Crafting: Profiting While Skilling

I did a lot of crafting over the weekend, and ended up getting Alchemy to 29.7, Bonecraft to 14.8, and Goldsmithing to 11.7.

I got goldsmithing a bit higher than the copper ring level by making and desynthing copper hairpins, and then moved on to brass ingots. Grymalkyn and I spent a bunch of time killing worms in Giddeus, with Grymalkyn turning the flint stones into glass fiber (getting her Alchemy to 61 in the process) and the silver ore into ingots, while I make brass ingots from the copper and zinc ores. I had more zinc than copper, so I ended up heading to the Windurst Port Airship store and bought more copper there, capping my goldsmithing at 7 in the process.

I used some of the brass ingots and glass fiber to make minnows, getting my Alchemy .7 in skillups, but no goldsmithing. I think the gold level on those is lower than the 9 listed in the guides, especially since it's using copper ingots.

Next on the list was Cornettes. We headed to Gusgen Mines to farm a bunch of bone chips, and noticed a trio of subjob-less level 17-18s fighting skeletons, so when we got a skull off of a ghoul, we asked if they needed it. Sure enough, that's what they were there for, so we teamed up with them and got all three of them their skulls. Grym then teleported them out to the Dem crag (she was THF/WHM), and apparently, it was even their first teleport! How exciting for them!

I ended up making about 40 Cornettes over the course of the weekend, 30 with farmed materials and another 10 with stuff I bought. Amazingly, these sold nearly as fast as I listed them on the Auction House in Windurst. As opposed as I am to the idea of people "buying" their fame by doing one repeatable quest with purchased items, rather than doing as many quests as possible, this approach really helps out the crafters! I ended up making over 100k just on the cornettes that skilled me up. If I had actually bought everything, it wouldn't have been so profitable, but it would have been better than break-even.

I had switched to Fang Necklaces before capping on Cornettes, but with the Cornettes having fewer ingredients, and the way they sell so quickly, I gave up on the Fang Necklaces, and capped bonecraft on Cornettes (14). I'm into the Bone Ring stage now, and used up all the bone chips and sheep teeth we had on hand, making then desynthing the bone rings, reaching 14.8 before I didn't have any left. I'll have to farm more sheep teeth, bone chips, and wind and lightning clusters before continuing with my bonecraft.

I decided it was time to get back to woodworking (it's been so many months since I touched it). I did some calculations, and I think I can do better than breakeven on demon arrows, and so I sank 550,000 gil into a stack of Demon Arrowheads. It would be nice if the 99 synths those will make would get me from 64.8 all the way to 69, but that doesn't seem very likely. Last night I managed to get 7 stacks of arrowwood lumber from the guild store in Al Zahbi for 3 gil a stick. That's practically free! I couldn't believe I was able to get so many. With what I already had on hand, I should have enough to get through the stack of arrowheads.

I started in making the demon arrows last night, and it's going much better than I expected. I did 45 synths and ended up with 13 stacks of arrows (6 failures, losing 3 arrowheads), and best of all, 1.8 in skillups. I still have 57 arrowheads to go, so I could well make it very close to the cap of 69 before I finish up these materials. It also looks like I can expect over 50% profit on my investment for these levels. I really love being able to make money while skilling up using purchased materials. Woodworking all along has been pretty decent for gil while skilling, as long as I stuck to consumables, but back when I hit 64, demon arrows would have been a 50% loss. I think the change to having demon arrowheads stack to 99 brought the cost per arrowhead down, but I didn't keep any records of the price of materials vs the selling price for the arrows back then, so I'm not sure. I'm just lucky the market's changed enough during my woodworking hiatus.

After I finish up with demon arrows, my next synth will be repairing broken clothespoles, so I foresee a lot of fishing to go along with that phase. Hopefully I can figure out a good place for both breaking rods and getting fishing skillups while we're at it. Most people seem to like using meatballs on the Selbina/Mhaura ferry for breaking clothespoles, but I'd prefer to avoid the ferry, just because of the wasted time while docked. Maybe sliced cod at the south side of Qufim will work - that's what I use to break mithran fishing rods when people need them.

Update, June 8th: I finished up with all my demon arrows last night, ending up with a total of 31 stacks of arrows, and 3.6 in skillups, getting me to 68.4 woodworking. Depending on how quickly the arrows sell, I may go ahead and buy another stack of arrowheads to get to 69.0 before moving on to clothespole repairs, since they're money makers anyway.