Crafting; Misc. Info & Spreadsheet

[RKenshin]

In between extracting aether and leveling crafts (yeah, that gives a ton of free time), I ended up making a spreadsheet for myself that others may find helpful and/or could be built into something useful for everyone. I know its made things a LOT easier for me.

As you may or may not have had some experience with so far, the crafting in this game can be rather complex. How many of what ingredients do I need to make this (ie: random hauberk = 8 large plates, 6 medium plates, 11 wire, is err.. how many ore?), how much does it cost, what can be profitable/most profitable... yaddaya.

So rather than continuing to buy a completely random amount of ingredients and just shooting in the wind and making whatever I could, and hoping I saved/made money, I made a spreadsheet for it a few weeks back. It made things so much easier. It looks like this (edit: I've since made a few spreadsheets):

Alchemy:
http://img23.imageshack.us/img23/9185/ffxi597.th.jpg
Armorsmith:
http://img34.imageshack.us/img34/8189/ffxi595.th.jpg
Cooking:
http://img691.imageshack.us/img691/6158/ffxi613.th.jpg
Tailoring:
http://img44.imageshack.us/img44/5199/ffxi596.th.jpg

I never really had the intentions of putting it in public so its a bit of a mess. I originally just made it as an easy way to get the exact number of ingredients I'd need for 5 synths of X and 3 synths of Y, but it works well for monitoring profit/loss too among many other little things.

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Spreadsheet Info

1. What does the spreadsheet represent?

The mats, costs, and profits of some common/popular recipes in crafting.

Typically when I use one of the spreadsheets, I update the prices to match the current prices of the gear on auction as well as the mats I purchased. Then I put in the number of synths I want to do to figure out the number of mats I'd need, or figure out how many synths of what I can do with what I have available. It can be used for a lot more as well (best profit recipes, etc).

2. What fields can I change?

Fields you can change/edit are colored with a red font. Just about everything in other color fonts are a calculated fields.

3. What table means what? (IE: Armorsmith)

Mats: A list of the potential materials needed for the synths on that sheet, as well as the current prices of those materials on auction/NPC. In addition it lists the number of which material is needed for the desired number of synths, which is entered into the Synth Plans & History table. Only price fields for base mats can be changed.

Recipe: Amount of which material a recipe for a piece of gear takes. All can be changed or omitted without messing with other equations.

Cost Data: Per Item Synth: All of the cost info for each piece of gear, and the amount of average profit (if any) made on a single synth. The NQ/HQ Sale fields can be changed to represent the selling prices of the NQ/HQ items on your server.

Synth Plans & History: Here is where you enter the number of synths of what item you want to do. By default I have 5 attempts of every piece, which is what you would theoretically have to do to make yourself a full HQ set. I also keep the history here, where the number of trials reflects the number of total synths made with an item, as well as the number of HQ.

Cost Data: For All Synths: Using the number of trials from the previous table, this table shows the total costs, total sales, and total profit made (or, money saved) from the synth history.

Recipe2 & Titanium Acid: Just an extra two tables used as part of the equations for the other tables, to simplify the complexity of the equations used in the cells. Nothing you really would need to change or worry about.


If anyone has a set of recipes that they'd like to have a spreadsheet for, post them and I'll try and upload one with the changes. Otherwise it's pretty easy to change, the formula and design isn't all that complex. Ultimately I'm aiming to level quite a few crafts so I wouldn't mind remaking the spreadsheet though, since I'd likely use it down the line.

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Note: This was a point of some confusion by my poor choice of words, and rather than update all the sheets just to change the text of one box I'm making a note about it here.

Craft#' is meant to represent the number of a product you wish to make; not the number of crafts you wish to do. What that basically means is if you wish to make 36 Grilled Aether Steaks, in actuality you're crafting 18 times (since you get 2 products per craft). Thus, if you enter 36 in the appropriate area in the Craft# row, the #needed for all of the mats will reflect how many you'd need for 18 crafts.

