Wark! Wark! ("Chocobo Talk" for crafting stinks!)

I came to the realization long ago that crafting is a pain in the butt. At one time many many moons ago I thought I would be a blacksmith. I crafted, and crafted, and crafted piles of useless crap. Arrowheads, subligar, greaves. Low level stuff that no one ever wanted, and half the time I'd just attempt to desynth the materials back to try and get something of value back. Every now and then I'd hit an item I could profit off of. Turning Iron Ingots into Iron Sheets could net a 10k profit per stack, 5k if I had to buy the crystals. Then, of course, SE added a tax that is paid to Jeuno shortly after I reached this level. So I pressed on, and finally made it to the Darksteel stage of blacksmithing.

Eventually RMT's started to realize you could make 100k+ by turning a stack of Darksteel Ingots into Darksteel Sheets. Soon after I saw the same people in Palborough Mines and Oldton Movapolos... synthing DS Ingots right there on the spot. Prices started to climb, and profit started to dwindle. Ingots are more useful than sheets, and eventually the price of ingots matched the price of sheets. So long profits... Then finally the straw that broke the camel's back. IGE's Christmas blowout. Stacks of DS Ingots jumped from 400k to 800k in mere days. People tried buying up everything they could get their grubby little paws on because they thought with all this newly bought gil, hell they'll level up smithing! Seeing as I capped my smithing at 55 synthing DS Ingots from DS Ore, I threw in the towel. Sheets were now less than ingots (wtf) and getting from 55-80 just went from 5M to 10M+so I just gave up and/or gave in. I still garden on my mule which yields me elemental ore, but it takes 3-4 weeks to grow and usually yields about 1M-2M each harvest. It's a nice payoff, but takes quite some time (and some luck) to make gil from gardening.

So a few months went by, SE countered with their gil capping delivery box idea, and they deleted 30 billion in RMT mules. Prices dropped some, but not to what they were at or should be at. So a week or so ago I started thinking... "What am I gonna do to make income? I know I can cook on my mule but my main really has only 1 craft". I started up fishing my first 3 months in the game, got it to 13 and then I hit some kind of wall. Its at 13.3 currently... I leveled Leather up to 13 as well so that I could make some Smithing things that required a leather base. Then there was "The Aquarium Disaster of '05". They released fresh and saltwater aquariums during an event. I had someone craft my saltwater aquarium which was awesome (until I got hacked into last August and it was stolen).

To make the simple Goldfish bowl you needed Woodworking 10/Smithing 4/Achemy 7. Well after spending nearly 10 hours farming, synthing, and getting ready for my synthesis, I got this:

Critical failure! All right!

It would seem that crafting and Goro are a dish best served seperatly. So last week I decided that I would take up Chocobo Digging! I did a lot of reading about it and it seems like it can be profitable, you just have to put mind-numbing hours into "leveling it up" and be kind of lucky since there are many "high level" diggers that can clean a zone out in minutes. I got Eviljoker to synth me some Chocobo gear (+1 gloves!) and I've pumped about 75 atcks Gyshal Greens into it so far. From the reading I've don it can take up to 10,000 stacks to max out digging and around 4,000 stacks to start to get your profit rolling in. I'm at 75 stacks... The profit isn't really there yet. My average run is:

Chocobo: ~350g

Gyshal Greens: 5,628 (67gx12 = 804g per stack x 7 stacks)

5,978g

Average return:

12 Pebbles: 3,000g

10 Bone Chips: ~4,000g

4 Tin Ore: 200g

1 Wind Crystal: 300g

7,500g

Now these are average estimates which are modest at best. You can clearly see I don't get much of any type of return on investment really but that is to be expected in the first 1/3rd of any type of craft. So if you see me running around Vana'diel on choco for hours, know that I am not lost, I'm just out wasting time and breaking even with my money. Wark! Wark!

I leave you with one of the funniest (and possibly insulting) pictures I may have ever taken. A taru on chocobo got bored while we waited at the Yuhtunga zone for our 6th person and decided to show me how they make taru-sized chocobos... Enjoy.