A bit of help

[Kirihn]

Alright, I've been playing for about a year now and to this point I've been able to cruise by just by farming. However with the prices of farmed goods dropping lately and most of the prices on armor/weapons what not staying the same. I'm really finding that a 3 in goldsmithing just isn't enough to bring home some shiny new Equipment.

I've been working on leveling up my GS for the passed few days and I've made it to about level 11(10.7). In the guide I found under Gold Smithing 101 I've been working with Brass Ingots and Brass Sheets.

I tried turning brass sheets into brass flowerpots and that idea bombed, I wound up turning two stacks of sheets into 8 pots and getting absolutely no skill ups. Worst part of this is that Brass Sheets in Stacks sell for about 12-16K and brass pots sell for about 1K.

I've tried de-synthing saparas and the failure rate is a bit too high for me still I great successed only once out of 4 attempts and the other 3 broke. I tried desynthing Brass Rings and that seemed to work well but it didn't skill up very often.

So as you can probably tell, I'm kinda at a road block. Please if anyone has any suggestions on what path I should take hook me up with a reply.

[LyonheartLakshmi]

Re: A bit of help

Silver Beastcoins into Silver Ingots caps at 18. So you can do this recipe for skill ups if you get advanced image support from the guild while doing so. If the price of silver beastcoins is too high compared to what you get back from the ingots, you can do Brass Hairpins until 12 or 13, at which point you can do Silver Ore into Silver Ingots (camp the guild and buy up silver ore when it's close to the lowest guild price for it, which is something like 315 gil each).

[Kirihn]

Re: A bit of help

Ahh cool, the silver beast coins aren't that expensive at the moment, I think they're like 6K-8K a stack. How many of the beast coins does it take to make a stack of silver ingots? If it's like 4 coins to an ingot that could run quite a bit of cash.

EDIT: LOL I looked up the recipe to make those silver ingots using silver beast coins. If it takes 4 Silver beast coins to make 1 ingot than that means a single stack only makes three ingots. If one stack is 6K-8K then it's going to take nearly 24K-32K just to make a single stack of silver Ingots this way. This is not including failure attempts and cost of crystals... (For some reason on Diabolos the price of Crystals is going back up, expecially fire crystals.)

Considering silver ingots only go for about 2K per peice and about 24K-27K per stack I'd have to be cautious on where and when I buy my materials but thiss might work without too much of a loss. I dunno if this is the best method for leveling up though because most people said they wouldn't attempt this till about level 14...

[Mhurron]

Re: A bit of help

While I can't give you any GS specific advice, I found that when leveling crafts that unless I could skill up on something to guarantee to sell at break even or at a tiny profit, it was easier to craft items that I would use later to continue to level up, or not sell 'finished products.' I usually tried to make materials, like make ingots and sell those, instead of gear or something like that.

So personally, I wouldn't have made brass pots. Looking at what you can do with brass sheets, I would probably check on how well the Bastokan gear sells, and either keep the sheets for that, or sold the sheets as is and found something else.

This might not help you, but I'll try and remember it if I take up goldsmithing on a mule.

[Mhurron]

Re: A bit of help

If one stack is 6K-8K then it's going to take nearly 72+K just to make a single stack of silver Ingots this way. This is not including failure attempts and cost of crystals...

Well, GS is known to be very expensive to level. It does seem to pay off in the end though.

[neighbortaru]

Re: A bit of help

first piece of advice i can give you is that do not expect to profit from skilling up on GS (you'll be lucky to break even sometimes). it is an expensive craft with great rewards in the high levels, but it's gonna suck to get up there.

second piece of advice is i would suggest to pick up another cheaper craft first until you can produce a steady stream of income to support goldsmithing.

third, you could try cornettes (14) as a bridge to 4x silver ores=silver ingot (20) stage, but it requires a bit of boneworking skill. you can NPC these for 200 in windy and get some windy fame in the process. it's still a loss, but hopefully not too big a loss.

