[secunia]

The problem I have with crafting, is either you spend an inordinate amount of time collecting materials or throw huge piles of money at it, but getting huge piles of money takes an inordinate amount of time too. Personally I find, I'd rather use the huge amount of time to farm the materials but if I didnt have a thf60 with TH2 I'd be so bored by now I'd have to go play wow to recover. the last time I left ffxi to play wow was purely because of the amount of time required to farm for money to play the game was getting silly because of all the jobs i have on the go. I've countered that this time but having mules to carry stuff. i got a armour, weapon, crystal, & small items mule.

I see crafting as a way to eventually make money to save me farming for money to buy equipment for all the jobs i've got between 20 & 60 which is pretty much all of them but also it's a part of the game and I want to do it. I would think most people dont have huge amounts of money or time to spend getting huge amounts of money. I'm writing this query in the regard to the person like me who ideally wants to casually craft over time. Crafting ought not to be an endgame pursuit and the logistics of crafting without throwing money at it are insane. It's pretty unrealistic to do without TH2.

the thing that would help most i think would be increase drops and make TH be like +1 or +2 items. it would probably have an effect on the general economy but the gap between vendor sell prices and ah prices has always been silly. Since it's not viable to start crafting as you go along the only way is to alleviate the need for excessive amounts of farming.

[Ziero]

Crafting takes two things, intelligence and effort. A smart crafter can skill to 100 and have a minimal loss. Most, if done right, can profit from their craft at any level, both character and craft wise. All it takes is knowing what sells best at the time, because markets are always changing, and being able to put forth the effort to make the stuff.

I know two high level cooks, 90+. One makes a fortune off of it while the other barely uses it. Because one watches and works with the market and the other doesn't.

Crafting is not an endgame thing, but it's not something everyone can just jump into and be successful at. And that's more of an issue with the way the economy works as opposed to how crafting itself works.

Though supposedly there will be some sort of crafting system involved in the new Moblin Maze Monger system coming out in December, so maybe that will help.

[Malacite]

Crafting used to be pretty reliable back before RMT became a major problem.

You can still make a living off it these days but it's gotten a lot harder I find, especially since a lot more people have very high level crafts.


If you're concerned with skilling up, I'm sure a few people on your server are bound to create mazes with a focus on synthesis after the update.

[Szkol]

This is an economy issue, and SE can't really help with that. If you increase drop rates, items just become cheaper on the AH b/c there are more of them, and the resulting synths from those items also drop in price. Even if you're farming all your own items, lower overall prices are still going to eat at your profits.

It sounds like you want everything to be made faster and easier and cheaper- if you want that I'd say you're playing the wrong game. For myself, I appreciate very much that everything in this game takes a long time or is difficult to do. It's nice to have a challenge for once, instead of a game that you can just breeze through.

Crafting is a way to make money faster than farming, but you have to remember that an MMO economy is a lot like a real one. Your product only sells for more if A) it's way more useful than anything anyone else can make or B) not many people can make it. The problem this presents in FFXI is that the game has been around for a long time, and the majority of players are at endgame, which means there's a lot of people that can make anything they want or need. 2 years ago i sold stack of Brass ingots for 30K, now I'm lucky if I can sell a stack for 8K. Unfortunately in MMO, and in real life, your reward is not necesarily relative to the work you put in, it's also relative to the work that everyone else has put in.

[LyonheartLakshmi]

You are more likely to get every craft to 100 before SE ever responds.

[Durahansolo]

You have a THF with TH2 that will probably eventually be a 75THF with TH3-TH4. If you farm common items that people use for crafting then you'll do pretty good with the AH. Think about it like this, if you farm something that would make you profit from selling it, farm a stack to sell and keep one for crafting then you'll break even. If you farm something that will make you more in the long run from crafting then just farm them all and then craft them. My crafts are arranged funny for the simple reason that when I farm 99% of the time I'm crafting it into money. If I'm farming beehive chips & Honey (Cooking 63) I'm crafting Echo Drops (Alchemy 81), if I'm buying ash logs from the AH I'm making bolts (Woodworking 69) if I'm farming beastman blood I'm making bolt heads etc. Makes me more versitile but the problem with it is I'll never be able to have 100 in any one of them because I've already allocated points between 3 crafts instead of 1. If I ever get enough gil to take 1 to 100 then I'll have the guildmaster cap them down and 1 skill will stay high.

I'm looking forward to whatever they're doing for the maze thingy it might be fun ^_^.

