Mastery Rank Data

Thanks for the info, sounds like i can just stay in a single zone then? The rank test item seemed like it would make since, kinda sad it isnt true but easier to skill i guess. Lv 37 now which is nice :)

I went from 0-100 in Elshimo Lowlands, so yeah you can just hang out anywhere.

Yeah my main point is that the assertion that there are hidden rank up tests is simply not true. I've spoken with a plethora of people capped and high rank who have not roamed around to different zones to find specific drops to influence a skill up break point.

Also, while the "Common" pool may be different in each zone... its not such a large difference that it should matter in the longer run (In my opinion). Its more important to know/identify if other diggers are running in your zone at the same time since the loot pool is limited until it refreshes.

I'd love someone to science the egg hat though... I dont personally believe the egg related items you get from wearing it arn't eligible for skillups.

most people here seems to be above rank 7 with 700 titles. was talking to a LS mate the other day and was somwhere in the 650+ titles with rank 7

had all missions complete except a optional mission in windy and bastok.

stuff i have completed beside that
voidwatch
crafts ww 100 rest 70 fishing 45 synergy 20
1 monstrosity enemy lvl 99 "slime from dragon quest event"
950 Roe completed now 1002

i havnt done all side quests at the point i talked to him. only sandy beside 2 quests. and most of jeuno beside mythic ws and af hand quest.
dont know if this info is of any use.

Cool idea; Needs some filters in spells on unobtainable ones or dynamic quest that are unobtainable when you complete another (ex. The Lu Shang Quest). There is also some weird campaign ones.

Some consideration on the 2 Choco Digging bodies.
In terms of efficiency it's quite evident that having double the amount of digging daily attempts, allows for faster skillup (over time) compared to the other body, which "only" gives you a slightly higher skillup rate but you're still bound by the total amount of daily digging.

This is quite clear from the data reported in the previous page, minus one singular aspect: Time.
To do 100 digging it takes you like, what, 28 minutes? Let's say 25.
Doubling that amount with the "best" body would mean 50+ mins everyday doing Digging. Unless you can bot that, it feels like dying inside a bit.

So... is it so stupid to think to get the "skillup" body, even if it's worse than the other one, simply because at least that way the amount of time you have to waste every single day remains the same? I.e. 25-30 mins?

The time aspect works both ways.

Done in 30 minutes, takes 50 days. Less time per day but more days.
Done in 60 minutes, takes 25 days. More digs, longer days, faster finish.

Pick the option that works for you. Youre going to spend the same rough total hours either way
(most diggers are probably automating it, so the "correct" answer is clear)

You can have both right? If you got 30 minutes today use the one, if you have an hour to burn use the other.

You're absolutely right, in the long run.
But I quite frankly don't see me spending 1hr a day doing this thing and survive.
I'm already finding it very very very hard to dedicate 30mins a day.
So I dunno.
Convince me not to get the crappy skillup body before I waste these 150 Chocobucks!


Are you serious there REALLY are Choco digging bots? Wtf? C'mon, for real? Why would people even develop a bot for that lmao.
What's it called?

As I don't do it I can only assume the primary one is likely called "something fairly obvious" lua names are often called exactly what they do.
Standard disclaimer for random ***from random people, upbeat is trustworthy.

https://www.ffxiah.com/forum/topic/58849/introducing-the-windower-addon-directory

Someone with experience can confirm or deny
(google AI will write you a 7 line basic *** lua)

In general, the guaranteed skillup body was previously preferred for skilling up. Assuming you have a bird that allows you the maximum of 200 digs per day, this roughly gave you a guaranteed skillup on half of them, where the other one just gave you roughly twice as many digs per day, and you'd have to get invisible skillups on at least a quarter of all digs for it to balance out.

Before we had visible skillups and numbers, just based on the amount of digs it took per rank, skillups became rarer and rarer as you approached the cap. I have my detailed logs of every day I did my digging (count, successes, fails, items, etc) and in the beginning it only took me a two or three days to rank up to the next rank, but by the end it was like 18 days straight of capped digs.

Assuming the base skillup rate goes lower and lower, having a guaranteed skillup on half your digs would be worth it to me more than having twice as many digs and hoping half or more of those give skillups or something. Plus, it was already obnoxious enough doing 200 successful digs a day even in Ronfaure, I wouldn't want to require myself to do 400 a day.

But I suppose with the new wing skill visibility, we can have people giving exact reports of how many messages it took from every level, the frequency of seeing them, etc. People seemed to think that the skill was similar to a crafting/fishing one, where every skillup was a 0.1 or something, but it's entirely possible that it uses a completely different system and going from 99 to 100 takes "100 skillups" while an earlier rank might take "10 skillups" or something.

