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[Akura]

Well, it turns out the bear guy isn't a good artifact crafter at all.

I do have two other outers with high crafting skills, one has terrible stats, the other has pretty decent stats but has also been consistently making 100-quality everything.

[Micro102]

I knew I forgot something. Yep, talismans for mood are super important.

Also did not know that even moving 1 item resets EVERYTHING...

This makes me want to play again.

Well, it turns out the bear guy isn't a good artifact crafter at all.

I do have two other outers with high crafting skills, one has terrible stats, the other has pretty decent stats but has also been consistently making 100-quality everything.

I think alchemy and artifact crafting are a mix of the crafting/medicine Stat and the magic Stat. So if you don't have good magic, you don't get good either of those.

[Akura]

Turns out I had to actually put points into his artifact crafting skill. After 9 points, his skill is 32. Probably could be better, but I don't have better available.

On the plus side, a random manual from a dug-up casket gave me the locations for everywhere on Mt. Shu, including Gemspring Cave - I now have a semi-reliable source of Earth Flux. My main cultivator(True Sun, Luck a little over 5.0) seems to be getting one about 50% of the time.

What's a good way to recharge Qi? I don't have an alchemist(yet, working on it), so other than cramming down spirit stones, I don't see a way to easily recharge cultivators with >30k qi.

[Micro102]

There is a breathing manual and some Qi regen pills. Also, I just remembered that there is a mod out there somewhere that makes the skill levels displayed in a more reasonable way. Before the mod it just shows how skilled your character is at something, however that skill is based off stats like INT and PER. The mod shows the innate talent, which is much harder to raise. So it's best to pick people with high talent in magic and crafting, so they give high artifact crafting skill after becoming cultivators, and then you can boost your stats to ramp up the skill.

[lemon10]

Well, it turns out the bear guy isn't a good artifact crafter at all.

I do have two other outers with high crafting skills, one has terrible stats, the other has pretty decent stats but has also been consistently making 100-quality everything.

You need two things for a good crafter: 1) Good magic crafting, 2) Good artisan.
Your crafting skill determines your success chance (and quality to some degree?) and artisan is a large part of the end quality.
Thus any good crafter needs both.
Magic crafting power is based entirely off the skill *rank* (aka, /20) instead of skill level. This means that stats (con, perception, ect) don't matter, so if you just look at skill a crafter with 30 skill (and like 6 ranks) can end up having worse magic crafting then one with 10 skill (and like 15 ranks) but trash stats.

You can also raise crafting rank by having them craft a bunch of stuff. For cultivators this doesn't really work because you aren't going to have them pump out thousands of artifacts, but you can raise mortal medicine (aka, alchemy)/or crafting (magic crafting) skills by grinding a ton.

Of course (as always with this godamn game) there are other stuff that matter.

Spoiler: Stuff that matters for quality calculations that you wouldn't realize (click to show/hide)

A happier cultivator is a better crafter; pristine mental state (95+) is a pretty huge boost.
Luck and Feng Shui both matter. More luck=more random and bad Feng Shui=more random. More random is typically good since it gives you a higher max quality even if it means that more of them will be trash.
More qi in the item makes a difference, but this is really hard to mess with since stuff slowly gains qi over time and the difference in amount required is exponential (1 million is +4 and 40k is +2). Still worth it though to check the item has a decent amount of Qi does make a significant difference to item tier. (You can stick your stuff to be made into artifacts into their own qi gathering arrays, but this is super slow and typically not worth it).

Spoiler: A very in depth post by Sirian on the exact mechanics of what determines skill level (click to show/hide)

Hey so I just noticed, the skill values on the work schedule don't always properly reflect how good someone really is. I went digging in my outer's stats and sure enough, someone might have a lower mining skill but have higher mining yield (which is what I'm really interested in when picking my miner). Skill seems to raise speed first, and yield a distant second. Same with farming, crafting, butchering, etc..., and tools only seem to increase speed (except perhaps for the acupuncture needles).