[LyonheartLakshmi]

Re: A bit of help

Considering silver ingots only go for about 2K per peice and about 24K-27K per stack I'd have to be cautious on where and when I buy my materials but thiss might work without too much of a loss.

Whether silver beastcoins => silver ingots is profit, break even, or loss can change quite quickly. I'd suggest being very shrewd in your timing and try to only buy the beastcoins at the low price. You should also pay attention to the price of singles as well. Sometimes, you can snag quite a few single beastcoins at a price lower than you would pay per stack.

If you break and lose quite a few coins, the losses might seem like a lot. But pretty much every other recipe in this range is going to be a loss anyways. Through my skill up experiences, I have often faced deciding between the possibility of losing gil and the certainty of it.

I dunno if this is the best method for leveling up though because most people said they wouldn't attempt this till about level 14...

Like I said, if you're not comfortable with beastcoins into ingots, you could try and bridge with Brass Hairpin. It caps at 17. Brass Ingots aren't too expensive. And since the recipe uses exactly one ingredient, you can probably get back half of your materials by desynthing the hairpins afterwards.

But once you hit level 12, I see no reason to not jump into Silver Ore = Ingots provided you don't mind camping the guild. With image support, you close your gap to 5 levels, which provides a pretty decent success rate. If you buy the ore at the low price of 315 gil, that means one ingot costs 1260 gil plus the cost of the crystal, and a stack costs you just over 16k gil to make. If you sell the ingots at a reasonable price, you can quickly make back enough gil to more than make up for even the materials you lose to breaks.

PS. If you want to farm Silver Beastcoins, I suggest Giddeus. I went farming there as a WAR/THF, pretty much the same level as the OP. The 2nd tier Yagudos drop silver beastcoins quite regularly (i.e. you're not relying on Steal's 5 minute timer), and you can desynth bead necklaces on the spot into Copper Ingots.

[Icemage]

Re: A bit of help

If you have about 14 levels of Bonecraft under your belt, there is a very quick and easy bypass.

Lightning + Cornette (Bonecraft 14 desynthesis).

NQ, HQ1 -> Brass Ingot
HQ2, HQ3 -> Bone Chip

The nice part of this is that Cornettes can be purchased from Harmodios' music shop in Bastok Markets when Bastok is in 1st or 2nd place in conquest.

It is significantly easier to do this with stacks of (usually inexpensive) lightning crystals than burning fire crystal stacks for brass ingots, and you can sell the bone chip stacks in Windurst to defray your cost.

The Brass Ingots can then be used to synth/desynth Brass Rings:
Fire + Brass Ingot x 2 -> Brass Ring (Goldsmithing 15)
Lightning + Brass Ring -> 1 or 2 Brass Ingots (Goldsmithing 15)

That gets you within shouting distance of Silver Ingots (Goldsmithing 18):
Fire + Silver Ore x 4 -> Silver Ingot

I recommend doing some Mining in a place with a lot of Silver Ore. Yughott Grotto is a simple place to mine and yields a fair amount of silver, and will give you other higher quality ores (even better if you have some Smithing skill to convert Iron Ore into Iron Ingots to save space).

Don't do beastcoins until you can't avoid it; they're usually a losing proposition unless you time the markets well.


Icemage

[dspeed]

Re: A bit of help

If you have the patient like me. I'll say farm for the items or mine them.
A good places to farm them will be Giddeus. Silver Beastcoins drop quick easily from the yagudo there. But make sure go in with a lvl 35+ char so you don't have to worry about aggro. If you're lucky and bump into an NM or two you can take it down and earn a bit more money. You can also use the yagudo necklace and trade it to the npc in Windurst wood for norg fame or if you don't want to waste space bring some lightning and earth crystals and desynth the necklace into grass thread and then syth grass thread into grass cloth. It doesn't yield much income but better than throwing them away since you're there to farm for silver beastcoin and you don't want the yagudo neck to go to waste.

Once more thing will be. If you really want to go extreme just bring with you a stack Sickle or two and harvest there too. If you're lucky and get red moko grass that should yield a pretty good amount per stack. Not sure about your server but in Remora a stack of Red Moko Grass can fetch you about 30K per stack and is not that hard to harvest.

