The Art of SkillBuilding

by Z-Corp Of Morningthaw

 
Welcome one and all to the Wonderful world of SkillBuilder
 
This article will deal with the Art of SkillBuilding.  ie: Leveling your char. by means of doing the same thing over, and over, and over for XP.
 
First off,
Gaining levels in trade skills is hard to do. One way is to make a fighting toon, and dump the xp into the trade skills. This has worked for alot of people, and at one point was the only way to get a good Trade Mule.
 
Then a few bright people figured out that if you make items that get harder to make, you can gain XP from just doing trade mule kind of stuff, Like Cooking, and Fletching. That, combined with the tools like ACScript and ACTool, gave birth to the trade mule macro.
 
Both of those Macro tools worked fine in their day, And even today ACTool is a great open ended Macro tool. But you have to know how to script, and have to know what item gives what XP, and how long to wait, and where to put what, and, and , and ...SO...
 
What you have here is the ultmate skillbuilding macro tool EVER Built, all the guess work is gone, all the Math work, timing, and other tedious tasks are also gone. This is all you need to get the best trade mule ever (well, that along with lots of Pyreal, but more on that later). So without Futher Babble from me, let me get to the point...
 
Building a Trade Mule takes time, and lots of cash (Pyreal), so be sure you want to get into this, as it can be very expensive at early levels.....
 
I want to start off with my favorite Trade Mule template..
str 80
end 10
cord 100
quick 10
focus 100
self 30
spec cooking, fletching, and alchemy,
Train Healing, critter magic(optional, some like item better), then use the left overs for whatever fills your fancy. (Alcam's note: Alcam likes to spend some of that on Bow skills. The high coordination and fletching make the bow a nice way to gain more spendable xp)
 
At the time, the art of ID'ing items is long past, heal kits no longer give xp, but lockpicks do. this might be implemented in a future release, But dont hold your breath, I personally dont see the advantages of it at this time.
 
The new release of SkillBuilder has a hard coded set of steps that are there to maximize the xp gained. There is skills.xml included with the installer that you will need to load before starting the skills portion of the plugin and i will get into that in a moment.
 
If you cant hold all the stuff for maxium xp do not worry, it will all still work, but with less xp than having everything at the start. SkillBuilder is designed so if you dont want to make something, just dont carry the ingredients. It will skip over the items it cant make and continue on it's way, If you run out of something SkillBuilder does not bog down and quit, your xp gained will just be lower when out of some ingredients.
 
To start out, you will have to have at least 102 pyreals on the char before clicking on start. Why you ask? Skillbuilder uses the full pack method of crafting items to lessen the usage of comps, which means it will run longer, and cost less to run. Ingredients will only be used when you fail at a task. If you succeed when the main pack is full, the item does not get made and the ingredients are not used up. Either way, you gain experience for the attempt. What this means is, to start Skillbuilder every space in your main pack must be full of something, and the easiest and cheapest thing to fill with is Pyreals, SO Skillbuilder will place 1 pyreal in each slot of the main pack when you hit start, If you dont have the pyreal, you must get some, because the macro will not run without all main pack slots being full, a safety feature to protect your expensive ingredients.
 
Once it fills the main pack it will then start the macro and run untill you stop it.
 
On the Skill pannel you will find 3 click circles that allows those of you that just want to train in one skill to do so without having to do all 3. However, if you choose all 3 and only have ingredients for one skill, it will just bypass the others and continue on it merry old way. There is also a new check option on the config pannel that will allow you to see how much xp you're getting with each item you make, kinda nice to see if you can find holes, or places for us to add something else in. If you dont want the extra spam, make sure its unclicked.
 
You will have to have the exact ingredients for each item being made. Since the main pack is full, Skillbuilder cannot make the sub-ingredients. 
 
Once you have all the ingredients needed to start skillbuilding (see the shopping lists below), you need to load the skills.xml by typing @sb file skills.xml . This will ready the xml with the updated recipes needed to run the macro. When you are done SkillBuilding, you can load the standard recipe file with @sb file recipes.xml
 
If fully stocked, You should be able to get about 130k or more an hour with Skillbuilder. Remember, the xp gained doing it this way goes mostly directly into the skills,  you will not get a lot of spendable xp,  The 130K total, as well as the totals displayed in skillbuilder are given to the skills themselves. In addition to this experience, you will gain another 10% that is spendable.
 
Well, I think this should get most of you up and running, If you have questions be sure to post them to the forums, and we will do our best to get back to ya in a timely manner...
 
Good luck with your new trade mule!
 

Shopping List:

In these shopping lists, the place is square brackets are suggestions on where to buy the item for best price and availability. The numbers in parenthesis are the number of times the item is used in each cycle. There are approximately 27 cycles per hour. Items used in higher difficulty skills will be used up faster, as well as items used multiple times, so you may wish to purchase more of those than the other items. Your mileage will vary.

Fletching

Store Bought Supplies

Supplies to be made or purchased from other players

Alchemy

Tools Needed

Store Bought Supplies

Supplies to be made or purchased from other players

Cooking:

Tools Needed:

Store bought supplies:

Supplies to be made or bought from other players