I'd have to start digging on an alt or something and re-record every detail of every day again but I really don't have the motivation to do it again on other characters haha.

I assumed only the integer values are displayed.
Given how all crafting work in this game, it's safe to assume that PROBABLY (but not necessarily) it's the same with wing skill.

Each successful Dig gives you a chance to get a 0.X skillup, once you reach a full level, you get a +1 (and with the recent change you see it in the log).

That X value has a high cap (like 5?) in the early levels and the chance for X to actually happen is likely higher.
Later on the chance for X to happen becomes lower and lower and so does the cap, likely becoming 1.
Chocobo Rope might work in the sense that it makes the cap higher, like 0.2 instead of 0.1, so when you do get a skillup you OCCASIONALLY get a 0.2 instead of a 0.1.


This would all make sense, right? Except that with digging you can do it in any zone (with all crafting you progressively need to pick "higher level" recipes to even have a chance to get a skillup) and doing it in "harder" zones was reported to grant no additional chance to skillup compared to the "easier" starter zones.
Is that right though?
Supposing it is, then it's quite clear that Digging is different from all other "crafting" skills in this game and, as such, it doesn't necessarily have to use the partial 0.X system like all other crafting skill do.
It could be a fixed number of successful amounts on each level.
The numbers I've seen reported so far look very very similar altough not exactly identical.
We're within such a small difference that it could be caused by Chocobo Rope, for instance. (maybe it works that it has a low chance to make a single successful dig to count as two, sometimes, and this would create the difference in the number of successful attempts required to levelup reported by people).

Personally I still have the numbers I obtained for the first ~27 levels, I stopped tracking after that. I'm 29 and likely very close to 30.

My current chocobo has ~200 attempts per day (or should?). That alone is at least 50 minutes of time.
With the Endurance body those would become ~400 attempts per day.
Almost 2hours every day, it's... insane?
Unless someone can find a way to automate it lol, this feels like the grindiest thing in FFXI I've seen in quite a while.

This isn't quite accurate, unless wing skill works differently than how everyone's noticed for the past decade.

You're only looking at the absolute amount of digs needed on those two numbers, but the other silks gives you a guaranteed skillup on half your digs vs whatever default rate is.

Given that it takes 20+ days alone to go up 10 levels towards the ends, it would imply the skillup rate drops to ***, so guaranteed ones become even more valuable. Or that you need more skillups per rank, which still makes guaranteed ones have value.

If you guarantee a skillup on half of 200 per day, that's 100 guaranteed. At 400 a day, you'd have to at least be skilling up on a quarter to match that, and it feels lower than that usually. But exposed wing skill might change the calculus now.

For what it's worth, I went from 0-capped last year before it was exposed, wearing the skillup silks and rope 99% of the time, and it still took me over 20,000 successful digs over more than 3 months. And that was with multiple skillup campaigns during that range.

It's highly likely the skill values system DOES work this way, and that's what most assume, but it'll be hard to iron out without people going back tot he NPC on every message to check skill and count exact numbers of messages and the like. Especially as it's still not fully exposed.

It shouldn't take THAT long per day, though. My worst accuracy day needed me to do 225 total digs for 200 successes (in Ronfaure with a digger specced bird) and once you hit rank 20 or whatever that lowers the "in between digs" to no delay, you're just gated by the animation by default, which is about 3 seconds. And you can move far enough in that time to basically redig on recast. In practice this would be like 11-12 minutes minimum, but for me it was usually about 20 since I watched TV while doing it lol.

I actually was experimenting with writing an auto digger before I started the grind, but when it only took me like 15 mins a day to just do it myself I stopped bothering. It would have probably taken more time to fully get it working and debugged and fixing things than the total amount of time I just spent digging lol. I do think they exist somewhere, though.

The in-between digs thing is irrelevant atm because of the Hyper Digging campaign, allowing you to dig every ~5 seconds.
Is there something I don't get about digging then?
The only things I know are:

1) you need to have walked a certain amount (X?) yalms from the previous spot where you last digged
2) you need to be ready for digging, a certain amount of seconds which get reduced according to how high is your wing level and gear (this point is currently irrelevant with the ongoing Hyper Digging campaign)

Is there something else I don't know?
Point 1) I just deduced it on my own because I tried digging in the same spot without moving and after the first successful dig all subsequent ones would fail so I assumed you need to "move" a specific amount of yalms.
Is it wrong? Is the requirement something else?

To get 100 succesful digs with my previous (low endurance) chocobo and the ~5 seconds delay (more often than not 6 or 7 I'd say) it took me ~25 mins and the total amount of digs has been an average of, uhm ~280?
It usually takes me a bit less than 3 stacks of Gysahl Greens to reach that 100 successful digs.
I've only had 5 digging days/sessions for now and the amount has been pretty much similar in all those days.

