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Skill Grinding Tips! [UPDATED]

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Updated! Using the opening from the previous thread. Credit to Rayjon for things up so far!

I am going to try to update this as the game is made "better" and worse, and as people find better tips!

Requested Guides:

  • Fight Skill
  • Masonry

I thought it would be nice if players with a little experience in one field or another offer some advice to players on the good ways they have found to grind different skills. In some cases when I have added a quote to the Original Post I have taken ideas or information from others wo have posted in this thread. Where feasible to simply cut and paste whole quotes I have. It is a good idea to look through the whole thread if you have the time. I have just tried to place as much here as I can.

Don't worry if you think everyone knows already. If it is not here let us have it 

The Wiki also offers a wealth of information. Here a couple skill related links.

http://wurmonline.com/wiki/index.php?title=Tips_for_Skills

http://wurmonline.com/wiki/index.php?title=Skills

Body Control

Tip for body control:

Gonna put this out there so anybody can easily get 40+ body control.

Items needed:

Carving knife (preferably enchanted)

200 hunting arrows (they seem to be a tad better then war arrows)

Bulk storage bin

Forge

Empty inventory (Put your non-drops in a backpack or something)

Method:

Put arrows into the bulk storage bin and withdraw them out, click the little 'i' up the top of the inventory box so all the carving knife imps are up the top, start improving them. While your character starts improving those, highlight all the other arrows by using shift drag and put them back into the bulk storage bin. Then withdraw more. Repeat this until you have a whole inventory of arrows that need a carving knife to improve. Once the arrows in the bulk storage bin get to around 30ql, put them into 2 backpacks and put them in a forge. Light the forge (you won't need to fuel it, the kindling keeps the forge lit for long enough). The arrows will start to lose their ql, make sure to watch closely as it is easy to let the arrows burn to nothing. Once they're around 5ql, withdraw them out and repeat the process of improving. This will gain you very good body control and mind logic, while also raising your fletching and carving knife skills.

Some ideas:

You can just make lots of arrows instead of burning down the quality, this is a good idea for people who plan on raising archery. Raising archery while you fletch can be good as it also gives you pretty decent body control.

Carpentry

Cheese's Carpentry Guide:

It is very easy to get your carpentry up to a medium-high level, and it can be extremely useful, but it will require a few other skills. You need a basic skill in blacksmithing (for the creation of nails amongst other things like tools) as well as a woodcutting skill that is higher than your carpentry skill, otherwise you won't be able to get good enough logs to imp effectively.

Carpentry has 5 separate subskills, 2 of which are "essential" in Wurm life. These are ship building and fine carpentry. If you grind these, then your main caprentry skill will go up at the same time too, so I'd recommend only grinding these 2 sub-skills, or more if you think you will need them. Bow making, toy making and fletching are harder to grind and not as useful (unless you're an archer!)

Ship building can be ground first by imping 5-10 seats until about skill 10, and then imping 5-10 oars for as long as you can stand it. Once you reach about level 15 this skill becomes very useful, as you can then start making boats effectively. Very easy to grind, you just need logs and some decent tools!

Fine carpentry is extremely useful in the creation of storage containers, an essential in Wurm life, as well as carts and a range of other useful things. I recommend that you make as many small barrels as you need and imp them. Small barrels can be carried unlike large barrels, giving you a bit more flexibility with them. And when you aren't grinding the skill, they can be used as storage containers. They only require one small nails and 5 planks to make each one of them and they can be improved with logs, making them easy to make and imp. At higher levels of the skill you may want to start imping some more advanced items. Also quite easy to grind overall, and when you aren't imping the objects you can use them for storage too. (Bonus!)

As ever, Coc will really help. It's especially useful if you don't have access to many trees. Talking of trees, woodcutting isn't too difficult to grind. It helps to have a good quality axe when you're getting wood for tree imping, but for just grinding use the worst axe you can find, as this will give you a higher skill gain; in exchange for bad logs not suitable for imping duties. Also, see if somebody somewhere needs a large number of trees cut down, as this can be a good skill gain opportunity. Otherwise, you'll have to stick to cutting down trees in your own back yard. To avoid upsetting your neighbours (and Greenpeace!) re-plant a sprout for every tree that you cut down. That way you'll have a sustainable wood resource and no grumpy neighbours, annoyed that their prize forest has just, vanished. So you could say that forestry helps too.