[Kirihn]

Re: A bit of help

Wow, these are all really awesome suggestions, thanks a lot folks. What I have gone with at the moment seems to be brass ingots -> brass hairpins and then desynthing back. Only issue with this is that I tend to break quite a bit of these ingots in the process.

However, I get a skill up of .2 or .1 with nearly every ingot. At the moment I think I'm at level 12, but I may be just a few points +/-

From what I've seen the passed two days of camping the guild to keep my income flowing (copper ingots sell well on my server nearly 7K a stack most times) The Silver Ore does tend to sit there in the guild around 315-400 gil per peice.

I may attempt silver ingots from silver ore very shortly and see how I do.

Once again, thanks a lot for the information.

-Kirihn/Eji: Diabolos Server

[kiffkin]

Re: A bit of help

I'm at Goldsmithing 41 and not doing too badly at not going bankrupt so far . Here are some of my handy hints and tips.

I'd recommend getting Moghancement:Desynthesis if you're planning on going down the desynth route. The success rate will still be bad compared to synthesis, but it will reduce your chances of losing your ingredients when you break.

It's worth keeping some of those Brass Flowerpots and growing your own Fire Crystals and Lightning Crystals if you're not into gardening already. Keep any coloured stones you get for synthing into gems.

Keep an eye open for bargains at all the Auction Houses. Buy Zinc/Silver Ores for cheap (e.g. 100g for silver and up to 1000g for zinc). Mine when you can, and don't discount the usefulness of Zehrun Mines for ores. Remember that Bastok is usually more expensive than Jeuno. San d'Oria often has cheap ores and Windurst is usually the most expensive with poor choice.

Make your own ingots, and make double what you need, then sell the rest on the AH.

Find yourself a niche, or preferably several, of in demand items that you can sell for a profit. They are out there, but you'll have to find them yourself. Pretty much all of what I'm telling you is common knowledge for people who've been crafting for a while, so I'm not giving anything away. However, beyond the hint above about the ingots, you'll have to do your own market research.

You can buy Silver Earrings at the jewellers in Jeuno. Desynth them when Silver Ore is expensive. 315g for Silver Ore is your friend - I'm currently at the stage of grabbing every Mythril Ore at 1000g I can find, and it's about to get much, much more expensive. Really, 1260g+crystal per synth is incredibly cheap.

Check the goldsmithing outlets when the main shop gets expensive. The more of an item that's sold, the more expensive it will be the next day (or it just sells out). The stock resets after the guild holiday (Iceday for goldsmithing).

Check the daily guild point item lists. You may be able to make some quick cash selling items that will only be in demand for one day. Similarly, you may be able to combine your skilling up with items you can turn in for points yourself (once you get to 28).

Don't be afraid of paying for advance synthesis support.

Take your time. Sometimes everything goes right, sometimes you break every synth and never see a skill up. Some people swear by synthing at a particular day/time/moon phase/direction. Others claim this is just superstition. Ask 100 crafters how skilling up/Hqing/not breaking works and you'll get 533 different answers and a severe headache.

[Kirihn]

Re: A bit of help

You know, you bring up a good point with the whole direction thing. I've heard that you should face the direction of the constallation of the corresponding synth type in order to get the best results.

Does anyone know off the bat where the NPC that explains the constallations is in bastok?

[dspeed]

Re: A bit of help

The link that kiffkin posted with the direction of the crystal is very useful. Most of the time when I craft I face the direction that is indicated in the graph and most of the time I have better chances of skill up or successful craft.

[LyonheartLakshmi]

Re: A bit of help

Does anyone know off the bat where the NPC that explains the constallations is in bastok?

The NPC is up on the top floor of the Metalworks, lurking outside one of the consolates. Keep in mind that the constellation map it shows you is from the perspective of you looking up into the sky. So the east/west sides of the map will be on opposite sides of traditional maps (which confused me when I first studied it).