Crafting for Profit: Salvaging & Trinketing

Who this Guide is For
There's a lot of good money to be made in salvaging drops in DAoC.  Better money than any cash farming location I know. There are also a lot of people who are interested in leveling a crafter specifically for salvaging and trinketing but aren't sure how to go about it.  My goal was to find the most inexpensive craft and then determine the most economical way to level both the trade and secondary skills for salvaging.  This guide is designed to give new crafters information with those goals in mind.

To start, I had heard Tailoring was the most inexpensive mundane trade skill to level by far.  So I decided to roll a tailor to get some actual numbers on how much gold it would cost.  I documented everything as I went and learned a lot.  The information below is based on the knowledge I've gained through leveling that tailor and three other Legendary Crafters.  As you read this guide note that some of the terms are Hibernian specific although I've tried to make the overall content as generic as possible.

Powerleveling Cost
I leveled the Tailor completely clean room. I dumped money on her, leveled her skill and sold everything back to the merchants. No sales to customers, no commissions, no tips, nothing.  Any transactions I did were through a second character who brought materials to the tailor for grey items she could craft.  By doing this I didn't artificially skill her up or make her money on anything she made. This was the only way I could be sure what the real leveling cost was. While randomness varies, I’m hoping my numbers are fairly typical after 1100 skill points. It turns out getting a tailor to 1100 cost me less than seven platinum. In fact, getting to 1060 only cost six platinum (darn those last few points.)

Secondary Skills Cost
At each 100 mark I would stop leveling Tailoring and level all secondary skills to catch them up with my Tailoring level. So at 700 Tailoring I would get to 700 in Clothworking, Leatherworking, Metalworking and Woodworking. I tracked additional costs to raise the secondary skills separately from the Tailoring costs.  It cost me just over 48 gold to raise the other secondary skills from 1-1000.   Raising secondary skills is fairly inexpensive if you plan out how to use the other crafting skills in advance.

Salvaging / Trinketing
If you haven't done salvaging before here’s how it works. Your ability to salvage an item has nothing to do with your declared trade skill or your skill in any of the related crafts. It’s completely based on secondary skills. So for example, I can have Weaponcrafting at a skill of one yet be able to salvage arcanite (tier 10) weapons if I have 900 in metalworking.  The catch is,  your secondaries can never be higher than your main trade skill.  So your actual trade skill doesn't matter, but you have to have it high enough to get your secondaries to the level you want.  All mundane crafters (not Alchemists and Spellcrafters unfortunately) have the ability to salvage and trinket all materials by raising their secondary skills.

Leveling secondaries can be done through trinketing but it’s boring and slow. The best way to level secondaries is to take advantage of the other trade skills at their low levels. The most important thing is to plan ahead before you start your crafter. For example, you can fletch arrows to get a cheap and quick 400 levels in metalworking and 500 levels in woodworking. But if you do that at the start you’ll run out of cheap, low-level trade skills as you get close to capping your crafter and you’ll be stuck with the slow and more costly task or trinketing tier 7-10 materials to cap some secondaries.

What is trinketing you ask?  It's a mechanism Mythic put into the game that accomplishes two things, first you can use it to raise secondary skills independently from the main trade skill.  Second, trinketing can be used to turn raw materials into a product you can sell back to the merchants at about 98% of the purchase price instead of the 50% you get from selling back the raw materials.  There are trinkets for each of the secondary skills like Hinges and Brackets for Metalworking; Dolls and Puppets for Clothworking, etc.  So salvaging is only half the picture.  First you salvage an item into its material components, then you trinket the item into a product to sell back to the merchant at a much higher value than the raw materials alone would sell for.

Trinkets by Secondary

The table below shows the Hibernian trinkets for each of the four secondary skills and the materials they require.  You can use these items to both raise your skill in the secondary trade skill as well as convert salvaged materials into a higher cash yield.  Notice that some skills like metalworking and woodworking can be trinketed without any additional materials while Clothworking and leatherworking require other materials to complete the trinket.



Salvaging Yields

Secondary skills are the determining factor in which items you can salvage.  Before salvaging an item it's good to know what materials the item will yield so you can make sure you have the appropriate secondary skill to successfully salvage that item.

Each item you salvage will yield a quantity of one material.  This includes drops, merchant bought and player crafted items.  Regardless of the number of materials the item is composed of, salvaging yields a quantity of only one of those materials.

Material yields are based on item type.  Here's a table with the material yields for salvaging the different categories of items:
 


Target Skill Level
The first thing to decide is what level materials you want to salvage and trinket. Pre-Shrouded Isles the highest materials you generally saw were tier seven (Diamond metal bars, etc.). Darkness Falls seals were turned into gold by purchasing items and salvaging them for large quantities of tier seven metal bars which could then be trinketed. Many drops like the popular Hibernian Finlaith Firebrand also yielded tier seven materials. To salvage and trinket at that level you needed to have 700 in metalworking or the comparable secondary skill like clothworking for cloth items. woodworking for staves, bows and instruments, etc.