The same applies for potions, in that if you enter 300 in the field, you'll be given the materials needed for 100 crafts (since you get 3 products per craft). Same for scrolls (500 craft# = #needed of mats for 100 crafts), etc.
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Other Misc. Crafting Info

While on the topic of crafting, some stuff I've picked up on that you may or may not have already read/know about:

1. Number of levels above the recipe appears to have no effect on your chance to proc HQ, just effects whether or not you fail. Keep in mind that on a HQ proc, you have two chances to fail. So you should try to be at least 10 levels above the recipe you're making. I've found that being 10 above the level pretty much puts you close to never failing, or at least I haven't yet.

2. Base HQ-rate is about 20% on the recipes I've tried thus far. This seems to vary between armor, manastones, and food (20%, 15%, 15%).

3. Rumor is DP effects proc rate (on at least some recipes). If this were to be the case, I'd wager that level 3 DP appears to add about 5% to that HQ-rate, making it rather noticeable. This is just from my experiences (not large enough of a sample to say anything concrete).

4. Costumes have no 'success' animation, so if you have to do a large amount of crafting... wear a costume. It cuts a very small amount of time off of your synth animation, but it can really add up over hundreds of them. I personally use the frightcorn one often, they're like 150-200g a piece. There are also costumes that last for an hour and are cheap, but don't recall the name.

5. You can get so much done while crafting/gathering! I made this post and the spreadsheet while doing it, among a shitton of other things. <.<

Feel free to add any of your own experiences, or anything you'd like to see in the in the spreadsheet/any questions, etc.

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EDIT1 10/23/2009: Armorsmith sheet now includes the level 33/38 Adamantium armor, and also have a tailoring sheet with level 23/28 Twisp.
EDIT2 10/25/2009: Fixed armorsmith equation, it wasn't updating the # of titanium ore needed properly.
EDIT3 11/15/2009: Alchemy table added.
EDIT4 11/28/2009: Cooking table added, armorsmith table updated (profit calculation more accurate).
EDIT5 12/10/2009: Note made to clarify the design of how the #needed/craft# fields work.

[Zanz L. Barre The 3rd]

Outta' left field.

[RKenshin]

Boo. I scare ya?


(Not like I'd never make a post again if it wasn't about FF!)

[Abandon]

Totally didn't see this coming, lol, but thanks for the information.

[Pyree]

If you fail a HQ craft, you still receive the NQ result.

[Aevis]

can somewhat confirm point nr.1. 10 levels above the synth level won't make you fail or if it does, it must be <1%. i've never failed so far (170 handi, 140 cooking, 74 alchemy) if i was 10+ levels above the synth.

i copy pasted this incl. reference to my legions board btw. hope that's ok with you.

[Chun Liroy]

I love Rukenshin, have my babies plz

[Syntex]

4. Costumes have no 'success' animation, so if you have to do a large amount of crafting... wear a costume. It cuts a very small amount of time off of your synth animation, but it can really add up over hundreds of them. I personally use the frightcorn one often, they're like 150-200g a piece. There are also costumes that last for an hour and are cheap, but don't recall the name.

I found this to be the most interesting part since I craft about 500 synths a day with alchemy.

[Purrrfect]

I've crafted 2 trades to 250 and a few others in the 100s and not once have I ever failed a craft that I was 10 levels over. It may require more than 10 later on, I dunno. When actually making something and shooting for HQ I go for 11 over just incase some math gets wonky about the +10 and all, but I've never failed a HQ either. When I first started making armors after release I was saving up 4k DP as I had read that before and for a session or 2 I was easily at 1 in 3 HQ rate. I have since dropped off a bit unfortunately, and on my new character I've made after switching servers my rate is fucking horrible, like 1 in 7-10 crafts. Damn random numbers.

[Pyree]

Also, does anyone else notice that you don't always seem to lose the correct number of items when crafting? I buy items for work orders in large quantities, enough to complete 8-10 work orders, and when I'm done there's usually an item that I still have one or two of left, and I was never rewarded it from any work order. It seems like it doesn't always take all of my materials like it should, but I never pay enough attention when I'm crafting to witness this actually happen.

[Koga]

@Pyree - I do the same thing with my Work Orders but usually everything is spot on unless I get some extra from the reward from it. Currently only at 200 Handicrafting though. It could be tradeskill dependent though?

I thought I noticed something like that when doing alchemy.
It's also possible, I suppose, that just like you can't HQ certain items, that some items lose all the mats and some have a chance to only lose some of the mats?

