Artisan Archive

As a supplier of animal resources to an armorsmith, let me comment on some of the issues encounted with gathering these supplies, at least on Bria. As we all know animal resources change just like resources in the ground. They also require some one to go out and actually kill the animal in quest to obtain the resource. This can yield huge problems in the scout/rangers ability to obtain large quantities of certian resources. Here is an example:

Armorsmiths need lots of wooly hide. This isn't that big a deal, except the only good spawn on Bria recently was on Corellia. As a master scout with ranger hunting 4 I can get just about the maximum resource from any creature. Corellia has 3 species that yield wooly hide, paralope (10), durni (12) and crazed durni (20). The average take from a mission lair is 100 hides and say 300 from a non-mission lair. Point being to get 1000 hide you have to kill between 100 and 50 creatures that give basically no exp. Add in the baby factor and its more like 120 to 60. I didn't mind doing this at first because I was getting CH exp. by taming all the babies that popped out. Now, I only will do these runs on an extremely high cpu rate as it takes forever and helps my character in no other way than to get money, which I can actually get faster by running more difficult missions.

The easiest animalresources to get in the game are leathery hide, carnivore meat and animal bone from Dathomir, because people constantly group to kill rancors. If you can use those resources, your lucky. Some of the resources are so tedious to get that people won't take the time to harvest them, Talus wooly hide is one in particular.

That's good to know, thanks! And a little tip back for ya, try banthas on tattooine. More xp than durmis and paralopes I'd imagine.

WHAM! A HOMER!

wham! anuddah homer!

How about surveying for hours to find that really sweet spot - but there's a lair of tortons or somesuch right on top of it that I can't possibly hope to clear off on my own. I've paid combat-monkeys to clear off that lair for me.

I see 3 main things that crafter would desire that combat types could provide. The afore mentioned hide/bone/meat, security on surveying missions and harvester collection/redeeding runs, and collection of specific loot drops.

The hide/bone/meat thing does have the problems mentioned before in the time/xp vs cpu. Mostly armorsmiths would be interested in those resources and they can usually afford to pay the kinds of prices that would make collecting them worthwhile for a combat type, provided the materials are of high enough quality. They need overall quality, maleabitlity, unit toughness and shock resistance as high as possible and typically in that order of importance. Medics/doctors need copious amounts of meats for their products and architects need some hide for thier furniture as well. You'd just have to talk to members of those professions to see what their specific needs are and work out a pricing arrangement that would benefit the both of you.

For security... well most crafters aren't very good at combat, but their needs often require them to travel into and through what is very dangerous territory for them. They need to survey to find that "sweetspot", as you call it, then they need to clear out any lairs in the area in order to place their harvesters. Then they'll need to come back to retrieve there resources and harvester when the resource shifts and do the whole process over again. Myself, I'd be willing to pay an hourly rate for an escort, as well as any ticket fee's and a bonus for especially dangerous areas we'd have to go thru to find and setup on that sweetspot. I only mine 1 resource per shift, but it could take anywhere from an hour to several hours depending on how quick I can find a suitably high resource density and how many planets I have to travel to to find the specific resource I'm looking for. I do this every 6 to 10 days as the resources shift, but the timeframe when it would need to be done is critical. Every lost day due to my "escort" not being available could cost incredible amounts of money due to lost harvester productivity and postponed order completions, I'd probably just end up taking the chance and doing it alone if it came down to this though. But all of this is just what I'd be interested in if the service were made available.

The specific loot drops are things such as the krayt tissues, armor segments, rancor bile... way more items then I can think of, but most are specific to a particular crafting profession. Again, you'd just have to talk to some crafters and find out what their specific needs are and see what, if anything, they can afford to pay for such items. That'll be highly specific to each individual crafter and the successfulness of their business.

That's about all I can think of that crafters might want from combat specialists. We are a very selfsufficient lot except for not having the ability to take on the especially, or sometimes even moderately tough critters. Of course we do rely on each other from time to time, but that's a totally different subject

Hope that helps and good luck

That DOES help! Thank you!