The Way of crafting

The Way of crafting

Study the Ways of all professions (Go Rin no Sho, Miyamoto Musashi).

This page is ongoing, and I'll continue writing and improving it. Please, correct me, if I mistake somewhere.

Here are the common words about crafting, suitable for all crafting classes. All class-specific information will appears on corresponding pages.

Crafting is a most efficient way to supply yourself and also your friends with any equipment you need. While leveling, you'll need your weapons and gear to be respective to your current level and so you'll need to periodically spend a lot of gil for it. But there is another way to keep you equipment up to date your level and spend much less of gil for this: make all what you need by yourself. But economy isn't only reason to craft: you may craft high quality (HQ) equipment with noticeably better characteristics at the same level requirements.

Certainly, the way of crafting also means that you needs to be skilled in gathering. Without a gathering, a crafting will be more expensive than buying a finished products. Also the NPC-vendors offers only a small assortment of low-level materials, which are can cover your needs only up to 10th level or about. Furthermore, if you want to create HQ items (you certainly want this, right?), you'll need HQ materials, many HQ materials. And they are not selling by NPCs. Of course, Market Boards may solve all these problems, but the price wouldn't be cheap.

Crafting starts from an hours of striking a rocks with a pickaxe under the sun, which wants to fry you, of slashing a trees, wet to the skin under the falling rain, and traveling from one end of Eorzea to another, with heavy-weight backpack, which tends you to the ground. And continues by hours spent at the workbench or anvil, making a tons of billets, sorting the best of them, to finally turn them into that, what may be called a Masterpiece. This is not a way to obtain something easily. Do you ready for this? If yes- welcome to our ranks!

What profession to choose

Any crafting class is depended to mostly all another crafting classes, so you'll not be mistaken if you'll unlock all of them as soon as it'll be possible. But in this case, there is a one side effect: even a large hangar may be not enough to store all materials, you need. And of course it will take a lot of time to keep all these classes on certain level.

This way, it will be more rational to choose most necessary crafting and gathering classes:

Battle class	Weapon crafting	Armor crafting	Preferred gathering
Marauder, Gladiator	Blacksmith, Carpenter	Armorer, Leatherworker	Miner,Botanist, Loot
Pugilist	Blacksmith, Goldsmith, Carpenter	Weaver, Leatherworker	Miner,Botanist, Loot
Lancer	Carpenter, Blacksmith	Armorer, Leatherworker	Botanist, Miner, Loot
Archer	Carpenter, Blacksmith	Leatherworker, Armorer	Botanist, Loot, Miner
Rogue	Blacksmith	Weaver, Leatherworker	Miner,Botanist, Loot
Conjurer	Carpenter, Alchemist?	Weaver, Leatherworker	Botanist, Loot, Miner
Thaumaturge	Goldsmith, Carpenter	Weaver, Leatherworker	Botanist, Loot, Miner
Arcanist	Alchemist, Carpenter	Weaver, Leatherworker	Botanist, Loot, Miner

Note: the Goldsmith makes a jewelry, used to increase different attributes, which is useful for all classes without exceptions.

Crafting summary

As common for unlocking of other classes, go to the crafters guild and talk with guild receptionist and then - with guild master. Guild master will give you a first lesson and your first tool. After this mandatory part you may equip your tool and go to the nearest location to kill some mobs with it :).

At first time, when you unlock a crafting class, (approximately until 9-10th level) you may leveling fast enough only by crafting items, available in your crafting log, one by another. When you make any item from crafting log first time, you get additional exp bonus. Don't make tons of lower-level items, but focus on most complex recipes, however this is obvious. Always try to increase items quality as much as you can: even if resulting item not becomes HQ, the more quality points you reach, the more experience you earn. At last, be avoid to use Quick Synthesis: you'll gain a minimum amount of experience, the chance to create HQ item will be minimal, and, furthermore, there is a small chance that some of synthesises will fail, even you creating a simplest items. That's all main recommendations about crafting.

//TODO: some words about guild quests?

When you join to one of Grand companies, you'll be able to participate in Supply missions - daily duties, available for each crafting class. Main feature of these missions is that you earn double amount of experience, if you supply GC with HQ items (unlike a guild quests). This feature allows to boost growing of all crafting classes in parallel. Besides these missions requires minimum amount of time and materials. But from the other hand, it may make you to run all over Eorzea in a single day to collect all necessary materials and have time to craft all needed items. And an additional inconvenience in the need to get to GC residence to hand over the stuff to Company officer. Nevertheless, neither simple crafting, nor guild quests will grant you so much amount of experience, as supply missions do.

//TODO: place here links for Miner,Botanist and Fisher nodes locations?

Except a materials, you need a crystals as catalyst for crafting. The most effective way to obtain the crystals is completing of quests (look lists of respective quests in class-specific guides). Also you may obtain them by gathering, but this takes too much time and gives very small amount of experience for a Miner or Botanist. //TODO: make list of quests, with crystals in reward, individually for each crafting class.

