Craftaholics Anonymous/Guide

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Crafting: The Addiction
So, you want to craft? Of course you do. Crafting appears to be a way to make gil or even make the gear you need for leveling. But is it? Crafting can be very frustrating, though, because there are numerous recipes and guilds. Hard to keep track. You won't be making anything too significant for quite awhile.

The city you start in may play a large role in which craft you are going to skill. Fortunately, the creatures outside the city are often just what you need to level the craft whose guilds are in your city.

The great thing about crafting is you can craft anywhere and anytime. Especially when you get frustrated with xp'ing. Then there are those of us who can become so addicted to crafting that we forego leveling. ( I have for about 4 months at a time.)

My advice to all you future craftaholics as you embark on a craft: pick one and stick to it. To make headway, don't pick too many crafts at once. Trying to do too many crafts at one time can lead you to spending the next few years getting your crafts up.


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Craftamentals: The Foundations of Synthesis
Becoming a craftaholic starts in learning the basics of elements. Elements form what might resemble a ring of six snakes, each biting the tail of the one in front of it. These are six of the existing eight elements. The other two rest in the middle, dividing the ring’s interior: top and bottom.

You can certainly craft a long time never working with this elemental chart and without understanding how the elements dominate one another. Outside of crafting you may begin to touch on elemental dominance in order to apply the appropriate spells to kill mobs, since that is also the same methodology of one element being weak to another element.

As a craftaholic you will want to memorize this ring of dominance and understand how it is an all-pervading system. It is not just a cute picture – it is your ‘everything’ as a crafter in Final Fantasy. Perhaps when you get a super high craft you may go willy nilly and ignore the fundamentals, but really it is there for a reason. Understand it and it will propel your forward much faster then without.



To remember them I use this saying: FI - WE - TWa (FIGH-WEE-TWO-AH)  Fire > Ice > Wind > Earth > Thunder > Water 

Which corresponds to:  N > NE > SE > S > SW > NW 

The elements also make their appearance in the weekly calendar

>>>>>>>

A common acronym is FEW WILL Die but having used that I could never remember what W and L it was to come next

Try this instead:  FE-Wa-WI Ling-LiD (FEE-WA-WHY LING-LID)

These acornymistic phrases are supposed to be nonsensical enough that you remember cause they are strange.

The issue I find with these elements is because light and dark are taken out of the ring – in a very yin/yang way – the six elements are distributed oddly in terms of the cardinal directions. Here is where my guide will rub people the wrong way. According to the chart – which is provided in each city – there is no elements for E and W. If you do some searching online and even here in wiki, you will find recommendations for synthing while facing E and W.  As we go along, I will give you my contrary opinion and why. But before we go there this brings us to the next topic: {|width="100%" cellpadding="5" cellspacing="2"|
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Facing: Let's Face It
Facing - the next topic. An elemental chart within the game places the elements in very specific directions.Logically it could be said if you face the direction of an element then something is bound to happen. As you might discover, regardless of which direction you face, synthesis happens and synthesis fails. Facing, as I call it, is one way of boosting your odds of success. There are a number of way s to theoretically boost your odds and I will go into those later.

The basic theory of facing is – face in the direction of the element you are using.

Like I said this is not a crucial thing. If the recipe you are working on is within three levels of your current craft skill, then it is not gonna matter what direction you face. I feel facing matters when you are trying to level and synth recipes greater than three levels above your craft skill. Facing doesn’t necessarily guarantee but I feel it makes a difference. If you using facing, weekday, moon cycle, synth support, and mogenhancement then you can do some serious skill advancement in a short period of time with minimal loss. This is why I call myself a craftaholic – I actually give a flying turd about these subtleties. Advanced facing goes even further and suggests that if you face in the directions of the dominating or dominated element, relating to what you are crafting with, then you can either increase your odds of HQ or Skill Up. We can get into that later and you can certainly find other people’s opinions on that topic here in wiki. I’ll eventually link to them, but for now I am just typing this all out.

Because I didn’t like the available graphics I made one of my own - ya gotta love photoshop.