I would at least hope for that anyways... Some of the 400+ Handicrafting recipes call for some heftily priced items.

[Gwynplaine]

Great work thanks. I'm doing armorsmithing too. I have a hard time investing so much thought into mmo crafting. It seems not worthwhile for me personally. My only general plan was to gather several hundred ores for every 100th stage and then crank out work orders for recipes and ingots/mats.

And that is some damn fine spreadsheet color-scheming. Mmm yeah.

[arus2001]

I've noticed the "not lose everything" while working on my crafts, too. Anyway, where can the costumes be bought?

[Gwynplaine]

Anyway, where can the costumes be bought?

There's probably a cheap npc type somewhere but idk. Look on TB under food, any of the various candies have costume effects. Or I guess if you cook make them yourself.

[Fallyn]

Ok I don't know if this should be here, but I thought i'd try it finally. I'll post what I made, what lvl, what synth etc. and DP amount and maybe we can get some numbers?

4000 DP:
Armorsmithing 190
Worthy Titanium Breastplate (p150): 1/1 HQ
Worthy Titanium Plate Pauldrons (p130): 1/1 HQ
Worthy Titanium Helm (p140): 0/2 HQ

[Syntex]

Ok I don't know if this should be here, but I thought i'd try it finally. I'll post what I made, what lvl, what synth etc. and DP amount and maybe we can get some numbers?

4000 DP:
Armorsmithing 190
Worthy Titanium Breastplate (p150): 1/1 HQ
Worthy Titanium Plate Pauldrons (p130): 1/1 HQ
Worthy Titanium Helm (p140): 0/2 HQ

Small sample size which can't confirm anything.

We need like 1000 synths of something that has a HQ synth that can be done at 4k dp and 0dp to really see some results.

[Pyree]

0 DP
Armorsmithing Lv299
Worthy Durable Adamantium Guantlets (p270): 1/1 HQ
Worthy Titanium Plate Pauldrons (p130): 0/1 HQ
Worthy Titanium Guantlets (p120): 0/1 HQ

[Fallyn]

Small sample size which can't confirm anything.

We need like 1000 synths of something that has a HQ synth that can be done at 4k dp and 0dp to really see some results.

I didn't say just what I did will help, I said I would post my results every time I craft something with HQ involved.

But, looks like it's not needed and I wont bother.

[Syntex]

I didn't say just what I did will help, I said I would post my results every time I craft something with HQ involved.

But, looks like it's not needed and I wont bother.

The point I was trying to make is that HQ is like flipping a coin with just one side showing up a lot less then the others.

If you flip a coin 3 times then the next day do it again, and again and they all come up heads did you really prove anything? Again if your using different coins that could also change the results.

When doing this we need lots of synths of the same type because I doubt you will be making 100 or so of those plate leggings or whatnot so anything with that sample size regarding DP is too small to test 1-5% increase which is what is rumored to be going around.

The best way to test isn't with the big investment synths but the cheap ones like leather boards that can HQ into a green/blue and then do 200+ in one sitting and see where we stand at the end.

Things to consider are time of day in-game, DP, your current level, your craft level, your buffs, any specific items that might apply like the cooking hat while cooking and anything else you can think of. Some of this stuff may sound silly but its how we determine what does and does not help or hurt your crafting.

[Fallyn]

The point I was trying to make is that HQ is like flipping a coin with just one side showing up a lot less then the others.

If you flip a coin 3 times then the next day do it again, and again and they all come up heads did you really prove anything? Again if your using different coins that could also change the results.

When doing this we need lots of synths of the same type because I doubt you will be making 100 or so of those plate leggings or whatnot so anything with that sample size regarding DP is too small to test 1-5% increase which is what is rumored to be going around.

The best way to test isn't with the big investment synths but the cheap ones like leather boards that can HQ into a green/blue and then do 200+ in one sitting and see where we stand at the end.

Things to consider are time of day in-game, DP, your current level, your craft level, your buffs, any specific items that might apply like the cooking hat while cooking and anything else you can think of. Some of this stuff may sound silly but its how we determine what does and does not help or hurt your crafting.

Yeah, I understand.