Blacksmithing is less essential, but you need it to upkeep your tools and to make nails. I find that the best way to grind it is by imping needles. You can fit 100 in a bowl and they use next to no ore to improve. You will also need a decent mining skill to get the ore too... but I usually buy my tools from a merchant and use blacksmithing just for nails and maintenance. You would need weapon smithing to be able to make some tools, which sucks; weapon smithing isn't easy to grind. You may want to just take a shortcut here and find someone who will do tools for you; there are plenty of reputable merchants on here.

Anyhow, carpentry is a big topic, but you will get a lot out of it. A carpentry skill of 30 is easily enough to build a well sized house! Ships are a useful form of transport, that you can even make money out of building, and fine carpentry is essential if you want to hoarde stuff in containers.  :D

(If you want to grind other sub skills then visit the wurmpedia, as I don't have enough experience to comment on them.)

Alchemy/Natural Substances

Just my tips for Natural Substance (Alchemy), mine's over 60 now. 

The only real way to get there is making heal covers, and really only way to get to 50 is to do it on sleep bonus.  You're only wasting your time not doing it on sleep bonus.  The only main issue with most people is that you have to hunt, or purchase, animal parts to create the healing covers.

What I did was brought rope to the traders at the Shroud, and I assume this works for other main capitals.  I simply traded in the rope for the animal parts.  Most noobies sell the parts for a few copper and iron coins, and the traders are stocked full of hundreds of teeth, glands, horns, paws, etc etc.  You can easily fill small barrels full of animal parts at a well-known popular trader, and wait till your next 5 hour sleep bonus and crank them out. 

You could also just buy the parts from a trader too, but usually using rope discounts it heavily.

Channeling

Vynora:

Once you have enough Channeling to successfully cast Opulance (sorry do not recall what skill lvl that is) the following is the way that I grind Channeling. It cannot be done every day but can give you ome bursts of gain.

Spend some time creating ropes. Do this until you have several hundred. Also collect plenty of vegatable as well.

When you have done this choose a time when you have some sleep bonus and then stand in front of the altar with your rope and veggies and cast until your sleep bonus is gone or you run out of ropes.

Opulance only requires 10 faith to cast so you can get much more casting in. Opulance will not transfer to meals cooked with the veggies. If you use the method I gave to raise Hot Food Cooking you will have a ton of meals on hand to cast on instead.

Magranon:

Just keep casting light token, you can get to around 20-25 skill if you keep casting. Using only 5 favour, you don’t need to sacrifice anything.

After that, cast Magranon’s Shield on flasks of water. It has a long timer but gives a good amount of skill.

Fo:

Similar to Magranon, just keep casting Morning Fog on yourself and others till 20-25 channeling. After that you can heal things, or use Fo’s touch on flasks of water.

Cloth Tailoring

When improving large cloth tailoring items such as sails that require large amounts of raw material in the improving process, you will conserve precious string of cloth by improving using individual strings (0.1 KG) instead of a combined bunch.

Hot Food Cooking

Hot food cooking:

The method allready mentioned works good i'd assume.

But i prefer doing it my way :)

2 Forges (more if you want)

99 Frying pans in each

Fish / meat filet

Berries / herbs

Step 1: Put 1 berry / herb + 1 meat filet/ fish filet in each frying pan        (Not tested but seen on wiki: 1 fish filet + 1 meat filet)

Step 2: Light the forges

Step 3: Activate sleep bonus

Step 4: Watch your skill go up

Step 5: Turn off sleep bonus after the 3 minute mark.

Step 6: Empty pans (into small / large barrel)

Step 7: Start over if you feel like it.

I usually do a batch once in while. Can also be used for other food types than stew for more skill gain. Meals, Casseroles, Goulash etc.