This Elemental Dominance chart points out the basics you find in the chart from the game, which notably is a pain in the ass because you cannot screen capture it. I will make some other graphics as I go on, but this one lets you see the element, its color approximation and within the little arrow you see what direction it dominates to. So you see there is a NE in the Fire Elements arrow. This is useful as we get into more advanced topic. If you think I should put the directions in for the elements let me know in the page talk section. {|width="100%" cellpadding="5" cellspacing="2"|
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Skill-Up: Accelerated Crafting
For the beginning crafter it is important to know that you can synth recipes within about three levels of your current craft skill. Your success rate is gonna be real high. As you try recipes beyond three levels your fail rate increases significantly. Skilling up your craft depends on a number of factors. You will skill up more frequently with recipes beyond 3 levels of your craft skill, which means you are gonna fail more often. So the increased skill-up potential is countered with increased loss. You can address your loss by using furniture. The right furniture will give you mogenhancement for that particular element. That mogenhacement means you will lose your ingredients less often when you fail. To increase your success you can get synth support from a guild member. Your ability to skill stays the same while your success rate increases. Advanced support – the support that costs -gives you +3 and plain support – the supports that is free - gives you +1.
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Guarenteed Gil: NPC Sales
Everyone who crafts or farms dreams of making the big sale on AH. This venture could itself been seen as a game within the game. Determining the items and prices, catching the market as demand increases and supply goes down. Without crafting this can be a challenge. With crafting it can be your own personal hell. Especially starting out when you a relegated to making low level products that sell on AH for barely what it cost you to make them. At some point you have to suck it up and take the loss in order to level your crat skill. Everyone once in a awhile in each craft you will find an item that you can make where you can eaither buy the ingredients super cheap, there is some ridiculously generous mob drop rate or an NPC sells them affordably. Many of these type of recipes produces a large number: x4 x6 x8 x12 x33 ... and so on. The best case scenario is some npc will buy it from you and you will make a profit. Selling to a NPC has the wonderful benifit that there is now waiting for something to sell. Instant pay back. I hope, in the consequent pages to this guide point to some of the more obvious items that can be made affordably and sold at a profit. One I might mention would be Bug Broth. This item is my gil salvation. It can turn 1000 gil into 3000 gil, if all work in my favor - namely those favors begin that I farmed out the water crystals, AH sells stacks of shell bug for 1k or less (prefering 400gil) and the lugworm comes from some npc at about 14g a piece. Depending on your fame this sale price can be around 105 for a bug broth. The Math: shellbug(41gil) + Lugworm(14gil) + Water Crystal(free) = 4 bug broth  so each costs approximately 13.75 gil each - which in turn sells to NPC for 105 gil. No algebra needed to see that is one heck of a profit. Even if you pay for water crystals you are making money. This recipe and others like are guarenteed gil, albeit they do require the time of getting ingredients and making them and selling them. I have a mule in sandy that I usually send gil to and buy the shell bugs there. My cook taru in windy stays in waters, picking up deliveries and heading over to the general merchant npc in waters that sells lugworm. I can stand in the shop making bug broth for hours. Turning gil into larger and larger piles. It isn't gratification like selling a big item on AH, but it is guarenteed income so you can buy other ingredients to feed your craftaholicism.

Non-Multi-Craft Recipes
As you migh notice people make all sorts of guides for individual crafting. This guide is unique in that it assumes everyone is dabbling in a few crafts. Sometimes guides are misleading because an individual already has multiple crats leveled and the recipes they are encourage being made a multicraft recipes. Which isn't gonna help those of us with only one or two crafts. So I am embarking on supporting us craftaholics by making up lists of single craft recipes so you know exactly what you can and can't do, hopefully before you sink gil into ingredients. I am trying to create the tables in color coding by crystal to give you an idea of what elements the crafts are heavy in. I have completed the first list Simple Craft Recipes Levels 1 - 10 May this be of benefit and if, by chance you see I left some single craft, non key item recipe out holler so we can get it on the list.

I can't do what? Guilding restrictions
- Understanding how there are limits on how far ou can take secodary crafts when you get past level 60 on your favorite craft.

Shout about it
- Don't be shy - if you can't make it pay someone else to do it. How to get things for guild requests you can;t otherwise make. The cheaper way then paying AH prices.

And yet more will come, but that is off the top of my head.