But is 700 enough? At that level you can trinket one metal bar at a time with a yellow con trinket. You can’t increase your secondary skill beyond your main skill so if you’re only 700 in tailoring it’s going to take you a long time to get the trinketing done.  I remember the first Firebrand I trinketed. 68 Diamond Metal Bars and I had to do 100+ 13 second trinkets just to get it converted to gold because I failed a lot on yellow.  If you raise your skill to 750 you can make hinges. Hinges trinket two metal bars at a time, so you’d only need to do half as many trinkets, still all at 13 seconds though. If you raise your main skill to 800 and your metalworking to 800 then you’ve got it made. You’re successful every trinket, you can trinket two bars at once and the hinge is grey so each trinket takes only 6.5 seconds to complete. You can turn a Finlaith Firebrand into 151g in about eight minutes, not bad.

So, 800 sounds good? Enter Shrouded Isles where most of the high level drops yield tier 10 materials. Now you need 900 skill in each secondary to be able to successfully salvage drops and start to trinket. One aside here; yes, you don’t absolutely need 700 or 900 skill to salvage an item of that tier. However, if you’re significantly lower than the required skill you may yield fewer materials or fail and lose the item altogether. Bottom line, the ideal goal is to have 1000 in all secondary skills. Then you can salvage and trinket everything in the game at half trinket time. You can buy drops off people and pay them a percentage of the yield value, you can salvage your own drops and make sometimes upwards of three times the money you made in gold and loot alone.

Leveling Secondary Skills
Okay, you're ready to start a crafter and get to salvaging those drops for cash?  Sounds great, but let's look at how to get the secondary skills up first. Different trade skills raise different secondaries. Here’s a general rundown of what secondaries are raised by each trade skill:
 
  • Tailoring – Clothworking, Leatherworking (leather),  Metalworking (studded armor Albion/Midgard)
  • Armorcrafting – Leatherworking, Clothworking, Metalworking (scale)
  • Weaponcrafting – Metalworking, Leatherworking (blades, piercers), Woodworking (blunts, shields)
  • Fletching – Woodworking, Metalworking (arrows, staves), Clothworking (bows), leatherworking (instruments)
Note that not all items you craft in each trade skill raise the same secondaries. In fact, you can read that table the other way around and say “Tailoring requires Leatherworking and Clothworking.”  As a tailor, if I level on cloth items to 1000 and then I want to make some leather items I’m in big trouble because I’m 1000 points behind on leatherworking. Same goes with Armorcrafting. As an Armorcrafter if I level on Reinforced to 1100 and then I want to make AF102 Scale I’m out of luck until I figure out how to get 1100 levels of metalworking. Fletching is the most challenging trade skill for secondaries as it requires all four skills to make the full range of items.

You can use low levels of the other trade skills to get the levels in the secondary skills you need though.  How does this work?  It's pretty neat.  Let's say you're a Weaponcrafter and you've gotten 400 levels of woodworking already through making weapons.  If you do some Fletching even though your Fletching is at level one and your Woodworking is at 400, as long as you're leveling on a non-grey item you're eligible for all the secondary skills that item grants.  So you can use low levels of main trade skills to get your already high secondary skill even higher.  Taking best advantage of this feature of crafting will save you lots of money and time.

Planning Your Leveling
Before you start on a trade skill you want to plan out how you expect to level your skill and secondaries.  You should be able to get all secondaries to 1000 by using the alternate crafts in the inexpensive, fast low level ranges. By low levels I mean 500 in Fletching and 200 in Armorcrafting, Tailoring and Weaponcrafting in general. To raise your other three skills that high you’d probably spend less than 35 gold and in so doing you can get most of your secondaries in the 700-800 range. Your main trade skill will be leveling some of the secondaries automatically so the plan is to supplement the other trade skills to get the remaining secondary levels.

In general, you can’t get 1000 levels of secondaries by leveling the other trade skills at the low levels. So to level them as quickly and cheaply as possible you’ll need to trinket a bit at the beginning.  Consider this; if you start at the beginning using the other trade skills to level secondaries, when you get to the higher levels in your main skill you either have to do more expensive and slower levels in the other tradeskills or you have to trinket higher materials. While trinketing has a good return on investment at over 98% of the materials purchase price, it’s so much easier to plan ahead and trinket early on. Higher materials trinketing will cost more and is much much slower.  Low level trinketing goes by amazingly quickly and the cost is negligible.

Map out how you’ll use trinketing and the other trade skills to get to your target level. Once you know how many levels you can get out of the other trade skills start off by trinketing what you’re missing. For example, in the Tailoring template included below you trinket 300 levels of wood and metal initially to save time and money for when you get to the 800 range further down the road.

Crafting Templates
When I initially wrote this guide I included a template to raise a Tailor for salvaging and trinketing.  Based on many requests I've expanded the template section here to include a plan for each of the mundane trade skills.  Each of these templates shows a plan for getting a crafter to the level where they can make all items in that trade skill (1000 or 1100 depending on the craft.) Each template includes a plan to raise all secondary skills to 1000 so all trinkets are grey.  The templates are broken down by 100 skill points for crafters who want to level only to a certain point.
 

