[LyonheartLakshmi]

In looking through various threads where people were blind sided by the change to the Tree Cuttings => Tree Saplings recipe, I saw several references to the "Light crystal method". Apparently, Tree Cuttings + Light Crystal + No Crystal has the potential to yield 2 to 3 saplings per plant, as well as 1 to 3 Gold Beastcoins. This approach has the additional benefit of quicker harvest, since one of the feeding phases gets cut short. This seemed to be suggested primarily to avoid getting Shell Bugs.

I planted 40 Tree Cuttings two weeks ago today during Iceday, fed them a Light Crystal on Lightsday for the first feeding, no crystal for the second feeding, and was able to harvest today. That means feeding one crystal cut somewhere between 2.5 to 3 days from the no crystal method (which usually took 17 days to go from planting to harvest-ready). I harvested on Iceday, 95% Full Moon. Here were my results from today:

Tree Saplings: 7 plants, for 18 saplings
Gold Beastcoins: 12 plants, for 18 gold coins
Rock Salt: 14 plants, for 50 salts
Bronze Nuggets: 7 plants, for 115 nuggets

Rock Salt is basically a toss away product. Bronze Nuggets sold to NPCs in Jeuno for 12 gil each, and there's not enough AH activity to make them worth selling on the open market. So the nuggets are tossable as well.

On Lakshmi, Gold Beastcoins are selling for around 80k per stack. Tree Saplings are hovering around 210k per stack. Based on today's prices on Lakshmi, I got back about 435k gil for my investment. This comes out to 31k gil per day.

Even after the adjustment to gardening, I was harvesting on average around 43 saplings from 40 plants. If I had the traditional no crystal feeding approach, I would have gotten back around 750k gil. For 17 days, that comes out to 44k gil per day.

Unless there's a way to improve the harvest with the Light Crystal method, I'm thinking it's better to stick with the longer growth time of feedings. It might take a little longer, but I recall getting worthwhile items harvested (i.e. saplings) 70% to 75% of the time, regardless of the moon phase during which I harvested. With this attempt at the Light crystal method, less than 50% of the plants yielded something worthwhile (19 out of 40 plants yielded either saplings or gold coins).

I might try either feeding Light crystal on Darksday this time, or simply feeding Dark Crystals (since somepage does not list Bronze Nuggets as a possible harvest for Tree Cuttings + Dark Crystal + No Crystal).