Lairshaping workflow?

[Kerech]

I spent Saturday getting crafting up to 22 so I could train lairshaping. Then I spent most of yesterday trying to do the lairshaping quests and running all over getting the various resources needed and making lairshaping components... wow, what a chore

I have the best disk I can use at my level and I have my Dimensional pocket quests up to date, so I'm carrying as much as I can, but it took me roughly 11-12 hours yesterday just to do the following: 6 items for each of the 3 T1 quests, roughly 30 more imbued bronze bars to get me to level 10 for the T2 quests, and the 6 items for each of the first 2 T2 quests.

I am on my last of the T2 LSH quests now, and after that, I'm ready to make the first two hallways in my lair, so I'm trying to find an efficient workflow to help speed things up?

From what I saw yesterday, it looks like it would be best to switch to DCRA, make silos full of construction components and raw materials, then switch to DLSH to actually apply the items to the lair, since you don't get DLSH xp from creating the items. With that plan in mind, I found 4 silos on my guild plot that weren't being used and set about filling them with dim orbs, bronze bars, etc., but then I quickly realized that I need more silos

In order to do just the first 3-way and straight hall for my lair (all T1/T2), I need sandstone slabs, dim essence, dim essence orbs, bronze bars, sandstone bricks, viridian crystals, tri-cut gems, etc... I only have 4 silos to work with, so they filled up and I needed more space.

I asked about this in the Dragon channel and someone suggested using a private consigner as storage. I've never done that, how does it work?

My main question is, am I going about this the right way? Or is there a better way? Any tips would be welcome

[Kerech]

Oops... just realized. When I say T2 quests, I meant to say the Level 10 quests. Those are still T1 aren't they? Can't edit my post for some reason

[Tantalyr]

There are a number of factors to consider in determining the most efficient use of your time and effort in building out a lair:

1) Silos: Having silos available either in your lair (most efficient) or nearby plots is almost a must. The closer your lair is to available silos and machines (either biped plot machines or other nearby lairs), the better. Although some types (and tiers) of lair construction units may efficiently be made in the field, I've found I'm much more efficient in making the majority of lair units by filling silos with the base bricks/bars/crystals/orbs and making the units in my lair or at nearby biped machines.

2) Switching Schools: If you have not already achieved 100 seasons in DCRA, then you should keep in mind that you do not receive lairshaping experience for making "intermediate" construction units such as lodestones, cast stones, focused crystals and tricut gems. You should thus consider switching to DCRA when making intermediate units to get crafting experience for them, and then switching back to the lairshaping school when making the "end" units.

3) Discs: Unfortunately, lair construction units all take a minimum of two base resources to create, while lodestones and cast stones require three, and crystal lattices require four. While using a standard or deluxe disc is thus very tempting due to their multiple stack capacity, keep in mind that (a) you cannot portal with those discs, and (b) they do not hold near the bulk capacity of a Tarbash. If you have silos available either in your lair or on nearby plots, I've found it much more efficient to use a Tarbash to gather the base resources, portal back to the pad nearest my lair, fill silos, and then make the units at my lair (or nearby plot machines). This is especially true with respect to Tier IV and V tricuts.

4) Study/Explore Resource Areas: Look around resource areas for the tier you're working on to determine (a) how close together the various resources you need are, (b) whether there are any nearby machines for processing the materials and/or making the lair units, and (c) the proximity of the nearest portal. You may, and should, find some areas that are far more efficient than other areas of the same tier for lairbuilding purposes.

Consider Tier I lairbuilding resources as an example. There are at least three different islands that have those resources: New Trismus, Lesser Aradoth and Genevia. You will find that Genevia has copper/tin ore, sandstone and dim wisps all within fairly close proximity to each other, with community/world machines for each, and not far from a portal out in Genevia town. So I personally prefer to work there for units such as flowstones, maelstones, imbued bars and excoriations.

On Order (at least), there is a community lair with a crystalshaper on the western lip of the Lesser Aradoth Deadlands. So I prefer to quarry the crystal nodes in the Deadlands, process them in that lair, and then fly my disk to the Parsinia portal nearby (my lair is in Moyo, near Apia, a destination on the Parsinia portal).

Just keep in mind that on the whole lairshaping is a VERY nasty grind. While there are plenty of both direct and indirect "tactics" you can use to make it less so, it's still much, much more of a grind than building out a plot.

[Kerech]

Thanks Tantalyr

My lair is in the Water's Edge section of Scorpion Island. There's nothing there other than a couple of unfinished plots and other than a beginner blacksmith shop, there are no workstations in the vicinity that I've found.

The Tarbash disk is a good recommendation. I think I have one on an old bi-ped character; I might give that a go.

Given the lack of workshops in the area, my level 0 plan includes a T2 smelter, T2 essence and T2 crystalshaper, but now I'm thinking the crystalshaper won't benefit me much as the crystals will still have to be hauled somewhere else to be worked. I may try and rework the plan and fit in a stoneworking chamber instead. Is that a worthwhile endeavor do you think?

