So. recently took it upon myself to delve into chest creation again
despite remembering vaguely that it was shit and vowing to avoid it like
the plague.

Someone had offered up 7000 kg of divine weenite and not thinking about
anything past the moment, i bought it to quick-grind my chest creation up
to max with what i figured would be quick work as weenite takes a lot
less material to make a chest than say ... wood.

All of 2 seconds later i realized that my chest creation wasn't sufficient
to work with weenite... So in for a penny, i bought 14000 kg of divine
oak and wood from the same snickering salesman and drank 2 cups of coffee

and said ! Let's do this!

The various guides suggest max building from wood and max reinforcing
with oak to see the most improvement in your skill. Wood sadly, needs a
massive amount of material to make a single chest so for the better part
of a day i carved my way through the mountain of material i had and made
a variety of shit chests. 3-6 slotters.

8000-9000kg later i was at 99 chest creation which is 2 under what my
skill max should be. Generally each finished chest bumped my skill about
4 points except for 1 that gave nothing and another that gave 8?

At this point i realized i could start making weenite chests so i
switched to fully built but not reinforced weenite chests.. and hoped
my skill would max from those. Of course not. I eventually built up
an oak chest and reinforced it with ebony which finally pushed me to
101 skill.

I had fully exhausted the wood i had bought and had made a massive dent
in the Oak... but job done!

NOW-- the fun part.

I started carving my way through my pile of weenite, hoping to make
some of the money back that i had spent on the materials.. and found
out what fun Chest creation really is.

by this point, i'd become familiar with the how building a chest is done
you take an appropriate sized piece of material and build it into the
skeleton you had bought (56k for large). Using your skill references
your Dex and Int to see if you fumble. There are small fumbles which
means after waiting for the skill to engage, it says you smash your thumb
and generally waste your time and Ep and do nothing. With 120 int, 230 dex
this happened about every 1 in 3 to 1 in 2 tries. Then there are big
fumbles where it says -oooh you've really done it now- and that chest
it now a 1-2 slotter regardless of how much material you put in.

Now.. regardless of whether you get small fumbles or success.. the
number of slots you end up with is very random. Prior to maxing my
skill, i assumed that the skill would become more stable once i
reached the Max. Sadly.. this wasnt the case.

I then looked at the potential effecting skills that could be holding me
back and started training them up. Knowledge of Metamorphosis is your
merchant mastery so i assumed that was playing a part but i'd already
trained it to max. Next was my material skill of gem cutting which is
your reference for working with gem materials. Pushed that up to 98
and gave it another go.

My failure rate around this point was about 1 in 3. I'd consider a chest
of 10,11 or 12 slots a success and had yet to make any chest of 12 slot.
I was displeased.. I looked for advice from other merchants and was told
to over build your chests, sac and pray 2x per boot for a week and
you'll be fine, and a couple other suggestions.

Over building seemed like a bad idea because i'd already received a
charming message while building a chest -you overbuild your chest and
end up wasting the material. Because of this, I'd traced down the amount
of material i needed to reach the final stage.

Oh god this is boring to read.. why did i do this?

So luck?

Yeah i guess. I've continued to sacc moonrind gear 2x per boot and my
failure rate seems to have dropped to 1 in 4 and 12s started to show up.
but keep in mind that each weenite chest required 210kg divine material
or 270 for a diamond one.

Which is kindof shit.. especially if you're trying to fill an order
for somebody. There also seemed to be -better- days and definitely
worse ones.

A quick analogy would be for a max trained mage to do half damage on his
best blasts about 1 in 3 casts. Unless he sacs 2x per boot and then
can reduce failure rate to 1 in 4.

so quick tally of the negative points.

- Despite being master chest maker i still need to buy a skeleton (56k)
this is a minor nuisance. If the skill was more reliable, i'd just
put this into the charge of the final product.

- Ambiguous *finished* stage when building a chest. It's nice that you can
just say fk it at any point and try to finish your chest but its kindof
bullshit that you can take a 90kg chunk of material when you just need
5 kg more. Again.. i don't care about this too much in that you can
figure it out eventually by making chests and pissing away materials.
but its dumb. It's like letting mage decide how much mana he can put
into his big blasts..

- Can't decide how many slots you want to make. You REALLY should be
able to try for a certain number of slots. This also should give
you a better chance to succeed if it's not the maximum amount for
that size. Hello 10 slot diamond chest?

- There should be some way to to recover some of the materials that you've
dumped into a chest. Especially on a Fumble where you know it's a
total wash. I'm aware that you can dest chests for dimensional gems
but if someone is asking for 10x 12 slootter weenite vaults.. and
you bring him a failed 9 slotter that you stretched into a 12..
That's not what you contracted for. Dimensional gems seems like a
weird way to justify having a bad failure rate in chest making.

- And seriously.. if luck plays this much of a roll in this skill then
give us some initial message when you pick up your hammer that.. oh
this looks like a shit day to make chests! In fact, maybe don't do
anything today.. go walk your dog.

- 11000kg of divine wood and oak to max the skill?? there's something
wrong with the player base when people don't even blink at this.
I guess when you've farmed that much material, wasting the time it
takes to mine and refine 270kg of diamond to make a 6 slotter isn't
such a big deal.


Why did you read this far?

chest making stats after saccing for a while

12,12,12,12
11,11
10,7
6
12,12,12,11,9,6

4050kg of diamond *roughly*
estimated sale price of roughly 5m

ACK

Knew i forgot something,

I was also using focus before every chest creation attempt, which is more
or less like ceremony for skills. In testing, it improves skill about 10%
or so to my knowledge... so i technically should be doing better than
average merch who isn't using Kata potion or some extra boost.