10 cooking containers (pottery bowl= casserole  Frying Pan = meal)

In an Oven using seperate pottery bowls get a large amount of filet and a large amount of onion, corn, or potato to searing hot. Then add 1 filet and 1 veggie to each searing hot container. This will produce an instant meal or casserole. Casseroles are better at lower skill (pottery bowls). This method will provide relatively quick skill gain even once you pass 50. I do in tens as that is what size stacks you can grab. This is a great method if you are working on taming too as casseroles and meals can be used to do that.

I believe this is repeated in the wiki but cannot hurt here :)

Forestry

Picking sprouts is horrible forestry skillgain. Get yourself a large fruit yard or similar and harvest instead.

Mining

Mining!

When starting off the mining skill, you want up to a 30ql pickaxe, if you cannot get that, than so be it. Do not go higher than 30ql pickaxe unless you want ore. Of course use CoC and no WoA. For skillgain, I have always tried to mine on a wall where I am not QL capped (so if you have 50 mining, I mine a wall with 51ql shards) You will want to mine rock until 50skill. Continue repairing your pickaxe, and keep it at around 10ql. At 50 skill, you will want to switch to iron, the easiest to mine of the ores. Upgrade your pickaxe to 25ql and begin mining the iron ore. Continue mining iron until 60, at which you can switch to copper. Mine copper until 70, where you switch to tin or lead. At 85-90 mining, start on silver and continue to 99. Gold will never be a good way to get skill. You do not have to switch to ore at 50 mining, but it will drastically increase your skillgain. For mining ore up to silver, you will want between a 15 and 25ql pickaxe, whereas silver you want around a 30ql.

Ore difficulty is as follows: Rock -> iron -> copper -> tin -> lead -> zinc -> silver ->gold.

Best skillgain while mining is where you have about a 65% chance of getting ore that is <1/2 skill. You will want ore failures, so you may have to adjust your pickaxe quality. At 90skill on silver with a 30ql pickaxe, I get about 15 1ql ore per 100 mined, and this is the best skillgain I have seen.

Gems you recieve are based on the ore you mined with the gem. If the ore was 1.21ql, then so is the gem, btw.

This is what I have learned from Wurm. ;)

Prospecting

I find so far the best way (At least up to level 30) is to propect ceilings in mines. Hit each ceiling tile three times and move on. Sleep bonus helps.

Plate Smithing

Plate smithing:

This is a tough one due to 3 skills being required

Coal making:

    No easy way to grind this, just spam charcoal piles as long as you can stand it.

Metallurgy:

    Making bronze and brass helps raise this skill to increase your chance of success on making the steel.

Plate smithing:

    Materials:

          2 forges

          7 cauldrons

    Place all 7 cauldrons in one forge.

    Cauldron #1 - 100 coal

    Cauldron #2 - 100 iron

    Use the remaining cauldrons to sort your steel lumps - ie: 1-10ql 11-20ql etc.. (This just makes it easier when your trying to imp and keeps things nice and tidy :)

    now your ready to start, make 100 steel plate gauntlets (cool and reuse your scrap from failers).

    Imp all the gauntelets to 5 - then 10 - 20 - 30 - 40 - and finally 50. At about 35-40 skill start spamming 20-30 great helms as well - these can fit in the forge with the cauldrons.

Tip: Use your lowest ql steel for the creation of items, the success rate is greatly reduced but you can cool the scrap and reuse it over and over (placing glowing lumps in a cold cauldron in an unlit forge insta-cools the scrap). Steel being extremely difficult to create this an effective way to use every bit of it.

Good luck and happy smithing,

You dont need to place iron inside the forge, as only coal needs to be glowing to combine these two materials.

Weapon Smithing

  I found fairly fast gains early on[ under 20] by just making carving knives. The best way is to ensure that you have a good and steady supply of iron, ideally one vein of low ql and another higher for creation and improving purposes respectively. You'll also need a good large anvil and a like small anvil.

At under 50 skill you can imp an item to 10x your skill, so if you have 10 ws you'll be able to improve things to 20, but after 50 it gets a little harder.

CoC [Circle of Cunning] Tools really are a must have. That includes a barrel of water for tempering if you can get it. If you live in a village with a priest of Vynora, or know a priest ask them for the water. I remember making a total of around 250 Carving/ butcher knives on my way to the 50 mark. After 50, I asked Zuperman what I should be doing and he advised longswords, the reason being is that they are in demand and at 50 you will be able to make a few extra coins selling them.

