Artisan Archive

My first holocron just told me to master Artisan. I've been playing since beta but have yet to really get into the grind. Now it's time.

Can anyone point me in the direction of a good grinding guide for Artisans? I've read some guides but most of them are tailored to someone who starts out as an Artisan. I'm currently a Rifleman/Swordsman/Scout and I'm not afraid of sampling out in the harsh wilderness.

I also have about 400K credits - so I can probably buy most of the materials I need to craft with. Could someone give me some pointers (or point me towards a guide) on mastering Artisan with a player who's already established? I'm sure I'll need to do some surveying and sampling just for that experience.. no problem. But to tell you the truth, I'm really not interested in creating sampling macros that I have to run overnight for nights on end. That just doesnt sound fun.

Don't get me wrong - I may actually enjoy being an Artisan (my starting player in beta was an Artisan.. which is why I'm not one now :smileytongue - but I don't want to spend a month mastering it. I enjoy the combat aspect of the game too much

Thanks!

Cimalke Oatia
Rifleman 4-2-3-2, Swordsman 0-2-1-1, Medic 2-1-1-1

Grind Mineral Survey Devices from Novice Artisan to Engineering 1. Then, you have a choice. Continue grinding survey tools, or switch to crafting tools. The advantage of crafting tools is that they yield more exp. The disadvantages are that they use metal and chemical, as opposed to just metal, and the dev's have set it up so that you can't grind multiple crafting tools at once in practice mode (at least that's the way it was when I grinded(ground?) Artisan, but to the best of my knowledge I don't think they've changed that). Whatever you choose, continue grinding it til you reach Engineering 3. At this point, switch to Personal Mineral Extractors (or any of the other "small" harvesters). They take a bit more resources than what you've been grinding up to now, and the experience yield per resources used is lower, but each PME is worth about 10 crafting tools worth of experience. Then continue grinding the PME's for Engineering 4, and both the Domestic Arts and Business lines. If you have the resources all ready up-front, the grind can easily be done in just one day. On a sidenote, if you're looking to make some of your money back on all the resources you just spent grinding, try building Wind Generators. If you can get them up to BER 8 they sell fairly well on the bazaar (as long as you don't price them too high, I sold mine for 800 and they usually sold out within a few days).

As far as the Surveying tree goes, well, if you don't macro at least some of it you're going to get bored pretty quick. The "good" thing about this tree is that you can do it AFK, unlike crafting macros which require you to be at the computer and double-click your resources. Though you said you didn't want to run macros overnight, so I'll leave out a sample macro unless you ask for it.

This isn't the definitive way to grind out Artisan, but it's what I figured out for myself way back when. Really, you can grind anything until you get up to Engineering 3, and then just grind personal harvesters and it will be a piece of cake. Good luck to you, and try not to go insane doing the Survey line.

Cimalke Oatia
Rifleman 4-2-3-2, Swordsman 0-2-1-1, Medic 2-1-1-1

Well it may not be the definitive way to do it - but your strategy has already gotten me to Artisan 4-4-3-1.. so I cant complain! I created my own macro to run tonight when I go to bed to hopefully net me more Surveying experience. I should be 4-4-4-1 in the next 30 minutes or so.

Woohoo! Thanks!

PS: to those reading this and saying "wow" - also remember I've probably spent about 30K credits or so on resources alone to do this... I need to find a better place to buy resources on Bria though.. other than the Bazaar. Aluminum is running about 3K credits for a case of 1K resources.

Cimalke Oatia
Rifleman 4-2-3-2, Swordsman 0-2-1-1, Medic 2-1-1-1

Cimalke Oatia
Rifleman 4-2-3-2, Swordsman 0-2-1-1, Medic 2-1-1-1

Glad I could help. Like I said, it's been a while since I had to grind Artisan out myself. Congrats on your progress, by the way. Anyways, here's that sampling macro (this is off the top of my head so if it doesn't work, let me know).

/sample;

/pause 300;

/sit;

/pause 5;

/stand;

/pause 5;

/ui action toolbarSlot##;

Little explanation of the macro...