Some traits might also mess with things further, for instance "Gifted Artist" seems to double the effect of "Artisanry", which itself gives a boost to the final quality of items. A "Meticulous" character on the other hand, had a boost to the initial quality range of crafted items, which is related to the "Crafting" skill. And I'm pretty sure that the "Craftsman" trait (not to confuse with the background story) also gives a substantial bonus.

This, on a tangent, made me curious about how each stat increased ability, and after some testing, most of them aren't straightforward, so here it is :

Mining 50% PER, 50% CON
Farming 70% PER, 30% CON
Construction 100% CON
Crafting 50% PER, 20% INT, 30% LUK
Social 100% CHA
Artisanry 40% PER, 60% INT
Cooking 60% PER, 40% CON
Medecine 60% PER, 40% INT
Battle 40% PER, 20% INT, 40% LUK
Qi sense 60% CON, 40% INT

As for Magic and Magic Crafting, it's 100% concentrated power of will... errr I mean they're only correlated to skill level, and cap at 50.

[Edit] Also stars (passionate/obsessed) increase the base skill level as if you had trained the skill, which is always a nice bonus on skills that you can't actually train, but won't help if you're at 20/20.

[Micro102]

Hmmmm, I probably shouldn't be trying to give detailed advice based off 2 year old memories.

[lemon10]

Hmmmm, I probably shouldn't be trying to give detailed advice based off 2 year old memories.

I could be wrong on how crafting converts to artifact crafting btw, its been a few years for me as well.

And there has even been new info found out in that time, for instance nobody knew the exact mechanics behind the artifact crafting stuff (eg. they thought luck was just flat out good) or that some of them existed at all (eg. nobody was making V. Ominous crafting rooms).

The wiki is also a hell of a lot better then it used to be, you could probably get enough info off it to play the game without ever having to go to the discord even (although you should probably go there anyways).

[IronyOwl]

What's a good way to recharge Qi? I don't have an alchemist(yet, working on it), so other than cramming down spirit stones, I don't see a way to easily recharge cultivators with >30k qi.

Spirit stones, spirit crystals, and qi regen pills are all cheap if you can make them (IIRC spirit crystals require 10 ranks in alchemy, so...). I believe qi gather items boost qi regen, so if you can persuade your cultivators to sit in a cultivation room or put a stand with some spirit wood/stone essence next to their bed/recreation spot that should help. IIRC there's a specific miracle to "go gather qi at target location," but I've never tried it out. There's also a miracle to slurp the qi out of an item, but I can't imagine that being all that useful for large numbers.

What I want to know about is stamina. A few of my cultivators keep running out and nothing I do seems to help. I had one on both stamina and ginseng pills and still couldn't tell if it was working, spirit dew is way too rare to rely on (there's like four tiles of spirit soil on my map total), and stamina boosting food seems to be pretty rare.

You can also raise crafting rank by having them craft a bunch of stuff. For cultivators this doesn't really work because you aren't going to have them pump out thousands of artifacts, but you can raise mortal medicine (aka, alchemy)/or crafting (magic crafting) skills by grinding a ton.

You're not supposed to be able to gain levels in alchemy/magic crafting stats through experience post-ascension, but I swear I got a message about it happening once. Maybe it's still tracking medicine/crafting xp behind the scenes and incrementing accordingly?

Speaking of which, as far as I can tell existing skill levels count for attainment costs. That is, a cultivator with 18 artifact crafting skill fresh out the gate gained +4 attainment per point (IIRC), as if he had purchased rather than inherited those ranks.

Of course (as always with this godamn game) there are other stuff that matter.

I've been obsessing over artifact crafting mechanics on the wiki and goddamn is it weird.

Spoiler: Good Luck! Except good luck increases your rate of failure, because... (click to show/hide)

Success rate is pretty simple: +10% per skill level, -40% per item tier. Baseline success rate is 90%.