Crafting progress

Crafting progress is a quite simple. One thing is to be mentioned: the progress generated by Synthesis grows as the recipe becomes easier for your level. Therefore you can't rely on progress value for lower-level item while crafting a higher-level one. But on the other side, the progress, made by any same-level class (with equivalent equipment) for any same-level item will be the same.

Increasing of quality

In fact, the crafting is a task of solving a "Knapsack problem": how to combine different actions to obtain maximum quality and successfully complete synthesis. This is too complex task to make a single universal formula for it, but on following simple example I'll try to illustrate main principles of solving it:

For example, we needs to make some material with minimal difficulty (we can synthesize it by 1 step) and we have 192CP for improving of its quality. Lets compose a different combinations of available crafting actions, which we may take with given amount of CP. Then we need to compute how much quality points we may obtain via each combination.

In addition, we shall keep in mind that most of crafting actions have probabilistic nature, which we need to take into account

Success rate - is probability of that whole sequence of actions succeeds.

Actions taken	Success rate	AVG efficiency	Max efficiency
1 Masters' Mend (CP:92), 5 Basic touch (CP:18, eff:1.0, prob:0.7)	0.17	0.84	5		1 Masters' Mend (CP:92), 1 Steady Hand (22CP), 4 Basic Touch (CP:18, eff:1.0, prob:0.7+0.2)	0.66	2.62	4		1 Masters' Mend (CP:92), 3 Standard Touch (CP:32, eff:1.25, prob:0.8)	0.51	1.92	3.75		1 Steady Hand (22CP), 3 Standard Touch (CP:32, eff:1.25, prob:0.8+0.2)	1.00	3.75	3.75

Here we see, that maximum amount of quality we may obtain using Basic touch 5 times. But probability of this seems too small (16.8%*). So this method is most suitable when you couldn't approach to 100% of quality points, but have a lots of materials, lot of time and need to make one or two HQ items.

The Standard Touch in this conditions losses in both of average and maximum efficiency due to much more CP cost and lesser advantage in efficiency. So it isn't a right choice when you have small amount of CP, but it will be useful when limit of Durability is more tight, than limit of CP.

At last, the most interesting method: buffing Basic Touch with Steady Hand, which increases probability of first one up to 0.9 (90%). This method gives a maximum average efficiency and is a best choice if you needs to create a lot of HQ items (commonly - crafting materials).

* Probability of that an event will occure m times in n trials is Pm,n=(n!/(m!Г—(n-m)!)) Г— p^m Г— q^n-m, where p is probability of an event and q=1-p - is probability of that event will not occure. If simplify this formula for m==n, then Pm,m=p^m. For comparison, the probability of that the event will occures 5 times of 5 trials will be 0.59 (59%) if p==0.9, and 0.328 if p==0.8, and only 0.168 if p==0.7.

//TODO FIRST: correct this example, meaning a calculations of actions probability.

//TODO: Write a note about that "50% success rate" not means a "one guaranteed success in each 2 attempts".

HQ probability

HQ-probability

If the crafting progress has absolutely linear scale, the chance to create HQ item has more complex dependency from amount of quality points. As you can see on the picture, filling of quality bar on about 65% grants only 20% probability to obtain an HQ item in result. But after reaching of this point, the probability starts to grow much more quickly. So what all these numbers are means in practice? For the most high-level recipes, available for the certain level, you will be able to fill only a half of quality bar (or even less), so chance of HQ will be nearly zero. But if at least a half of ingredients are HQ, this may significantly increase this chance. This diagram based on measurements made while crafting 25lv. items, which requires 1296 quality points, and was prooved by measurements on several lower-level recipes.

High quality ingredients

Using of high quality ingredients gives you some initial quality points. As higher the level of ingredient and as many HQ ingredients are used, as much initial quality will be gained. On the average, about a half of high quality ingredients will allow you to reliably produce HQ items from about a middle of your current recipe list. With full set of HQ ingredients, initial quality reachs about a half of maximum and allow to get very high chance to make HQ item from any recipe, available to your current level.

Low-level ingredients in high-level recipes gives no significant amount of quality. Considering a small amount of exp they gives and the low price, the better solution is simply to buy them from nearest NPC.

Crafting of materials

Materials are usually has quite low difficulty to synthesize'em by a single step. But maximum quality is not. Also, low durability applies tight restrictions on increasing of quality. From 7th to 20th level use Inner Quiet and restore durability with Masters Mend to get more steps. Since the Inner Quiet buff increasing after each increasing of quality, use "touch" actions in order of ascending of their efficiency. If you have some lack of CP, try to use food, which increases CP, it may be more effective than increasing of Control (if it'll allow you to take more touches or buffs like Great Strides).

Starting from ~21st level, when Great Strides becomes unlocked, the most effective strategy, that I tried, is "forsage": get as much quality as possible by first three steps and synthesize at last one step. In details, use all buffs that increases quality gain, and most effective touch actions which available. My common sequence is Inner Quiet>Great Strides>Steady Hand>Standard Synthesis>(Great Strides>Standard Synthesis)x2. At last, I use Rumination to restore some CP for synthesis. I tried other ways, like to "charge" Inner Quiet with Hasty Touches as much as possible, but low success rate of Hasty Touch and the high CP cost of Masters Mend makes this way useless.

