather 2,000 times to craft 1,000 polishers, you’ll find yourself with about 2,000 extra Water. You’ll also have about 1,200 Rock Salts, 1,200 Alum, 3,000 Clay and 3,000 Fine Sand. You won’t need any of those items for Gemcrafting training.
Secondary craft: Rough Paper (Gemcrafting)
If you want to leverage the Water for additional Gemcrafting training, you can spend some time gathering from Thin Twigs. They drop Twigs at a whopping 450% rate and Resin at a 200% rate. You can combine 6 Twigs and 3 Water with Gemcrafting to make Rough Paper, so another ~900 gathers will allow you to make ~670 Rough Paper. When we were making Polishers, we got about 1 craft per 2 gathers. At 2 EXP per craft, this is about 1 EXP per gather. When we gather Twigs to use the extra Water, we get a better ratio of crafts to gathers which results in about 1.5 EXP per gather. We will also get about 1,800 Resin.
Tertiary craft: Leathers (Weaving)
Resin can be used in a number of highly efficient recipes, but here we can combine it with the 1,200 Alum we got from our Limestone mining and a common mob drop from Boars and Boarlets to craft Refined or Smooth Hard Leather using Weaving. We only need 1 Resin, 1 Alum and 1 mob drop per craft, so we can do an additional 1,200 crafts here without any more gathering. We’ll still have 600 Resin leftover which we could use for a quick 150 Rubber crafts using Alchemy or just save for an even more efficient recipe later.
The Rock Salts, Clay and Sand can all be used in various Alchemy recipes as laid out in the spreadsheet.
Don’t Underestimate Gathering Speed Upgrades
As you can tell from these examples, volume is the name of the game. For that reason, you will greatly benefit from reducing the gathering time for your skills by activating the related talent nodes.
In the example above, we gathered 2,900 times. At the base gathering speed of 5 seconds, this would take about 4 hours (not accounting for travel time between nodes). By spending talent points to reduce gathering time to 3 seconds and 2 seconds, we can accomplish the same amount of gathering in only 2.4 or 1.6 hours.
During that time, we crafted about 3,000 items to gain 6,000 EXP and still had materials left over for future crafts. For reference, your daily 400
refill gets you only 1,600 EXP per day and you still have to spend time, along with stamina or luno to get the materials for these recipes.
Conclusion
The optimal gathering plan depends on which life skill or combination of life skills you want to level, so I can’t create a general plan for everyone, but I have listed the most efficient recipes for each skill in the spreadsheet along with how much EXP you will get per gather and all of the drops for each node. This should be enough information for anyone to figure out the best way to accomplish their specific goals.
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