So far, the T1 resources have been fairly handy to work. Bronze/Sandstone are easy at Nuthala, as there's a J-man blacksmith shop and a Beginner stone shop right there for easy use. Crystals I have to drag across Lesser Aradoth from the mine to Parsinia to get to a shaper, but with the Tarbash disk that will help speed up the trip.

I'm only 22 in DCRA, so yeah, I've been switching back and forth between DCRA and DLSH as needed to maximize experience. Of course the long trip out to the DLSH trainer north of Dralk doesn't help timewise but that's the woes of dragonkind I guess.

Thanks again for the tips!

[CallakDW]

I may be wrong about this, but it seems to me that Parsinia is the best for any T1 building materials. All T1 construction units can be made there without leaving the field, and the portal leads to quite a few outlying settlements, including my own in Mia's Edge.

Since I am still training my dragoncrafting, for all other tiers, I usually make the base resources and store them in the silos in my lair and assemble them later, this way I can earn experience, and don't have to keep switching my classes back and forth. I find it very gratifying to actually be able to train my dragoncrafting and put it to use at the same time instead of destroying it for a little more experience.

If you don't have silos of your own, hopefully you thought out your lair placement well enough to be close by to friends that have plots nearby with silos you can borrow for this purpose untill you have built your own.

[Kerech]

If you don't have silos of your own, hopefully you thought out your lair placement well enough to be close by to friends that have plots nearby with silos you can borrow for this purpose.

Well, when I bought my lair it was one of only two I could find for sale. I visited about half the communities personally and asked around about lairs available in other communities, etc. I didn't really want such a remote lair, but there wasn't much else available and this was the bigger of the two I found

Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it), our guild has lots of silos on plots of players who no longer play, so I'm trying to see if I can clean some of those out for use, plus my bi-ped on a second account has a plot in Selen that has 10 T2 silos in progress, if I ever get them finished. My lair plan for level 0 also includes 3 or 4 T1 silos, so that'll help. It's just going to be tough getting level 0 built in a remote location

[CallakDW]

I would also add, (after reading your sig) that finding a good workflow is going to be rather difficult untill you learn to fly. And parsinia might not be the best place for a hatchling to work.

[Steelclaw]

The majoriy of your time will be spent running around, next to digging. Make sure you make effective use of the tools and resources at hand to maximize the amount of work done per trip.

For example, if you're making lodestones, you need metal bars and stone slab. Fill your tarbash and inventory with ore, make bars, then top off the tarbash and some of your inventory with bars, and make the trip back to storage. Don't waste time dragging the raw materials about unless its necesaary.

Second, make some trees. (diagrams, not those things you fly into) Make a tree including bulk counts and stack size of each resource necessary at each stage of processing (don't forget to check how many this takes if you're not optimal). I can scan a page I use for corridors if you need an example. You want to start with the resource you'll need the most of first. That way your storage requirements will be decreasing and not increasing as you progress towards the final product. This is particularly important if you don't have silos or a connie to use for storage.

If you have access to any storage near the resource fields, use it. Things will go faster if you haul "everything you'll need" one resource at a time using a tarbash.

You might find the following helpful:
http://www.sanguine-embrace.net/rans...airshaping.png

I think lattices require a crystalshaper now, instead of a gemworking bench.

[Kerech]

That's a nice flowchart Steelclaw! Thanks for posting it

[Kerech]

I can scan a page I use for corridors if you need an example.

I would find that very helpful. Either it's lack of sleep or too much lairshaping the past 2 days, but I'm just not sure what kind of tree you're talking about

[Steelclaw]

First, excuse the handwriting. It's messy and I didn't intend this for anyone else to see.

http://sanguine-embrace.net/hzimageh...ridor-tree.png

What you're looking at is a tree for each of the resources required for a corridor. In this case, the tree grows left to right, the root being the final lairshaping resource.

Boxed resources are the raw ones that I need to dig up.

Circled numbers are the order to do the steps. I work on one lairshaping resource at a time.

I'm a bit lucky in that I have a big enough disk and inventory that I can make most of these things in one trip (requiring 6-7 trips total to make a corridor). You're probably not as fortunate and will have to adjust your batch size down. (say, 7 flowstones per trip instead of 14)

Anyway you can use it for planning out your strategy:
Start with the resource thats the farthest out to the right.

Gather/make the indicated number of resource.
If theres a sibling, gather/make the indicated number of its resource.
Follow the tree and go up to the next step.
Repeat!


Lets run through rough flowstones for an example:
1) gather 1120 slab.
2) make 560 bricks.
3) gather 560 (raw) essence.
4) make 280 cast stones.
5) gather 560 ore.
6) make 280 bars.
7) make 14 rough flowstone.

As long as the bulk requirements of two sibling steps does not exceed your available storage (disk + inventory),
you're in good shape and wont need a storage structure.

In the rough flowstone example:
560 brick (4480 bulk) + 560 essence (5600 bulk) = 10080 bulk
that's less than my disk + free inventory (12200 bulk) so it will work.


If you run into a situation where your storage requirement is exceeded, decide whether you want to use a storage structure or decrease the batch size.