Maybe I'm doing something wrong and there's some other requirement other than the 2 I listed above, meaning a lot of my attempts "failed" because of that?

1) Yes, but the distance is quite small. Like 2-3 yalms.
2) This "recast" delay is 15 seconds at 0, 10 seconds at 10, 5 seconds at 20, and 0 seconds at 30. (numbers assumed based on the table on wiki and a max of 100 skill). Basically starts at 15 and goes down for each tier, same with area delay. Hyper campaign is shorter than even max rank.

The animation at this point is the limiting factor, which takes about 3 seconds. You can immediately dig again as soon as the animation is completed. Technically, if you perform some sus packet manipulation, you can actually skip the animation entirely and dig instantly with zero recast. Very likely detectable though, wouldn't recommend it.

You're about to hit the rank where the delay is zeroed out. I actually did similar to you, and did my first ranks on a hyper campaign to bypass this slow-*** delay in the early levels of skill. Once you get to 30, you're as low as it gets and just need to move a short distance after the animation and hit it again.

I dug in Ronfaure because it turns up Gysahl Greens a bunch, which offset the ones I was using. I also specced my bird for full DSC to minimize greens usage. Each day's 200~220 digs usually took me less than one stack of greens bought at the NPC.

Zones have wildly different success rates. The starter zones have a ton of low level and high probability items so you almost never fail to get anything. I usually got 2-3 items per dig. When I tried for a day to do it in a place that had higher value items, my success rate went from over 90% to around 50-60%, which just adds time for misses.

Since I decided I only cared about maxing skill and not getting rare items or anything, I went back to Ronfaure and capped there.

Well I did say roughly, but if success rate starts falling off a cliff that does change it a bit. Not a whole lot though. The most important metric is still available time; if you don't dig to cap, it doesn't help to have unspent digs.

Literally never done chocobo digging even once.

The Chocobo I'm currently using has very high End and Str, I originally created it many years ago to win a race to unlock the related vorseal.

It doesn't have any specific digging stat, but high endurance grants me +100ish attempts per day, which is good. I also noticed I sometimes "save" a Gysahl Green with the message "The chocobo refuses to eat the green".
I guess I'll try Ronfaure next, so far I've done all my digging in East Sarutabaruta.
At this point I really wonder why the number of attempts it took me to reach 100 success (~280) was so high compared to yours (~220 to reach 200 success).
Seems like a very big difference, is the only variable here the fact that my choco doesn't have any digging specific ability? Or is there something else I'm missing?
Because if I multiply 5 seconds per 280 attempts I get ~23.3 minutes, which is pretty much in line with the ~25 minutes I experienced to reach 100.
I'd be very happy if I could reach 200 success in 280attempts, i.e. ~25mins but atm I seem to be pretty far from it.

If you have any clue on what I might be doing wrong I'm listening!
I'll try Ronfaure next I guess.

I was thinking to turn off running (i.e. chocobo walks instead of running) and keeping numpad 8 artificially pressed down (put a small weight on my numpad key 8?) with Autodig set on 5 seconds. That should "automate" things for me and it won't use packets so the regular animation will still be there, hence it should be pretty safe.
I'm gonna try it later and see if it works.
I would need to find a part of the map where my chocobo can walk in a straight line for like 20 mins lol
Then I can like, I dunno, read a book or something as it digs /slashwrists

//setkey w down

Hit z to toggle walking mode.

Then just hit your dig macro or simple script that sends a command to dig, wait 5, and repeat.

You're welcome.

When I was farming Tolba a couple months back I saw a couple of chocobo digging bots at the entrance of the valley of sorrows. So they definitely exist. They'd pace back and forth at the entrance, digging at regular intervals.

I laughed pretty hard when one of them exceeded their chocobo riding time and the galka continued to pace back and forth on foot, pausing for a moment to "dig" before continuing on and on.

My "let's max chocobo digging" bird is 0 STR, 200 END, 255 DSC, and 186 RCP. On diggers, END gives you more attempts, DSC gives you chances to not use greens, and RCP gives you better chances at finding items. I had Bore and Burrow for the maximum amount of items in the pool.

Maxing RCP and less DSC would probably have been better, but I was running an experiment at the time for proc rates. Doing a digger-specific bird would likely improve things for you, but that takes months to save minutes. I was making multiple chocobos though so I just dedicated one for this purpose.

Wing skill might be a factor just in odds to get items at all (every miss with 0 items just means another dig attempt needed), my earliest days had 20-30 misses pretty regularly, but my later weeks it was more like 10-15. And zone might play a point in odds to get items as well.