I think.

Tier is where it gets weird, because there's these long elaborate compounded equations that get compared to a table, which means there's wide swathes of improvement or loss that don't hit the next breakpoint and thus don't matter.

Specifically: Randomly get a number between ({[Luck] + [Crafting Table Feng Shui]} * 10) and ({[Luck] + [Crafting Table Feng Shui]} * -5), divide by 100, add to 1. I find it easiest to treat these as a "High" and "Low" result and calculate them separately.

Once you've got your random number, it's simply a matter of:

High Result = [Item Qi] * (0.5 + {0.05 * [Artifact Crafting Skill]} + [Artifact Crafting Grade Bonus from Manuals]) * 3 * (1 + {0.1 * ([Luck] + [Crafting Table Feng Shui])})

Low Result = [Item Qi] * (0.5 + {0.05 * [Artifact Crafting Skill]} + [Artifact Crafting Grade Bonus from Manuals]) * 3 * (1 + {-0.5 * ([Luck] + [Crafting Table Feng Shui])})

Then you compare that to:

ItemQi	TierBonus
0	+0
1500	+1
15000	+2
40000	+3
90000	+4
1 million	+5
2 million	+6
3 million	+7
4 million	+8

So for instance, if we have a pristine crafter with 5 Luck, 10 ranks in Artifact Crafting, working on an Auspicious (ie spirit stone because it's everywhere and we didn't realize it mattered) Crafting Table, we get:

High Result = [Item Qi] * 1.0 * 3 * 1.8  =  [Item Qi] * 5.4
Low Result = [Item Qi] * 1.0 * 3 * 0.6  =  [Item Qi] * 1.8

Glancing back up at our table, we realize this isn't going to matter for more than a tier's difference, and even then not all the time; an item with 500 Qi will get +1 a little over half the time; 1000 to 2500 Qi in it is guaranteed to get +1 to its tier no matter how (un)lucky we get here; an item with 8,000 qi will almost always get +2, but barely scrape down to +1 or up to +3 now and then.

Glancing back up at our equations, we're not sure what to do about this. We can accumulate more qi in an item to a point, but with breakpoints like these that's a very meticulous project. Each rank in Artifact Crafting boosts the total number by 5%, which is good but definitely inching forward. We can adjust our table for gambling mode (and hey, gotta farm anguish soul gems somewhere), but that's still only a ~50% boost (in effective qi, not bonus tiers!) for the very best items, and at the cost of a lot more of them falling flat.

Oh and I forgot to mention that base artifact tier is base item tier, because of course I'd go for a page and half of algebra forgetting to specify one of the basics. So if you've got the crafter qi just using fancier items is the other obvious solution here. Which brings us to specter refinement! Yaaaaay...

[Folly]

IIRC there's a specific miracle to "go gather qi at target location," but I've never tried it out.

Meditation.
This Miracle can be scary, because the description says it consumes lifespan. However, it consumes at an extremely slow rate. A single low-ranking lifespan-extending consumable will add more years than you're likely to consume in an entire playthrough using Meditate constantly, so don't worry about it too much.

[lemon10]

What's a good way to recharge Qi? I don't have an alchemist(yet, working on it), so other than cramming down spirit stones, I don't see a way to easily recharge cultivators with >30k qi.

Spirit stones, spirit crystals, and qi regen pills are all cheap if you can make them (IIRC spirit crystals require 10 ranks in alchemy, so...). I believe qi gather items boost qi regen, so if you can persuade your cultivators to sit in a cultivation room or put a stand with some spirit wood/stone essence next to their bed/recreation spot that should help. IIRC there's a specific miracle to "go gather qi at target location," but I've never tried it out. There's also a miracle to slurp the qi out of an item, but I can't imagine that being all that useful for large numbers.

The spiritual breath chant (the "go to area and suck up qi") miracle is super fast and basically *the* way to do it. You can regenerate like 8k per second without putting a lot of work into it.

