Talk:Shovel Smith/Guides

A self-sufficient Shovel Smith: How to level shovel smith with minimal initial investment. Basically, you're crafting shovels, and then shattering them for Runes and selling some or all of the runes. You won't have as many runes as you would for magus, as if you saved all of them, but you will still have many thousands of runes when you hit level 65. It's important to note that, unless you have a lot of cushion money, you will need to wait for your runes to sell. However, you can easily afford to market them at the lowest prices in almost all cases, so this is not much of a problem. Furthermore Ine and Sa are very in-demand runes, and they are what you produce the most of for a while.

1-40: Small Twiggy Shovel (sell to NPC or shatter for Vi runes)

''You have to start somewhere. I seemed to have bad luck with shattering these, so I sold them to the NPC to recover a portion of the resource cost.''

10-80: Field Shovels (shatter for Sa/Ine runes)

''This is about the most responsible recipe you'll have for a long time if not forever. Even when the success rate is low, you can expect to easily turn a profit by selling just some of the runes you get from these. 50 of these usually shatters to about 225 Sa, 325 Ine runes, at the low cost of 300 Ash/200 Iron/200 Chestnut, so you can easily turn a profit by selling runes and/or save plenty of runes for Magus if you go this route.''

40-100: Small Mechba Shovel --> Powerful Mechba Shovel

''Responsible though it may be, Field Shovel isn't exactly conducive to fast experience, or even the best experience to money ratio. The best for leveling fast is to smith Small Mechba Shovels, which then provide a fifth ingredient for Powerful Mechba Shovel. 600 Bronze/600 Iron/300 Cherry/200 Tin gives you 15,000 experience (100 small shovels, then 100 powerful shovels), AND they produce enough runes that, if sold, you can break even or better on the ingredients.''

It's worth noting here that even at about level 50, without a 99% on the Small Mechba Shovels, you can still just about break even on material costs by selling all the runes. And as your success rate improves, especially at level 60 when you get 99% on Small Mechba Shovel. Theoretically the best way to do this is to have a mountain of ingredients and make Small Mechba from 60-80 before using them for Great Mechba shovels at that point, THEN crushing. However, if you're counting on selling runes to make money for ingredients, you can turn to this path as soon as level 40.

This is pretty much the same as the existing guide, but there's some things I disagree with in the original guide (namely, Scratchy Shovels being worthwhile, either for experience per money, OR runes per money. If you want Fo Runes, craft Pushn series shovels.), as well as some added information/explanation I think could be handy. Kid-Dynomite 155.33.162.162 20:19, 24 January 2009 (UTC)