The Way of crafting

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

This page is a stub and 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. But economy isn't only reason to craft: you may craft HQ equipment and gain a better performance at the same level requirements. Certainly, the way of crafting also means that you needs to be skilled in gathering. Without a gathering your crafting would likely more expensive than direct buying. Also you'll may not find some of materials and ingredients in sale. At first look it seems that most of materials are relatively cheap, but this turns different when you want to create HQ items (you certainly want this, right?). The chance of creating an HQ item is commonly not so high, and so you'll need a lots of basic materials to create HQ items to enlarge a chance of creating an HQ gear, weapon or tool. Also you can gather HQ materials, which sufficiently enlarges a chance that your crafting result will be HQ.

Classes dependencies

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.

There are list of most necessary crafting and gathering classes for each battle class:

//TODO: check this table for correctness //TODO: add column "Preffered gathering classes"

Battle class	Weapon primary	Weapon secondary	Armor primary	Armor secondary	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

"Primary" means main role in crafting of a needed equipment, "secondary" means ability to craft lesser assortment of equipment or ability to craft a materials needed for equipment.

At first time, when you unlock a crafting class (approximately until 9th level), you may leveling only by crafting of an different items: this will give you enough amount of experience for good speed of progress. Craft most complex items, and you'll obtain more experience. Then you may go to respective guildmaster and complete all available quests at once.

When you join to one of Grand companies, you'll be able to extremely boost the gain of experience by completing Supplying duties for your GC. This takes not many time and not requires a lot of materials, but rewarded with lot of gil and very large amount of experience.

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

By the way, always try to make HQ items, even chance to success is tends to zero: you'll gain a more exp if gets more quality points, even if resulting item will be normal. Be aware to use Quick Synthesis: you'll gain a minimum amount of experience, and also you have little chance to have some fails, even the items you creating are simplest.

Crafting summary

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 an simple universal formula, but here is a way, how to approach this problem: E.g. we have 228CP and needs to make some material with durability 40 and minimal complexity, which requires only one step for synthesis. Lets subtract a number of steps, needed for synthesis and To demonstrate practical efficiency of quality-increasing actions, for example, let's take about 192CP available and 40 durability points (DP). Using 92CP for Master's Mend and 10DP (one step) for synthesis, we'll have a 100CP and 6 steps for increasing quality.

Formula is floor((availableCP-summaryImprovingActionsCP)/touchActionCP))*touchActionEfficiency*touchActionSuccessRate. Let's calc what we may get:

CP avail.	Actions taken	AVG efficiency	Max efficiency
192	1 time Masters' Mend, 5 times Basic touch (-18CP,1.0,0.7)	3.5	5
192	1 time Masters' Mend,1 time Steady Hand (-22CP), 4 times Basic Touch (-18CP,1.0,0.7)	3.6	4
192	1 time Masters' Mend,3 times Standard Touch (-32CP,1.25,0.8)	3	3.75
228	1 time Masters' Mend, 1 time Steady Hand (-22CP), 6 times Basic Touch (-18CP,1.0,0.7)	5	6
228	2 times Masters' Mend, 2 times Basic Touch, 9 times Hasty Touch (-0CP,1.0,0.5)	6.3	9

These are theoretical calculations given for example. So the best way is to use Steady Hand and Basic Touch, until you have not enough CP for 2x(Masters' Mend & Basic Touch). But when it'll be enough usage of Hasty Touch from Culinarian potentially may give better results, but it is very very unstable. Generally, in practice, usage of Steady Hand gives noticeably more stable results. Also, as we may see in the table, usually we may have 1-2 steps left. Its may be used for trying luck with Hasty Touch, certainly if you can use Careful Synthesis from Weaver. Otherwise it'll be better to leave'em for that case if first Basic Synthesis fails.

Crafting of an simple items

The simple materials are usually synthesed by only step, so common strategy for this is firstly to get maximum quality using Basic Touch (or advanced modifications of it) and Master's Mend to restore durability, until you have CP for this. And finally synthese the item. You have small amount of available crafting steps, but that, what will limit increasing of quality points, usually will ba a lesser amount of CP. At low levels (approximately about 1-10) a meal, which increases CP (Frumenty e.g.), shall help you to obtain more amount of quality points. At higher levels your CP will grow, and you may turn to using meal for increasing of Control. //TODO: to be continue