Dont worry too much about weapon heads and blade smithing.  I often hear people in chat trying to grind one of the two to gain WS skill and end up quitting because they are not gaining skill. It is a waste of effort. By 50 + WS you should have around 25 in each of these subskills.

Remember, skillgain in WS is gained by the amount of items you create, not by the level you improve to so make, say, 100 ? longswords over time and improve each one to the best of your ability. Doing this will get you to 70. 

After 70 the skillgain slows down considerably. But don't give up and keep creating. By this stage you can make anything in the WS category, from carving knives [which by now won't give you much skill] to large mauls. These are harder to imp as they take 4 kg of lump for the head, but again sell well.

Hope this helps.

Repair.

Being discussed, unfinished items and clay flasks decay fast off deed.

Ropemaking

You can grind Ropemaking now by improving Net Traps.  These improve like cloth items once they're made - Strings of Cloth, Needle, Scissors and Water (better make sure it's pre-washed and doesn't shrink on your victim in the rain).  It's pretty heavy on the String usage, so you might want to put your spindle in your fifth toolbelt slot.

Rope traps use much less cordage and are ropemaking as well.

Taming

Animal Taming:

Animals:

-At a lbeginning level,(about 1 or 2) tame a pig, pheasant or similar depending on the resources available to you. I would reccomend a pig because they will eat a larger variety of items; and should also be easiest to tame. (Pigs may be found wandering the wilderness and forests.)

-At a new tamer level, (about 5 to 10) you may choose to keep taming a pig or pheasant, or you may choose to tame a cat, a rat, a wolf etc. instead, although they will prove harder to grind it with. Keep grinding on the animals, keep taming.

-At a medium level (about 15 to 25) you may choose to keep taming a pig or pheasant, or you may move onto a cavebug, wolf or similar for similar gain plus enhancing the tame level of your own pet of choice. Keep taming them. Bear in mind that you should now be at about bear taming levels.

-At a higher level (about 30-40) you may choose nearly anything to tame - anything virtually up to unicorns, but again, a wolf, cavebug, pig, pheasant, deer, rat, cat etc. will get you more gain. You will not be able to tame many champion animals yet, or unicorns/crocodiles very well, but you will start getting there.

-At a title level (50+) You can tame virtually any basic animal now. Crocodiles will tame with a few attemtps, but taming a cavebug or similar may be your best choice of taming. If not there's always the good ol' reliable pigs.

-At master levels (very very high) you can choose whatever you like. You should also be able to master most champion animals, but be cautious nevertheless.

Taming Food

-If you are a fisherman, you may choose to fish and slice some filets to tame with. Animals you can tame include: Pigs, large rats, wild cats, black wolves, brown bears, black bears, cavebugs, crocodiles.

-If you are a farmer, you may choose to grow some exess seeds to tame with. Animals you can tame include: Deer, pheasant, pig, unicorn, hen, rooster, chicken, bull, cow, calf.

-If you are a fighter or warrior, you may choose to slaughter the bretheren of a carnivorous beast you wish to tame. Simply, you may tame some of the following: Pigs, large rats, wild cats, black wolves, brown bears, black bears, cave bugs, crocodiles.

-If you are a forager/botanizer/herbologist, you may find some odd berries or plants in your scavanges. The only animal you could tame with these is a pig.

-One old trick in the book is to fill a cauldron with water, and add some meat or fish and maybe a plant. You should get a heavy amount of soup. From this, you should fill up a smaller container, such as a pottery jar, and fill up a pottery flask with soup to tame a pig with. This will use 0.25kg of soup per tame and the soup should last maybe 150-200 tames; and is fairly easy to obtain again. However, this does only work with grinding taming on pigs so may not be the best choice, depending on the creatures and resources available to you.

Timespan

-The timespan will depend on your level. At lower levels it will raise fairly quickly, but as it advances it slows dramatically. At skill of 50-70, 400 meat filets taming a cavebug (without sleep bonus) may gain you about a skillpoint in taming, maybe less. (This is without affinities too) but by this level you will respectively be able to tame most creatures.