Crafting of common items

The feature of crafting of middle-complexity items is that you able to mix increasing of quality with synthesis, aiming to catch more moments when condition of materials becomes good or excellent, and do it without loss of productivity. Start crafting with synthesis and keep an eye on materials condition. When it turns good or excellent, use that touch action, which has maximum efficiency and success rate. But always prefere to ignore the material condition when you need to (re)cast Steady Hand, because if touch will fail, you will lose both material condition bonus, and increasing of quality at this step, and the current step itself.

Crafting of a complex items

In the each group of recipes there are several items, which differs from another by ~20%-higher difficulty. They are always have 10 points of durability above common ones, but requires much more steps for synthesis. The most problem with them is that you may miss out of look its difficulty and become unable to complete synthesis, by getting carried away with increasing of quality.

At first, you need to boost synthesis progress, and cross class action Rapid Syntesis is the best for it. 250% efficiency of this action may save up to 2 steps. The only problem is 50% success rate (70% with the Steady Hand)and because of this, Rapid Syntesis should be used in the beginning of crafting to be able to use "plan Z". However, high efficiency and no CP cost exceeds this disadvantage.

Note: make the test items, to see how much progress you make, because sometimes you may to underestimate your ability and unexpectedly complete synthesis by a single Rapid Syntesis, before you will have started to increase quality.

• At first, get so much HQ materials as it possible. Full set of HQ materials gives a half of maximum amount of quality points, independently of the recipe.
• Use Steady hand buff for both of syntesis and increasing of quality actions: in such conditions the 10% fail rate of Basic Touch becomes critical, but you can't replace it with Carefull synthesis without significant loss of efficiency.
• Try to boost progress using the Rapid Syntesis from Armorer. Cast Steady Hand and use Rapid Syntesis (its success rate will be 70%). If it succeeds from the 1st attempt, it'll bring 250% of progress against Basic Touch. Due to low success rate, it is better use this action at the beginning of crafting process, to have fallback ways, and to correctly plan remaining steps if Rapid Syntesis fails (time to time, it may fail even twice).

Synthesis

Careful Synthesis from Weaver – 100% warranted result! Start synthesize with no fails right now! P.S.: 90% efficiency. Your culinarian skills must be at least 15th level. If be serious, often, 90% efficiency is enough to complete synthesis with the same number of steps as using the Basic synthesis. Also often this action is usefull to finish synthesis when the remain progress is small. [TODO: move this to appropriate section]

Rapid Syntesis from Armorer – synthesis overclocking giving a 250% boost. Unstable. 50/50 it may fail or may not. Steady Hand is recommended for this action, but it may be easily omited, if getting of some fails is not critical, but quality is a primary target.

Quality increasing actions and buffs

Steady Hand (level 9) – one of the most useful buffs, common for all crafting classes. It improves action success rate by 20% for the next 5 steps, and costs only 22CP. Success rate has great influence on amount of quality points, which you can obtain. But this factor of the Basic Touch is quite low, Hasty Touch is almost useless, etc. Also all synthesis actions (ecxept Careful Syntesis) may fail sometimes. Thus using of Steady Hand is required for every crafting.

• Save CP by buffing Hasty Touch up to 70% success rate.
• Boost crafting progress by buffing Rapid Synthesis up to 70% success rate.

Inner quiet (level 13) – grants incremental bonus to control with every increasing of quality. Cost: 18CP. Each bonus increases gain of quality points on ~11% [TODO: check dependence from character's level]. Duration of Inner quiet is not limited, that is very usefull.

• Charging of Inner quiet: For example, Inner quiet > Steady Hand > Hasty Touchx2 > (Great Strides > Basic Touch|Standard Touch)x3. By the way, use synthesis and refresh Steady Hand, when it expires. In this example, the first two Hasty Touches will increase
• But Rumination allows to restore CP proportional to the number of times control was increased under the last casted Inner quiet. And this amount is usually greater than 18CP.

"Must have" cross class:

Hasty Touch from Culinarian – very low success rate, but cost no CP. Its main usage is to save some amount of CP for other actions. Note that it is better to always use it under the Steady Hand buff.

• Save CP for Basic, Standard and other Touches. For example: Start with Inner quiet and Steady Hand, then use Hasty_Touch to save CP, for maximum number of Standard Touches. Finally, spend all remaining CP repeating Standard Touch. Why not vise versa? Because this way, the greater efficiency of Standard Touch will be 125% you will have greater bonus from Inner Quiet, unlike if use Standard Touch at the begining.

Class-specific guides

//TODO: describe usage of specific abilities for each class

Alchemist Guide

Armorer Guide

Blacksmith Guide

Carpenter Guide

Culinarian Guide

Goldsmith Guide

Leatherworker Guide

Weaver Guide