Plan ahead a bit and things become a lot easier.

Good luck!

[Kerech]

Wow, that's great information! Thank you for sharing it. I think I'm beginning to understand now

My inventory + Tarbash disk is total 4100 if I remember right, so I can adjust it down from your example. This is very helpful

[Tantalyr]

A couple of further suggestions . . .

In planning storage space for your lair, I would recommend building Tier I storage chambers rather than the higher tiered ones for two reasons. First off, Tier I chambers have a much smaller footprint than the other tiers, not to mention only take up one rather than multiple levels, and in fact have the smallest footprint of any chamber. So you can build quite a number of them throughout your lair, typically in "dead" spaces where you cannot fit any other kind of chamber. Indeed, I have 8 Tier I storage chambers built on just Level 0 and Level 1 of my lair, all in places where nothing else would fit. And that's a total of 200,000 bulk storage space, more than enough for my needs.

Second, and fitting hand in glove with the above, you will need multiple storage chambers since every lair construction unit requires multiple resources to make. Because every storage chamber has but one item stack capacity, you're much better off having four Tier I storage chambers (four units, 100,000 bulk) than a single Tier V chamber which, though it may hold the same or greater bulk, will (a) take up a LOT more of your lair, and (b) still can only hold one type of resource.

Furthermore, in planning out your lair, consider building multiple level chambers for upward and downward access, such as halls, lairs and Tier V shops. Spirals and especially slopes take up room in your lair plan--room that may prevent you from building a particular shop or other chamber. Indeed, I know a couple of dragons on Order who don't have a single spiral or chamber in their lairs, but instead utilize multiple level chambers for access between levels.

[Kerech]

After searching here and reading old threads, I've done and re-done my lair plan so many times it's not even funny In fact I lost some resources from building and deconstructing my opening 3-way corridor a few times, so for now I'm working on a guildmate's lair to skill up while I still plan mine out.

I am sticking with just level 0 for now, and I have limited myself to just T1 storage chambers. I have a T2 Hall, so I took my spiral out.

My lair is a 4x5x7 with the entrance taking up the bottom two blocks on the right hand side. My problem is I the 2 blocks above the entrance on the right hand side are not usable for some reason. Anything I try to put there it says it would stick out above the terrain and deletes it. So my Level 0 is actually only 4x4 I guess. Is that a common problem with lairs?

[Tantalyr]

My lair is a 4x5x7 with the entrance taking up the bottom two blocks on the right hand side. My problem is I the 2 blocks above the entrance on the right hand side are not usable for some reason. Anything I try to put there it says it would stick out above the terrain and deletes it. So my Level 0 is actually only 4x4 I guess. Is that a common problem with lairs?

It is indeed a problem with some lairs, though certainly not all (or perhaps even a majority). The lair planning system somehow takes into account the terrain existing just outside level 0 of a lair, and somehow makes a calculation that the height of a particular structure would stick up through, say, a crevice in the terrain outside (or over) the lair. In that instance, you cannot build any structure in that space. I have a couple of "dead" areas on level 0 of my own lair.

[Kerech]

Thanks for all the advice in this thread, it's really been helpful. I'm taking a break from Lairshaping for a bit until I get Adult status. By then I can carry more, use a bigger disk and I'll be able to fly, so that'll help things out greatly

In the meantime, I am making a spreadsheet based on the tree diagram Steelclaw posted and looks like it might turn out to be useful. If I get it polished up to a usable state, I'll post it here.

Now, just one more question (I promise)

I notice I don't get experience from focusing crystals in either the Lairshaping or Crafting school. Is that intended? Or is there something I have to do to get experience for that?

[Tantalyr]

Hmm, I can't say for sure whether or not focusing crystals should or should not give you DCRA experience as my dragon is at 100 DCRA.

But since I do know that making tricuts gives DCRA experience, it would stand to reason that focusing crystals should as well. So, have you checked to see if perhaps the tier of the crystals you are focusing is too low to give you any DCRA experience? Just a thought . . . .

[walkerglassmire]

It won't in either. It uses the Crystalshapeing skill (Tricuts uses Gemworking) and CS isn't a skill in the DCRA class, so you can't gain xp from it's use, and DLSH gives no xp for making sub-parts of anything. Only final products (Like Lattices) and application.

There's a good excel sheet floating round the forum (or least there used to be) I'll see if I can find it again.

<edit>
Turns out, the person that posted it took it off when they left the boards. As it's not mine, I don't want to repost it. But, if someone knows how to get hold of silverest, could they ask permission for the Excel sheet to be reposted here for new laircrafters to use?

[Kerech]

I get DCRA experience for all the submaterials except for focusing the crystals. It doesn't say they are too low to provide experience. I get a message saying it uses a skill from a different school than the current one. I get the same message whichever school I'm in (DCRA or DLSH).

[Deth]

Crystal focusing is not a primary skill of eother Drafon Crafter or Lairshaping so no you would get no XP for it. IT was thought that once a crystal making class came out for dragon then you would get xp from that.