Hints

-When taming, always have somewhere safe to retreat to if you have to. A tamed pet or aggressive creature, or any animal you're taming can in one fell swoop start attacking you, so you always need somewhere to retreat to/a plan about avoiding attack.

-Sleep bonus is very useful for taming - you should gather your taming resources (your fish, meat, seeds etc.) without sleep bonus, store them in a container near your taming pen or area overnight, get some good sleep bonus and tame with it. This will boost skillgain quite a bit.

-Affinities would help drastically. 5 affinities in taming will boost skillgain 50%, so they are definitely worth seeking/investing in.

-Always carry some healing covers or rags/strings of cloth with you, in-case you do suffer wounds.

-Be fairly patient when you can and if you need to - it doesn't always follow a regular path as other skills may.

-Taming is changed occasionally. Always check out skillgain or how your taming skill changes if any updates occur related to taming (eg. the soup taming method may suddenly proceed to give little skill gain, that sort of general change.)

Weapons

Longsword and 2 handed Sword skill can be raised to level 20 by activating the Sword and cutting down trees.

This also works for Axe type weapons which can also be used to chop the felled trees.

Woodcutting

ALWAYS use two different hatchets when cutting down trees. It's always nice to have that top quality wood, so therefore, you need one very high QL hatchet with some nice WoA to speed up the process. Equip your high QL hatchet with WoA and cut the tree down. After you've done that, take out the low QL high CoC hatchet and start cutting the tree into logs. Remember, you gain MORE skill cutting trees into logs rather than cutting trees down. Personally, I use two 1.5kg hatchets, one 15QL w/ 99c, and the other 70QL w/ 97w 95c.

It's always nice to have a toolbelt to speed up the process. I use slot 1 for the high QL, slot 2 for the low QL, slot 3 for water, slot 4 for my meal, and slot 5 for cotton (if you fall).

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Requesting FS guide? Which animals to attack, which to run, good equips, etc?

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I'm honoured to have my carpentry guide put up :D

I will probably make an updated version too that covers more on the subskills and more on higher levels of carpentry... and how about a masonry guide too? :D

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just a note about your ropemaking skill tips. The net trap is a great suggestion for imping to grind your skill but it should be noted that rope traps cannot be improved so not such a great item to grind on.

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please fix the post, its pretty annoying to see and the like, sorry :S

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Reposting my carpentry guide, this time an updated version that I finally got round to writing!

____________________________________________

Cheese's Carpentry Guide: V-2.0

It's very easy to get your carpentry up to a medium-high level, and it can be an extremely useful skill to have. However, like all skills, carpentry requires "support" skills - specifically, these are woodcutting and to some degree blacksmithing. I will address these later.

Carpentry has 5 separate subskills: bow making, fletching, ship building, fine carpentry and toy making. The most useful are ship building and fine carpentry and I'd recommend grinding them. The bonus with subskills is that they increase your main carpentry skill at the same time as the subskill - effectively a "two for one" deal. I'd recommend only grinding shipbuilding and fine carpentry. Bow making, toy making and fletching are harder to grind and are not ordinarily as useful - I won't cover them in this guide.

Ship building can be ground first by imping 5-10 seats until about skill 10, and then imping 5-10+ oars for as long as you can stand it. Once you reach about level 15 the subskill starts to become very useful, as you can then start making boats effectively (albeit only small ones for now.) It's easy to grind, you just need logs and some decent tools. After about 30 skill it may become better to grind with small tackles instead; however, I'd recommend that you start making actual boats at that point. Making the parts and putting the boat together can be good skillgain and also gives you a useful end product at the end of it. Don't attempt boats too hard for you: rowboats and sailboats at 15+ skill, corbitas at 30+, cogs at 40+, knarrs at 50+ and caravels at 60+. Otherwise they are very hard to make and take a very long time!!

Fine carpentry is extremely useful in the creation of storage containers, an essential in Wurm life - as well as carts and a range of other useful things. I recommend that you make as many small barrels as you need and imp them. Small barrels can be carried unlike large barrels, giving you a bit more flexibility with them. And when you aren't grinding the skill, they can be used as storage containers. They only require one small nails and 5 planks to make each one of them and they can be improved with logs, making them easy to make and imp. At higher levels of the skill you may want to start imping some more advanced items - large carts can be good. If you live in a village, then you could offer to imp other villagers' furniture for them.