Tailoring Template
Tailoring is the least costly trade skill to level for someone looking to make a salvaging and trinketing crafter.  This template shows skill leveling details for each 100 points of tailoring.   For a total cost estimate to level a Tailor check the bottom of this guide.

Armorcrafting Template
Armorcrafting is the most straightforward craft to level secondaries as you can take advantage of the cap in fletching to gain levels in both metalworking an woodworking easily.  When following this template note that you will cap your fletching but that you are still eligible for the secondary skills those skills grant.  Just keep making those arrows until you cap out your secondaries. 

Weaponcrafting Template
Weaponcrafting has the most complicated plans but is worth following as the cost to level a Weaponcrafter is one of the most expensive.  This template is designed to level on the most inexpensive items through each 100 points.  Some comments if you're following this template include:  1) Make shields as soon and as long as you can.  The round shield is by far the cheapest thing you can level on.  Make these well into blue.  2) When moving on to the next tier you won't be able to see or map the dirk haft until you've gotten your leatherworking to the 100 mark.  If you're not seeing the haft go back and level your leatherworking some more.  

Fletching Template
Fletching is the most inexpensive craft to get to 500 but is one of the more expensive crafts to get to 1000.  The template shown leveling on bows for levels 530-1000.  An alternate option not shown in this template that may be more economical would be leveling each 100 with bows through 10 points, instruments through 35, staffs through 90 and then back to bows to finish the tier.  Thanks to Caedric of Albion/Kay for this suggestion.  For a total cost estimate to level a Fletcher check the bottom of this guide.


Spreadsheet
The templates above were built using Excel.  If you'd like to download this workbook to customize your own crafting template you can find the source here:  Crafting Spreadsheet

Frequently Asked Questions
Q: Is this the cheapest, fastest way to level a crafter in trade skill X?
A: I've got no guarantees.  I'm basing these templates on the knowledge and experience from the crafting I've done and the feedback I've gotten from the community from this guide.  I'm definitely interested in alternative least-cost crafting plans.
Q: The template shows at each 100 mark certain secondaries at that level as well.  Mine are behind by 10-15 points, is that okay?
A: Yes, it's not uncommon for secondary skills to lag behind the main trade skill some.  In most cases it's not necessary to get all secondary skills to the 100 mark or at your level before continuing.  However some skills have a minimum requirement to move on to the next item.  If you fall below that level you won't be able to continue until you increase the secondary skill to the minimum required level.
Q: What con items should I craft?
A: In general you'll get the greatest gains from crafting orange and yellow items.  I wouldn't recommend skilling on red items as the critical losses in materials or component parts can be costly and the skill gains low.  Some people keep crafting an item into the high blues and continue to see reasonable gains in skill for another 10 levels or so.
Q: I'm already a LGM Crafter in tradeskill X but I didn't level my secondaries.  Are there trinketing alternatives to leveling the secondaries?
A: There are, but they aren't necessarily the most efficient.  For instance, in the trinketing table above, notice that the Clothworking trinket Puppet can be used to trinket wood while the leatherworking trinkets can all be used to trinket metal.  It's not the fastest as you're only trinketing one bar/board at a time and you have to buy the materials you're lacking, but it's a better option than reselling the materials back to a merchant.
Q: I have all these strips I got from salvaging reinforced armor, how do I trinket those?
A: Unfortunately there isn't a secondary skill associated with strips and subsequently no trinkets.  Your best best it to find a crafter working in that tier and sell them to them at a discount.
Q: How do I tell if I have enough skill to salvage an item?
A: There is no way to definitively determine if you have enough skill to salvage a particular item but you can take a pretty good guess.  In general the best way is to look at the DPS, AF or con of an item and check what skill level you would need in order to make that item.  To be safe, you'll most likely need the associated secondary skill at about that level for salvaging.

Full Cost Breakdown
How much will all this cost?  Here are exact costs for my Tailor and Fletcher, both whom I clean room power leveled.  The Gold column is the total amount I spent to get all skills to that level.  The Secondaries column is a cumulative total of the gold I spent to level the secondaries.  I didn't follow the templates exactly from above as I learned a lot in the process but I was fairly close.  The overall totals should be a good indication on what actual costs should be.
 
Tailoring Cumulative Cost Fletching Cumulative Cost
 
Skill Gold Secondaries
100 0.1 0.1
200 2 0.3
300 7 0.6
400 29 6
500 108 7
600 277 10
700 629 19
800 1,260 25
900 2,113 43
1000 3,377 48
1100 6,971 48

 
Skill Gold Secondaries
100 0.08 0
200 1 0
300 2 0
400 6 0
500 37 8
600 1,177 8
700 3,605 11
800 6,320 20
900 10,377 66
1000 17,599 66
 

Thanks and Good Luck
I'd like to thank the many people who emailed me with thanks, comments and suggestions on this guide.  I've tried to incorporate the ideas and suggestions into this revised version of the guide.  If anyone is interested in the original guide which presented the templates in a different format you can find it here:  Original Guide
 
Best of luck with your crafting.   I hated crafting at first but it grew on me and now I'm addicted and don't plan on stopping.  If you have questions or comments you can email me at pharaoh@guardiansofvalor.com