/sample obviously begins the sampling process. The first pause (300) is how long you will be sampling for before you need to take a break. This number may need to change depending on your character. The toon I used this macro with was a Human with 0 combat skills, so I was able to set my secondary stats to the point that I would completely regain all my action while waiting the 30 seconds between samples. If your stats aren't set up like that, feel free to reduce the pause duration for however long it takes before you run out of action (you could do stat migration, but it would take a long time to switch around a few hundred points). Remember that the pause time is in seconds (so with this macro you would sample in 5 minute cycles). Now, here's where they tricky part comes in. I'm sure you've already noticed from getting to Survey 1 that once in a while box pops up telling you about discovering a higher concentration of resources or something to that effect. If you had just used /sample and walked away from your computer, one of these pop-up boxes would eventually appear and keep you from sampling again until you made a choice. With this macro, after the 5 minutes is up, your character will sit down, wait 5 seconds, stand up, wait 5 seconds, and begin sampling again. The dialog boxes will still be there when you get back to your computer, but by beginning a new /sample session you will have bypassed the need to make one of the choices. Just be prepared to hit "cancel" a lot when you return from sleep, work, or wherever.

The last line of the macro, /ui action toolbarSlot##, is where a lot of people make mistakes. First of all, you must capitalize the "S" in "toolbarSlot" or else the macro won't work. Second of all, there is no space between "toolbarSlot" and "##" (I usually mess this one up myself and put a space in there). And finally, you won't actually write ## - you'll need to put in the 2-digit number that corresponds to whatever slot you put the macro in. The slot numbers go from 00 to 23. 00 would be the slot activated by F1 (top row, all the way to the left), and 23 would be the slot activated by Shift + F12 [bottom row (if you've enabled your toolbar to have 2 rows), all the way to the right]. I've made it sound a lot more complicated than it actually is. Hopefully you know what I mean.

Finally, if you want to stop the macro at any time, type /dump. That will stop all paused commands.

If you have any questions (I don't think I did the best job explaining it) or if the macro doesn't work, feel free to respond.

Oh yeah, about getting resources. When I did the grind myself, I bought most of them of the Bazaar like you. 3 cpu seems to be standard fair for grinding-quality resources on the Bazaar. Never ever pay more than this. If you look hard enough through all the pages, you can occassionally findstacks for 2 or 2.5 cpu, but these are few and far between (as I assume they sell rather quickly). One way to get more bang for your buck is to go to Coronet starport (or whatever starport has the most AFK-spammers on your server), and as much as I hate them, listen to the AFK-spammers to see if any are advertising resource vendors. There's a few on Azahi that advertise grinding resources for 1-2.5 cpu, though I visited a couple of them and mostly it's just tubers and whatnot and any metal hangs around 3 cpu. The other way, as you mentioned, is to pick up some harvesters of your own. You should be able to locate resources on the bazaar for no more than 4 cpu that have high stats in the areas that you need (Heat Resistance, Shock Resistance, Unit Toughness) to make harvesters with a base extraction rate (BER) of 4 (the highest possible for "small" harvesters, excluding wind generators which can get as high as 8). Unless you're going to be grinding out any of the "elite" crafting professions, I wouldn't recommend getting into medium or heavy harvesters (unless you want to sell resources on the side). Pesonal harvs should be netting you around 5-6k resources a day on a decent concentration (if I recall correctly), and energy is pretty cheap to buy on the Bazaar (about 2 cpu for wind energy, don't pay any more than that as wind energy is basically all the same). Or you can do what I did, and set up 2-4 wind generators to provide energy for the rest ofyour harvesters. But if you're not going after any of the elite crafting professions and are not interested in selling resources on the side, I'd advocate just buying the remaining resources you need instead of setting up harvesters. They can get to be a real hassle.

Woohoo! Build out a bunch of decent muzzles and melee powerups and I'll probably end up surrendering it though Time to head to Dathomir to do some group hunting to make back all the cash I just blew!

Cimalke Oatia
Rifleman 4-2-3-2, Swordsman 0-2-1-1, Medic 2-1-1-1

lol, I got 4-4-4-0 in 27 minutes after starting Artisan. I'm at 4-4-4-2 after surveying for... 2 hours. Surveying is such a pain, lol. I'm glad I found that macro tho... it'll help me out, I'm sure I'll hit master artisan by tomorrow morning. So, thanks for the macro, lol.

Thats no moon, thats a... no, wait.... thats a moon.

In order, I've gotten: Scout, Teras Kasi, Medic (Holo1), Creature Handler, Ranger, Squad Leader, Combat Medic, Doctor, Entertainer, Bio-Engineer, Image Designer, Pikeman (Holo2), SILENT HOLO, Dancer, Brawler.

Cimalke Oatia
Rifleman 4-2-3-2, Swordsman 0-2-1-1, Medic 2-1-1-1