If you want to grind carpentry without subskills... you're stupid! But you could imp spindles.

As carpentry requires wood, woodcutting is an essential support skill. You'll need high ql logs for imping and lower ql logs can be used for basic items such as planks or even just as fuel. The best way to grind woodcutting is unsurprisingly by cutting down trees. It helps to have a good quality axe when you're getting high ql wood for imping, but if you're just grinding use the worst axe you can find, as this will give you a higher skill gain; in exchange for bad logs not suitable for imping duties. A high coc cast on your skilling hatchet will mean less trees die and will make skilling much much easier; and remember that chopping up trees into logs gives good skillgain too, it isn't all about cutting them down.

Also, see if somebody somewhere needs a large number of trees cut down, as this can be a good skill gain opportunity. Many people despise fruit trees such as olives, so try first to find an ugly patch of them. Otherwise, you'll have to stick to cutting down trees in your own back yard. To avoid upsetting your neighbours (and Greenpeace!) re-plant a sprout for every tree that you cut down. That way you'll have a sustainable wood resource and no grumpy neighbours, annoyed that their prize forest has just, vanished. So you could say that forestry helps too.

Blacksmithing is less essential, but certain elements of carpentry require it. A skill of 15 should get you through chores like making iron ribbons and nails. A bit of blacksmithing skill is also necessary for re-imping any specialist low ql skilling tools that you may have - as they are low ql they get damaged easier and hence lose their ql quicker.

Anyhow, carpentry is a big topic; but it is a vital skill for any Wurmian. A carpentry skill of 30 is easily enough to build a well sized house! Ships are a useful form of transport, that can give you a healthy income if you build them for others; and fine carpentry is essential if you want to hoarde stuff in containers. etc. :D

(If you want to grind other sub skills that I haven't covered then visit the wurmpedia, as I don't have enough experience to comment on them.)

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I'm not sure why we have an article about Carpentry that doesn't mention the fact that you can get 99 Fletching and Shipbuilding (and therefore also pretty high Carpentry) using nothing but a carving knife, a BSB, and any old rubbish ql logs. No need to get good logs, no need to get more than one good ql COC tool. I know this 'feature' has only been around for a year or so but it ought to be in the mainstream by now and is far and away the most efficient way to grind those skills.

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As far as I know from posts of people that looked into WU code, Zinc has the same difficulty as rock, so i don't really trust that mining guide

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It took me 5 days to get 70 FS and this is how I did it.

First thing I got myself was QL 75-80 armor (no enchant) 
Huge axe QL 80-85 with 70+COC, LT, NIM and if offered, get animal demise.

If anybody tells you to build a dummy and hit it with a stick, just ignore them, they are stuck in the past and this method is no longer viable. Also if you choose to use a huge axe or a 2h sword/1h, proceed to hit trees with them until you get to level 20 on the weapon.|

Once you have some sort of the gear I've suggested, continue to kill everything in your way, be careful with hellhounds and trolls, everything else will die in 2-4 hits, except bisons... those things have a lot of HP, but they are good EXP too. 

 

You want to fight Hellhounds and trolls after you have at least 40+ FS, and a set similar to the one suggested, especially the weapon, the LT is what will keep you alive long enough to kill these during those low levels.

It's a small investment that provides a huge quality of life, the armor cost me about 1.2s for the whole set and the axe was around 2.5-3s

https://www.niarja.com/skill_compare/Legios

Edited by Legios

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Would love to see a updated masonry guide, I keep seeing a lot of conflicting info on what's best to level mason.

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Well Mason have not a lot of options. Pure Masson include mostly Forge or Guardtower Imping waht need a lot of HQ shards (need 0,5 material/imping). Esayer is Stoncutting grind by Imping items like Mindoors, Grindstones or the marbel kitchen items. Creating have sadly less Skill gian and the optimal Point of 70% Chance is often fast out past (the reason a lot of peopel notice a realtvie hard drop of skill gain after 30 for wall building and a strong one for Towers after 50).

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