Sheep farming. Am I stupid?

[Seryn Lvl 300 USEast2SkeletonPosts: 166]

It’s makeshift, but I think I have a relatively decent sheep farm.

Now I timed myself this morning: I got 200 wool out of this in one hour. With four sheep constantly ready to breed. There were several several-minute spans with zero spawns, one as long as ten minutes. The only sheep to have any spawns at all were the two on the left. I took repeated walks around the area on an alt and am positive there were no other sheep within 17-20 squares or more in any direction that could’ve interfered with spawns. I’ve killed and replaced all the sheep on the right, they still refuse to breed.

I have also tried other sheep configurations. I have tried putting sheep together in the same pen. I’ve tried feeding both sheep in a pair to breed instead of just one. I’ve tried having only four sheep instead of six. Since sheep breeding took a nosedive in late February/early March nothing I’ve tried has made a difference. I’ve also tried buying wool/yarn but there’s very little available. Economically the cost of leveling knitting here is 3-6x the cost of crafting, depending on if you can flip road kits.

In the last three months waiting for something to improve I’ve started reincarnating, and reincarnated 105 times. I’d like to add more knitting stars but at this point I’m convinced there’s not enough wool on the server to hit a fraction of my quotas for more blue stars.

At this rate I’ll have to farm wool for a full 90 hours. What on Earth am I doing wrong?

[PenguinPosts: 2]

i suggest hax

[Seryn Lvl 300 USEast2SkeletonPosts: 166]

@admin
@kaylovespie

If I’m not missing anything and 200 wool per hour is the standard, then I’d like to do a short comparative analysis with crafting gathering hours if I may.

I believe my 6th, 7th, and 8th crafting skills required grinding 50-65, 60-75, and 70-80, respectively, for a total pool of approximately 2,362,300xp (this is conservative, I got experience past 80 to round off the last star but I’m not sure how much, so I’m not counting it).

At my current XP boosts that’s about 1,385 stone hammers, or 41,550 stone and 27,700 wood (since you can average about 100 crafts/min this includes a vary marginal amount of ~15 black pepper).

Assuming 75% chopping chance (keeping conservative) and 100% uptime (from buying acorns) 27,700 wood with Quick would take 6 hours.

Assuming 75% mining chance and let’s say 2/3rds up-time, 41,550 stone would take 13.85 hours (so let’s say 14 hours). This assumes you converted nothing else you got mining into stone or crafting experience, you only used the stone.

So our total gathering hours estimate stands at 20 hours.

For an equitable amount of knitting experience, I would need 15,250 yarn. At the present rate, in 20 hours, I would gather 4000 wool. However, I must be careful to not ignore three factors.

1) Farming wool is much more attention-intensive than chopping or mining.
2) This does not yet include the time it takes to gather and produce dyes.
3) This doesn’t include time spent knitting, which takes ~16.5x more time than crafting.

So if crafting took 15 minutes, knitting is at 4.125 hours; being equitable, this puts our 20 hour mark for farming wool down to 16.

Now, we can fairly ignore time spent gathering from dye plants, since that can be attributed to farming foraging experience, and simply focus on the time it takes to create dye.

In this example I would need 3,810 blue dye if I am making noble jackets (you can eliminate this time expense by making friar robes with no loss to xp for wool/yarn expended if you’re at a high enough knitting level to rule out the xp gain from knitting resets at ~<40 knitting levels, but it increases the attention requirement of knitting by x4).

With the current dye-making process (being conscious of the effect of latency and buckets emptying themselves) let’s say you can make 40 a minute, so 3,810 dye is another 1.6 hours. This is also a mental way to spend your time, so let’s round up to 2 hours since we rounded down the last estimate, putting us at 14 hours’ time for wool gathering.

So right now in 14 hours you could gather 2,800 wool. And since sheep farming/breeding/shearing is a high-attention activity versus chopping or mining, let’s buffer that by 20%, so 2,250 wool in 14 hours to make the comparison between activities more fair.

This creates a discrepancy, since if 14 hours is our fair time to gather wool and in that time we could fairly gather 2,250, in order to compete with crafting in this example we would instead need to farm 15,250 wool in 14 hours, as discussed above.

So either 2,250 wool must convert to 15,250 yarn (1:12.2 conversion, instead of the current 1:1) or the rate of wool/hour must go up by a factor or 12.2, from 200 per hour to 2,440 per hour.

(And this is further ignoring the fact that crafting farming which took 15 black pepper, for knitting would instead take 250 (plus a bit more for human error wasting seconds during such a long grinding period). So not only does knitting require 12.2x more grinding hours than crafting to achieve the same amount of experience, it requires an additional 235 black pepper even under ideal circumstances.)

As I don’t see any reasonable way to leverage 2,440 wool per hour with the current game mechanics, could we expect some snap adjustments to knitting in the next couple days? For example, a 1:15 wool:yarn conversion rate while spinning to bring these skills at least somewhat into line with one another? Or a 1:10 conversion rate and a fix to sheep’s (what I think we can agree are) completely broken breeding habits?

Thank you for reading.