It multiplies your qi regen rate by a massive amount based on the amount of qi in the tile, so it works better in areas with lots of qi (middle of qi arrays) or if you are taking qi regen pills.

It also sucks up qi from the local tile, so after a while the amount you get goes down. Even with that though, its by far the best way to regain qi. Although note that since it sucks up qi from the tile you probably don't want to do a GC breakthrough there or anything.

You're not supposed to be able to gain levels in alchemy/magic crafting stats through experience post-ascension, but I swear I got a message about it happening once. Maybe it's still tracking medicine/crafting xp behind the scenes and incrementing accordingly?

Ah. Yeah, you can't increase it as a inner, thats how it works. (Aside from a loophole where if a cultivator is temporarily mortal they can increase their skill levels).

Speaking of which, as far as I can tell existing skill levels count for attainment costs. That is, a cultivator with 18 artifact crafting skill fresh out the gate gained +4 attainment per point (IIRC), as if he had purchased rather than inherited those ranks.

Ugh. Annoying if true.

I might have to do some searching to figure out if that's true.

What I want to know about is stamina. A few of my cultivators keep running out and nothing I do seems to help. I had one on both stamina and ginseng pills and still couldn't tell if it was working, spirit dew is way too rare to rely on (there's like four tiles of spirit soil on my map total), and stamina boosting food seems to be pretty rare.

Eat resin powder too (you can just buy it off the SSS sect).
Also note that high equilibrium (which I think you get from qi absorbtion efficency) is bad since it slows down the rate at which they gain stamina and consume food. So if your dude has it at max then they will gain stamina really slow.

Meditation.
This Miracle can be scary, because the description says it consumes lifespan. However, it consumes at an extremely slow rate. A single low-ranking lifespan-extending consumable will add more years than you're likely to consume in an entire playthrough using Meditate constantly, so don't worry about it too much.

Nah, meditation is to increase cultivation speed and gain max qi, not to increase qi regen speed.
Mostly its unneeded since cultivation speed is super fast with a good amount of boosts.

The only time its really needed would be for stuff like cauldron filling or bizzare stuff like intentionally increasing your age.

[Micro102]

Yep, I decided started to play again, and saw my mod list so i decided to post it here as I'm someone who tends to try and stick to the vanilla game but I find these to be indispensable.

Elysium: Automates cultivation based on mood so you don't have to check ally our cultivators every 5 minutes.

Skill level in recruitment: because it's bullshit that you can't know what they are good at

Numeric Descriptions: Gives more details to the rather vague descriptions of manuals.

Show law stats: to avoid having to go back and forth between the law screen and the character screen when looking for what stats are missing.

[IronyOwl]

Also note that high equilibrium (which I think you get from qi absorbtion efficency) is bad since it slows down the rate at which they gain stamina and consume food. So if your dude has it at max then they will gain stamina really slow.

GAH, I was intentionally increasing that hoping it'd boost stamina gain! What's the point if it doesn't, let alone at the cost of making things worse?

Clearing out SSS's larders it is.

[lemon10]

I think the point was that it was supposed to be a good thing in that it meant that your dudes didn't need to eat as often and would use less food resources. It probably is also supposed to represent immortals that never need to eat and can meditate for ten thousand years without moving, ect.

In practice its a trap that can effectively ruin your cults by slowing their cultivation speed down by a literal order of magnitude, being worse the better your cultivation stuff for them is.

[Akura]

Slightly odd occurrence just now. Got attacked by a bear. Battle music and everything. Except it was just a normal bear. Quickly shot down by a normal guy, and the music stopped.

Then the merchant showed up. Then almost immediately after, three demon tigers showed up. At least I had two inners and the dog to fight them, the only damage they did was chew a bit of the guest room up.

[lemon10]

Yeah, you can get three events really close to each other (due to the triple event setting), that's just how it works.

It can end really poor where like three squads of dudes drop out one after the other.