Enough with the flour already!

I haven't been on much in the past few days due to RL priorities and lack of sleep, but I managed to log in for a brief session last night. My old CatastrophyCrafters linkshell lost its leader and decided to reform as TheEternalCalm, mostly with the same members though the primary sack-holder has changed (good luck, Trumpy!).

In cooking news, progress has been slow, mostly due to lack of time. Although this craft is cheap and easy to skillup pre-60, the ingredients take some time to collect if you try to aquire as many of them as possible via NPC vendors. Since some ingredients are cheapest through regional vendors, this can take quite a bit of muling & walking to gather the 4-5 stacks of each ingredient for a good skillup session. And some items like Bird Eggs are just hard to track down unless your mules have Rank 5 and can access the Airship shops (which only sell them if that particular town won the last conquest).

A stalling point for me was the Frost Turnip ingredient for the Vegetable Gruel you need to trade in to break the skill cap at 30. No one ever owns the Valdeaunia region (not exactly an EXP area), so there was no hope of finding this on a regional vendor. There were no gruels on any of the Auction Houses when I was on, and ditto for the turnips. I was getting ready to grow a few turnips myself when, by chance, someone put a handful up for sale in Jeuno. I had probably wasted at least a day or 2 just waiting for the ingredient or the dish to turn up somewhere. Sensing a little opportunity here, I crafted a couple of extra gruels with my leftovers and auctioned them off for 8k apiece (didn't have the patience to craft more of them). I'll check later rank recipes & plan ahead before I get close to 40 and 50.

I took the Meatball recipe through 33 and NPC'd most of the product since the sales on the AH are just too slow to make the auction management time worthwhile. Using this recipe for 5 skill levels seemed interminable, because I would either run out of room about halfway through each level (since the recipe produces and entire stack for every synth), or I would run out of San D'Orian Flour which, like all flour, doesn't stack (where are the shopping carts in this game?). After dealing with Poison Flour during Alchemy skillups, I wasn't too pleased with this ingredient. Cheap? Yes. Annoying? Hell yes.

Once I hit 33, it was time for another recipe. Most people seemed to be using Pet Food Delta, which not only required yet another flour ingredient, but also included Bird Eggs. After half a level of grumbling, muling the flour, and searching for the Bird Eggs... I decided to take a look at the other recipes in range and stumbled across another opportunity for cooking/fishing synergy: Fish Broth. This is the same scenario as the Sliced Sardine recipe. Using a Sabiki Rig in Port Windurst will allow me to target Quus for fishing skillups (to 19), and Bastore Sardines for cooking skillups (to 37). The recipe caps a couple of levels lower than the pet food, but I'll take it and probably skip the pet food recipe altogether.

I look forward to fishing tonight ^_^