[Seryn Lvl 300 USEast2SkeletonPosts: 166]

@admin
@kaylovespie

So not only does knitting require 12.2x more grinding hours than crafting

Pardon, this is particular sideline is incorrect but I can no longer edit the post. I typoed my math, the number should be 6.8 instead of 12.2 and is only applicable specific to the time spent gathering wool, not the entire grinding period.

This would correct the following:

So either 2,250 wool must convert to 15,250 yarn (1:12.2 conversion, instead of the current 1:1) or the rate of wool/hour must go up by a factor or 12.2, from 200 per hour to 2,440 per hour.

To a 1:6.8 conversion, or up from 200 wool per hour to 1360.

Either way the point is this is bollocks, please halp. I think a 1:10 conversion rate for wool:yarn and a fix to sheep breeding in this instance is extremely justifiable.

[Seryn Lvl 300 USEast2SkeletonPosts: 166]

(This also further ignores the maintenance/time costs of maintaining a sheep farm, especially since sheep seem to drop dead every 72 hours or so, while chopping and mining requires no such long-term investment of upkeep-time and resources.)

[wisepaladin Lvl 68 USWest2Polar BearPosts: 46]

I agree with the rate needing to be raised they rest is to complicated for my weak mind

[xSimrick Lvl 200 USEast2GoblinPosts: 94]

I have 8 blue stars in knitting and it did also take me some time.

When it comes to gathering wool the best you can do is make an alt and give it shears in newbie village. You can do up to 400 wool per hour. But I don’t like to do it because it makes me feel dirty. I would just have a big network of people selling me wool or giving it to me for free. for about 2 months I told gc daily to always carry shears (I gave many players free shears) and told everyone to always shear and then kill the sheep.

I don’t know how you are making dyes but you are doing it wrong. I can do up to 2k per hour.

I also started selling all the gear I would knit for wool. This also helped alot.

You said that for your 8th crafting skill you did 70-80. yes if you will reinc that way it will get very very expensive. I prepared very hard for my 8th knitting reinc and made sure I had lots of good paths to character xp without raising the need for very high knitting. I think I did it with 70-75. I know the 5 to the 8th reinc each cost me on average 3.5k wool (more when I was lazy).

With the new gem update it has gotten significantly easier though. I used +22 knitting gear so that would have given me another 110% knitting xp, so you need less wool now.

Good luck.

Edit:
Also you might be interested in this http://www.mysteralegacy.com/forums/topic/when-are-we-getting-them-you-know-what-i-mean/

• This reply was modified 5 years, 10 months ago by  xSimrick.

[xSimrick Lvl 200 USEast2GoblinPosts: 94]

Oops sorry. I misread your post and thought it said 40 dyes per hour instead of per minute. ignore my comment about that.

[Seryn Lvl 300 USEast2SkeletonPosts: 166]

Short follow-up, I got the other spawns to work by starving the sheep to 0% and refeeding them, and got 434 wool from another hour-long farming session. So better, but I think it’s still very low considering.

Oops sorry. I misread your post and thought it said 40 dyes per hour instead of per minute. ignore my comment about that.

I’m actually glad our numbers lined up pretty well since I was spitballing that estimate. ^_^

Also thank you for the thought-out reply. 🙂

[WolfPosts: 22]

after you sheer a sheeps wool how long tll you can sheer it again?

[WolfPosts: 22]

would duplicating wool at the alter help?

[Kaylovespie Lvl 2 LondonSkeletonPosts: 173]

Hi Seryn, thanks for the helpful feedback! I don’t think the @ symbol works but I do read the forums regularly so no worries there. JVH has been busy with server administration and is about to dive into the next patch, but I’ll let him know to take a look at sheep breeding and wool production 🙂

[xSimrick Lvl 200 USEast2GoblinPosts: 94]

Well I do hope it is not too big of an adjustment. I would feel a bit bad if people could now too easily catch up to me. It was a hard skill to do and that’s ok.

If I can make a little different idea than Seryn’s because i think 1 wool to 10 yarn is a bit much. Maybe +1 yarn for every 1 star or if that is still too much +1% chance per knitting lvl to get 2 yarn per wool. So at lvl100 knitting you would always spin 2 yarn per wool. Also spinning should in this case give people a tiny, very small amount of xp.

P.S. Bandages need +1-2-3 stat that just give 1-3 hp extra per heal. so there is a reason for high knitting when making bandages,

• This reply was modified 5 years, 10 months ago by  xSimrick.

[Seryn Lvl 300 USEast2SkeletonPosts: 166]

I would like to at least aim to get 1k yarn/hour from sheep farming; if breeding sheep was more prompt and we got 1-3:1 yarn:wool (idea from someone in /bchat the other day while brainstorming about this) from spinning (averaging 2:1) then we’d probably be there. 1.25-1.5k yarn/hour would be more comfortable though.

Perhaps the 1-3 chance could scale with level per Cali’s suggestion, although if wool is going to be lower-level light armors after we get silk then I think the chance should cap somewhere around 50 rather than 100 (like how proc’ing lower level smelting caps around 50, while iron and steel scale to 100). I do agree now 10:1 would be excessive.

I don’t mind knitting being an investment, but it should at least be set up well enough that people are willing to run sheep farms to meet demand. Instead we’re looking at an abandoned market, and it’s beta, so this is the time to give feedback and get it straightened out a bit–when there’s time. 🙂

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