Hit today Area 25 with only 900/1350 stacks

"Thanks to everyone who has shared. This thread as well as the somepage digging page are by far the best sources of info I've been able to find online for chocobo digging. However, I was looking over the discrepancies of area wait times and I got to thinking.. I know one of you said you had /wait 0 between digs but had 50 area wait. Another person said they had /wait 11 between digs but (!!) 45 area wait! This leads me to wonder if the wait between digs and the wait between area change are not, perhaps, two separate hidden skills. In this manner, if you happened to get more skillups for delay between digs but less for area wait, you could be /wait 0 with areawait 50... or if you, by chance, got a lot of skillups on area wait skill, but not as many on /wait between digs, could end up with /wait 11 , area wait 45. I have not tested this and have no way of proving it. It just came to mind after looking over a lot of the conflicting data and seems like it might explain some things. O.o let me know what you think. -Zorlorn of Asura"


I'm going to have to disagree with you here- I think that for the most part the digging levels (like on somepage) are correct and that Area Wait and time between digs are constant for a particular level. Everyone at the same level of digging will experience the same area wait and time between digs.


The problem stems from the fact that since there are no observable levels and skillups, the only method of determining level is manually timing these things, which is prone to human error and server time/real time discrepancy. Even the most seasoned diggers will have some deviation in their testing using any number of methods- compounded by the fact that it's hotly debated at which point in zoning/digging testing should begin and end.


Time between digs is easily tested using the /wait command, and wait 6 is easily mistaken for wait 0 except you will occaisionally get an error message if you try to spam digs. Wait 0 will never have an error message between digs.


Area wait (and this is the last time I'll discuss it lol) can be determined any number of ways but the most "accurate" will always go from 0-2 seconds after expected wait time (you can't dig before your area wait, plain and simple).

Tree cuttings can be dug up in West Sarutabaruta. Got some today.

Wow, Congrats Snargy!

Just adding to the info base I guess. It took me 82 stacks of greens to level up the first time. Second level up took me 239 stacks of greens. The entire way up I managed to make a little gil. On this character I have basically stopped digging at 260 stacks of greens heading for my third level up.


For those of you thinking about digging please take note of the time investment just to get the first 2 levels of digging. No matter what you must spend 16 seconds between digs at first, there is no shortcut. So 82 * 12 * 16 = 15744 seconds of digging if you not once miss a chance to dig. That's 262 minutes of digging. Basically you're looking at 5 hours of digging minimum to get your first level and that's prolly a bit on the low side. That's also a cost of 61k gil just for the greens and to level that quickly you must almost certainly dig in low profit areas (i.e., digging up pebbles and copper ore etc). Assuming you can even get 50gil to NPC per item on average (and if you're powerleveling you're not posting at AH). You'll be lucky to get 3 items per stack or 150 gil off per stack so your return income would be about 12k gil. 5 hours of investment and 48k gil just to get past the first level.


It doesn't exactly get rosier from here. Assuming 239 stacks to get your third level of digging at 11 seconds per dig that's a total of 525 minutes just to get to /wait 6. Basically that's 9 hours of digging with decent results and almost never missing a chance to dig and at best NPC selling all the dug up goods. 239 stacks will cost about 177k gil so even if your average item value doubles and you get 4 items per stack you're only earning back 95k gilor still dumping over 80k into it.


By this point you've spent an easy 120k gil and 14 hours or more of your in game life to get next to nowhere. So if you think this is a wise investment of your time and hard earned gil go right ahead. But if you have any sense you'll leave digging to us idiots who have already wasted our lives on it and leave the profits to us as well. Remember there is a max number of diggers a server can support and the numbers are just getting worse for you.


By the way, even level 10 diggers I know say it takes 2-14 hours of digging just to make a million gil. 2 hours is good money 14 hours of time spent to make a million gil is wasteful. Almost any level 50+ player can farm/steal almost that much in that amount of time if they know what they are doing. Don't forget camping NM's either. Maybe not fun but I haven't heard from anyone or read about anyone that if they put in 14 straight hours of camping VE that they didn't get the drop and that's better than 1 million gil right there (at least on my server).

A thought on leveling up digging skill.


Normal crafting, the tougher an item is to synth, the better the skill gain can be (as long as it's range of being made).


Perhaps the success of a dig indicates how much of a potential skillup you get? So if a newbie digger is getting pebbles and such, he's getting modest skillups. A rarer item would give you a chance for a higher skillup per find. That might explain the disparity between how many stacks it's taking people to level up.

You can't chose what you dig. If you're a new digger you will get the most common item an area offers almost everytime you get anything. That means you will get lots of pebbles and bonechips, it's random what you get but the lower your digging skill the smaller the range of possible items sorta. Sure you can dig up tree cutting maybe but 1 in a million chance is basically no chance at all.

i think what the above (well, 2 above) poster is saying has some merit though. Ive always thought that digging rarer items gives more skill than common ones. Let's examine what we know:


-You can get skill or even level off digging nothing.

-It's widely assumed that digging actual items levels skill faster than digging nothing.


Following this to its natural conclusion I'm forced to agree that digging rarer items skills you faster. At A25 I had a really long set of good digging runs, getting some pretty rare stuff every day. I hit A20 in something like 10-12 days, far earlier than I was anticipating.


Interesting find on tree cuttings in sarutabaruta btw, if you can dig cuttings in saru and cactus stems in gusta... I wonder what can be dug in ronfaure @_@


Quick thought on that... you can dig seeds in at least one of the 2 'newbie' zones surrounding a city (like vegetable in west ronf.)... is a rarer plantable item in the other? Like.. cactus stems in north gustaberg, seeds in south gustaberg? If so then the 'rare' plantable item for the ronfaure region (assuming there's any sort of consistency) would be in east ronfaure.


Blah too much coffee and rambling today... currently A20 hoping for A15 this week! \(^.^)/

That's what I meant. You obviously can't choose what you dig, but a success on a rarer (hence tougher to get) item likely means more potential skillgain than on a lesser one.


Likewise, in all other "craft" skills, a FAILURE on a tougher item can give you more skillup than a lesser one, and a failure can of course happen on any item.


What I think is happening on a "nothing" may very well be a "you tried to dig up X tough to grab item, and failed!". Of course, this can mean skill gain, which is why it's perfectly logical then to dig up nothing and end up leveling up your digging skill doing it. If that "nothing" result was actually "Sorry, you whiffed on finding a rare"...well, you get the point.

It's stupid to say you can lvl off digging nothing, it contradicts everything said in the previous 14 pages of this thread, I'll make it extremely simple for you and give you the facts.


YOU CAN ONLY LVL OFF DIGGING AN ITEM, ANY ITEM.


In addition, getting nothing simply means the area is all dug up, each tier of digging lvl has it's own pool of items that refreshes based on time and moon cycles.