You only lose time if you get zero items in a dig, really, so as long as you get one, should have a chance for skill. Most of my digs were 2-3.

Ok my stats are:
STR 243 - 18~19/32RP
END 234 - 10~11/32RP
DSC 18 - 18~19/32RP
RCP 15 - 15/32RP

So the difference between 15 RCP and your 186 RCP seems to be what is causing me to have ~36% succesful dig rate and your ~87% succesful dig rate.
Pretty... huge difference if I may say.
But it is what it is and I certainly don't have the time or will to do another chocobo.
For now at least, maybe in the future when there's no campaign up I can prepare a new one while waiting for the next campaign.
Eeeeeh...


Anyway, thanks for clarifying it.
I still think for me, given how long my sessions take (~50 mins a day?) it's probably gonna be more beneficial to go for the Sky Blue (increased skillup rate) rather than Blue (2x successful attempts per day).
Spending 2hrs a day to chocodig just isn't very... practical. But for now it will have to do I guess.

Just to give a small update, it took me AGES to reach the cap for daily successful digs with a 200 base Choco + Blue Body (endurance).

I was 29, somewhat around halfway through for 30.
At the end of this session? I'm 37. With 14 successful digs on the way for 38.

Not sure how many total digs but it took me over 10 stacks of gysahl greens.
For the first 4 stacks I was in West Ronfaure, didn't dig a single Gysahl Green.
So I found an area with better pathing. After spending some time in La Theine and Dem, I found an horizontal path where it takes around 13 mins from one way to the other. It's not perfect but I'm doing this manually without a bot so I can't expect too much lol.

Anyway, took me 69 succesful digs to go from 36 to 37 and at least 64 for 36 to 37.
Not sure how this compares to the data you guys recorded.


Once I manage to get 150 chocobucks I'll try to get the Sky Blue thing as well, see how that works for me.
Ultimately I feel you really need a specific choco with zero STR, 200+ End, lotsa Perception and some discernment too.
With ~36% succesful dig rate otherwise the time it takes for each session becomes... intense.
That alone makes me lean a lot towards Sky.
With shorter sessions and ~90% accuracy in digging, then even 400 digs a day becomes less stressful I guess.

More accurate testing with the egg helm thing would be beneficial

If it does work (speculated it doesn't) it would significantly speed up levels

Shouldn't really take much effort, piss away 30 minutes on an alt that has a choco license and zero skill

When does the egg hat event start?

Saturday, but I'd assume people already have one or a Kupon-Cos

That's super interesting that you didn't get a single Gysahl in west ronf at all. I wonder if they're part of the Burrow or Bore pool then. I would get them probably 40-50% of my digs.

I'm not entirely sure how those skills work but suggestions have said they basically add separate "dig slots" for their unique pools, which may be why I usually got 2-3 items. But in doing so, it means you basically triple the chances you find something, I guess, which would shorten time needed on failures.

Wing Skill 89-90, 393 successful digs.
Wing Skill 90-91, 385 successful digs.
Wing Skill 91-92, 406 successful digs.

Should just about finish up from the campaign, if not, curious to see what these levels are like without the campaign.

I've never seen more than 1 item.
So either you need certain thresholds of Discernement/Perception to open up additional slots past the first one, or it's something granted by one of your abilities, or a mixture of both?
If those three slots you have work as a %.
Let's say each have a X% chance to happen. Let's use a 36% number for the sake of the example.
For a skillup to happen, you need to have at least 1 succesful dig (no matter which slot).

I basically have 36% x 1 (slot) chance to get a skillup on each attempt.
You get a 36% x 3 (slots) chance to get a skillup on each attempt.

Goes without saying if this is how it works, the number of times you fail an attempt (i.e. not even one of those 3 slots "procs") would be way lower compared to the fact I have a single chance.


I dunno, maybe it works like that?
It's nice to say that most guide say that Perceptivity raises the chance to get rare items. None of the guides say it "opens up additional slots / more items per dig / raises the chance a dig will be successful".

Now... the fact that guides don't say that doesn't necessarily mean it isn't true. But as far as we know the only thing affect Dig Success Rate should be "Treasure Finder" ability.
At the same time though, who knows? I mean, are we 100% sure that it's Perceptivity that raises the chance of a dig to be succesful? Or that it allows additional items past the first one? Or both things?

It's just burrow/bore that add additional slots

0/0/255/255 birds here with TH/Burrow and TH/Bore I only ever see

1. 1 Item, Main Pool Only
2. 1 Item, Burrow or Bore pool only
3. 2 Items, Main Pool Item + Burrow OR Bore Pool Item

Never 3 at a time.

Edit:


Greens are always burrow pool. See https://www.ffxiah.com/forum/topic/52191/chocobo-digging-observations