Blue Protocol: Star Resonance – Training Life Skills without Stamina (Drop Rates, Gathering Efficiency)
How to Train Life Skills without Stamina
Ву Sviel | Rozemain.
This guide shows you the best ways to level up your life skills by gathering, all without using any Stamina.
If you’re just leveling life skills for simple stuff like basic progress or making common items, you don’t need this. You can skip it.
But if your goal is to make legendary gear, deck out your house with cool furniture, or just level up for the sake of it, stick around. We’ll get you those levels as fast as possible.
The data for this guide comes from a spreadsheet that I put together. It has the estimated drop rates I tested in the Closed Beta Test (CBT) and will be updated when the game launches. It also shows the EXP needed for each level and the most efficient recipes for every life skill.
Efficient Gathering
Starting out, leveling up a Life Skill in Star Resonance takes 2,000 EXP per level. This amount goes up once you hit level 6 and caps out at 6,000 EXP when you reach level 49.
No matter what you make, every time you craft something, you get 2 EXP. That might seem slow, but in the English Closed Beta Test (CBT), I got 72,000 EXP from crafting. That means I crafted 36,000 items in about two weeks, which is around 2,100 crafts daily. This was almost three times the EXP I got from spending Stamina during the same time.
I didn’t even know everything I do now back then. I actually spent the last week of the CBT testing out gathering rates for this guide instead of crafting. Still, I was able to make legendary gear for every slot and good furniture for my house. This was thanks to getting Gemcraft to level 18, Alchemy to 20, and Weaving to 30.
The plan we’ll use is straightforward. I looked at the drop rates and figured out how much EXP you get per gathering attempt for specific items. We’re going to focus on:
- Crafting items that give us more EXP.
- Crafting items that we can use in other crafts later.
- Using items that drop often, so we can craft more items without spending as much time gathering.
All the details you need for this are in the spreadsheet.
The only tricky part is learning to use the extra materials you get when gathering. Every gathering spot has one main item, but they all drop other items you don’t need for your main craft. If you find ways to use these extra items too, you can craft way more stuff after a gathering session.
Example Gathering Run
When you break Limestone, you mainly get Limestone itself. It drops almost every time, specifically 95% of the time.
It also drops Limpid Azure Water more often than you’d think, at a 150% drop rate.
The basic Gemcrafting recipe for Sandstone Polishers needs 2 Limestone and 1 Water.
However, because of the drop rate difference, for every two Limestone you get, you’ll actually get about three Water. This means every time you craft a Polisher, you’ll have 2 extra Water left over.
If you gather 2,000 times to craft 1,000 Polishers, you will end up with about 2,000 extra Water.
You’ll also pick up other stuff: around 1,200 Rock Salts, 1,200 Alum, 3,000 Clay, and 3,000 Fine Sand. You won’t use any of these other items for just leveling up your Gemcrafting.
Secondary Craft
If you want to leverage the Water for additional Gemcrafting training, you can spend some time gathering from Thin Twigs. They drop Twigs at a whopping 450% rate and Resin at a 200% rate. You can combine 6 Twigs and 3 Water with Gemcrafting to make Rough Paper, so another ~900 gathers will allow you to make ~670 Rough Paper. When we were making Polishers, we got about 1 craft per 2 gathers. At 2 EXP per craft, this is about 1 EXP per gather. When we gather Twigs to use the extra Water, we get a better ratio of crafts to gathers which results in about 1.5 EXP per gather. We will also get about 1,800 Resin.
Tertiary Craft
Resin can be used in a number of highly efficient recipes, but here we can combine it with the 1,200 Alum we got from our Limestone mining and a common mob drop from Boars and Boarlets to craft Refined or Smooth Hard Leather using Weaving. We only need 1 Resin, 1 Alum and 1 mob drop per craft, so we can do an additional 1,200 crafts here without any more gathering. We’ll still have 600 Resin leftover which we could use for a quick 150 Rubber crafts using Alchemy or just save for an even more efficient recipe later.
The Rock Salts, Clay and Sand can all be used in various Alchemy recipes as laid out in the spreadsheet.
Don’t Underestimate Gathering Speed Upgrades
The main thing here is volume. You need to gather a lot, so you should activate the talent nodes that cut down the gathering time for your skills.
Look at the example: we gathered 2,900 times.
- At the normal speed of 5 seconds per gather, that’s about 4 hours of gathering.
- The first speed upgrade makes it 3 seconds, so the same amount of gathering takes 2.4 hours.
- The second speed upgrade makes it 2 seconds, meaning you finish in only 1.6 hours.
In that time, we also crafted about 3,000 items. That gave us 6,000 EXP and we still had crafting materials left over.
Just for comparison, your daily 400 Stamina refill only gets you 1,600 EXP per day, and you still have to spend time or Luno to get the materials to even use that Stamina.
Conclusion
The optimal gathering plan depends on which skill or combination of skills you want to level, so I can’t create a general plan for everyone, but I have listed the most efficient recipes for each skill in the spreadsheet along with how much EXP you will get per gather and all of the drops for each node. This should be enough information for anyone to figure out the best way to accomplish their specific goals.