Sold My Soul to the Company Store

Mining in Oldton Movalopolos.

One of the Windurst quests I'd never finished involved traveling to Palborough Mine to one of the mythril seams and mining it until you got a Sharp Stone. I bought a few pickaxes, traveled to the mine, and sought it out. Once the quest was complete, I decided to try mining for real. I've heard a lot of people talk about how much money they can make

The Field Tunic and Field Gloves, when worn, will reduce the chances of your pickaxe breaking. I had bought them ages ago to help with logging when I started woodworking. I grabbed them and bought three stacks of pickaxes before heading to Oldton Movalpolos.

The way it works is that you track down Mining Points. When you find one, you use your pickaxe on it and hopefully receive an ore or some other valuable item. You can usually hit the same mining point five or six times before it disappears and instantly spawns in another place. There are eight Mining Points in Oldton Movalpolos, and I marked each one on my map as I went.

If someone is working a Mining Point when you find it, it's considered extremely rude to begin mining the same point. To my considerable surprise, I was the only person in the entire place. I had no competition.

I didn't have as much inventory space as I would like, so I ended up throwing away a lot of copper and zinc ores, as well as Moblin Dice (they have enough sides to make me think the moblins are heavily into Dungeons & Dragons) and igneous rock.

When I left, I had the following items to sell:

1 Platinum Ore - 50,000 gil
1 Darksteel Ore - 16,000 gil
2 Moblin Masks - 1,500 gil each
1 Moblin Mail - 5,000 gil
3 Moblin Helms - 5,000 gil each
6 Silver Ores - 700 gil each

In about an hour, I made a little over 90,000 gil. That's assuming everything sells quickly. Couple that to the three stacks of Bastore Bream I'd fished up and the silk threads I got while hunting Spiny Spipi earlier, and it was a very lucrative day for me. I'll be buying more moat carp later.

The only thing I don't like about mining is that you don't get any skillups for it. Unlike fishing, you don't "improve" the more you do it. Nice money, though. I could see myself doing this a couple times a week.

I Hate the Dunes

I went to Valkurm Dunes as a Summoner, and it sucked pretty bad.

It didn't take long to get a party, but it took forever for us to actually do anything. We finally moved to the beach and fought a snipper for 200xp, but then the White Mage said "I have to go afk for 20 minutes. You can replace me if you want." He got booted, and our party eventually disbanded after a gobin attack left the leader dead.

That left me hanging out at the gate to Selbina and practicing my summons to raise my skill. A Lv. 19 Summoner named Maida was there doing the same thing, and I pumped her for information on my role in the group. I badly needed a Yoda.

I eventually got a party with two Paladins, another Summoner, a Dark Knight, and a Black Mage. It was an awful setup, but the leader brought along a high-level Red Mage to powerlevel us. I normally frown on that, but I kept my mouth shut because the dunes suck. Partying with another SMN and watching two Carbuncles slashing away at goblins was pretty entertaining.

Neyla came down as Lv. 15 White Mage to get a party but ended up going solo. By the time my party split up I had reached Lv. 14. I trudged back to Bastok with Feriz. Zoner, the leader of my linkshell, made me a sackholder so I could bring Feriz into the group.

Ouch

I woke up around 3 a.m. and couldn't get back to sleep, so I logged on to check my auctions and finish off the crayfish paste bait I've been carting around. Quieren was awake and joined me at the Fisherman's Guild in Port Windurst.

It was an amazing run. I got a .2 skillup on a Bastore Bream and achieved Lv. 57 fishing skill. I ran out of bait and decided to head for the ferry to finish my stack of Noble Ladies. I got two .2 skillups in about ten minutes. That's .5 in about thirty minutes! I was ready to have a heart attack at that point.

Quieren wondered if a Gugru Tuna could snap a Halcyon Rod, so I tried reeling one in. My rod snapped, and I have to wait until later so Veresko can repair it for me. Now that I'm closer to the level cap for Noble Ladies, they may be the fish to focus on for awhile.

Carby's Pull

Say hello to my little friend, Ifrit.

I had planned to spend the day leveling my White Mage, but it's almost all Japanese in the morning hours and harder to get a party. I decided to kill time by farting around on my Lv. 6 Summoner, running around East Sarutabaruta using Carbuncle (AKA "The Electric Squirrel") to kill stuff. I was having no problems killing Decent and Even Match monsters, and the experience points kept adding up.

I shelved WHM for the day, other than a break to join the linkshell to get Apu's Artifact Weapon for his Monk job. We had to go to the bottom level of Gusgen Mines to fight a Wandering Ghost. The sucker had a lot of hit points, but it had a hard time staying alive with so many high-levels beating it to death. We were total overkill, but we wanted a Linkshell event to take the edge off Xeones and Dagry's defection with some of the other members.

After we finished, I headed into Tahrongi Canyon and took my Summoner to Lv. 12. I mostly used Carbuncle because he hits hard, his Poison Nails move is a nice attention-getter, and he's not a huge drain on my MP. I'd break out Ifrit, Ramuh and Shiva every so often because I could use their second-tier elemental spells at Lv. 10. Watching Ifrit use Fire II on a sapling is kinda satisfying.

I'm only planning to level the Summoner job to 37. White Mages like to use it as a subjob because it gives a huge MP boost and you get an Auto-Refresh ability which keeps your mana pool slowly restoring itself. The jury is still very much out on whether Black Mage or Summoner is a better subjob for a White Mage, but it can't hurt to have both available. You can get your WHM to 75 using either one, so it comes down to preference about play style.

My personal feeling right now is that subbing BLM gives me too many utility spells to want to give them up for more MP. Conserve MP and Elemental Seal are handy as hell. I see myself using /BLM for experience parties and using /SMN for other stuff like coffer key runs and HNM stuff.