[secunia]

no i dont mind if it takes a longish time, i take more exception to the fact it has to be done exclusively. and when levelling up the logistically easier/cheaper synths are the ones everyone else is doing. It prob doesnt help on selling the stuff that there's a lot less lower ppl around than there used to be.

in 109days play time i've managed to do
fish 14 wood 29 smith 18 gold 4 cloth 4 leather 18 bone 1 alchemy 22 cooking 58
and thats on the intelligent synths for the least amount of money spent but it still feels like crafting on ff is my life's work lol. i dont want to play ff for ever lol

[Durahansolo]

Originally Posted by secunia

no i dont mind if it takes a longish time, i take more exception to the fact it has to be done exclusively. and when levelling up the logistically easier/cheaper synths are the ones everyone else is doing. It prob doesnt help on selling the stuff that there's a lot less lower ppl around than there used to be.

in 109days play time i've managed to do
fish 14 wood 29 smith 18 gold 4 cloth 4 leather 18 bone 1 alchemy 22 cooking 58
and thats on the intelligent synths for the least amount of money spent but it still feels like crafting on ff is my life's work lol. i dont want to play ff for ever lol

lol fishing takes forever to level, its a craft for the patient. Mine is about 0.9 and unless I get bored it probably wont go higher. Crafting is one of those things that if you do it in one sitting it goes faster. What makes it hard is trying to find things that both sell fast and don't take you forever to get all the items together to do.

[Szkol]

I find that it really speeds things up if you're organized about your crafting. I spend about 5 minutes per day doing preparation type tasks, gathering materials, farming/buying crystals, clearing inv. space, and making sure i'm at the correct guild. Then maybe 1-2 days per week, I spend an hour crafting. I've been doing woodworking, so a lot of times this has involved synthing through most of a stack of arrow/bolt heads. Let me tell ya, you get a LOT of skillups doing that many synths, and your reward feels greater than if you nickel and dime your skillups here and there. Whenever I craft, I usually go for around 5+ skill points. Sometimes its more or less depending on whats going on, but this has worked well for me.

Even if you're not doing synths like arrows where you can do the same thing over and over, you can prepare for 2-3 different synths.

Also, there are lots of money synths, very simple ones, but money synths dont always mean super pricey items that sell super fast. Take maple Sugar... it doesn't sell fast all the time, but it sells fast enough that you can leave it on the AH and it will move before it gets returned to you. There's almost no way you can't make money on maple sugars, especially if you can HQ them. Even if you cant, the cost per stack is like 250gil tops, including crystal price, and 140 if you farm your crystals, and i've been able to sell these for 2k per stack!

[Vyuru]

Ziero pretty much hit it on the head.

My only advice, and maybe you are doing this, you say you are at any rate, is to craft smarter.

I say this because you would not believe the number of people who I have talked to who level cooking and for instance use making honey as a skillup synth, and it could be anywhere from level 5 on I think. I think the fellow who was the lowest skill who tried this was a lvl 4 cook.

Now let's think about that, beeswax costs 14k a stack, and honey sells for 2k-3k a stack. And they honestly wonder what the heck is wrong with crafting and why aren't they making any money. They ignore carrot broth, they ignore orange juice, they ignore sliced sardines, which if they are going to make a lvl 11 or 12 synth like honey, I'd rather make sliced sardines than honey personally, if they make roast mushrooms they'll buy danceshrooms and not the cheaper ones, the list goes on.

So yes, you say you are crafting smart, but I hear that from alot of people who are not really thinking about it. So I would recommend that you take a step back and think about the skillup synths and the various paths that you can approach crafting from.

Also try farming in different areas, different mobs of the same family have different drop rates. If you are running through an area constantly that has some mobs you could farm, go ahead and kill them. For instance I'm almost always running to and from the maw in Saruta, there are 2-4 crawlers between Windurst and that maw, it takes me only 10 seconds to kill them all, and I'm not even looking for them. It nets me quite a nice supply of silk threads, and I'm not even trying to farm.

So just think about the ways you can approach crafting is my advice. Now there are some crafts where I'm sure it's harder to make a profit or do things somewhat quickly, Smithing and Goldsmithing come to mind.

Still though, I know that Alchemy, Weaving, Leather, Cooking and Woodworking can be taken to 60 relatively painlessly and you should be able to make gil as you go. Fishing and Boneworking would be a bit slower, but not terribly bad either, while Smithing and Goldsmithing I personally wouldn't touch beyond taking them up just a little bit. The ability to make Iron Ingots is pretty nice, but I wouldn't take Smithing beyond 20 myself.

So yeah, I don't think it's as bad as you're thinking it is, and for the longest time my Thf was only lvl 15, at 30 now, so I've only had TH1 for my farming. Just look at what you can do and come up with a plan.