Materials and Crafting Guide: Turn Upgrade Shortages Into a Farming Plan

Every material plan starts with a ledger, and the ledger starts with the upgrade targets. Each target—a skill level, an ascension step, an equipment enhancement, a Karma step, a cooking goal—has a countable material list, and the same material often appears in several lists. The material planner /material-planner merges every active target into one shortage table, which is the document that turns "I need materials" into "I need 40 of A, 12 of B, and 3 of C".

The ledger must stay current. Spending without updating the ledger recreates the original confusion, so the habit is: plan, spend, re-run the planner, plan again. A stale ledger is as misleading as no ledger at all.

Every material in the ledger needs a verified source, and the item database /items records the known sources the current catalog documents. The plan should only route through documented sources; a source that exists in the community but not in the catalog should be treated as an in-game check, with a fallback route in reserve. Drop rates are the same: the catalog proves quantities and sources, and live rates remain an in-game observation.

The grade of a material is a routing hint. Monster parts are graded by tier (Lowest, Low, Intermediate, and above), and the tier roughly tracks the content difficulty, so the source region follows from the tier. Region and faction items (fruits, insignias, herbs) map to their regions, and the Orbis map /map shows where each region sits.

A farming route is a map problem. The ledger lists materials; the map groups them by region; the route walks the regions in order of need. When three shortage materials live in the same region, one trip serves all three, and the route should be built around those overlaps rather than one material per trip. The Orbis map /map layers make the grouping visible, and the quest database /quests adds any story work that passes through the same places.

The same grouping applies to the crafting side. The current catalog has 167 crafting recipes, and crafting shares materials with upgrades, so a crafting goal should be merged into the same ledger before the route is planned. The item database /items shows the recipe outputs and their inputs, and the Cooking database /cooking covers the cooking side separately.

Some materials are gated by cadence rather than location. The daily missions (log in, cook, level a hero, level Karma, upgrade equipment, use a Key of Light) and the weekly activities (Currency Dungeons, World Boss, Hunts, Raids, and the rest) produce their own material streams, and the Raid claims have a shared weekly limit. The progress database /progress shows the current lists and limits, and the boss database /bosses shows the encounter rewards, so the ledger can be fed by the loop instead of by extra grinding.

When the loop already produces a shortage material, the route shrinks to the gap: farm only what the loop does not cover. The ledger shows the gap, and the map shows where the gap lives.

The plan fails when a source turns out to be undocumented or a drop does not behave. Keep a fallback material in every plan, and end each farming session with a checkpoint: update the ledger, note the next source to verify, and decide whether the target milestone is still worth the route. The material planner /material-planner keeps the numbers, the item database /items keeps the sources, and the keeps the sources, and the Orbis map /map keeps the route—the three pages together make the plan repeatable instead of improvised.

A checkpoint also means walking away at the right moment. When a material's drop refuses to appear and the ledger has no documented source, the honest move is to stop farming, mark the material as an in-game check, and route the session toward a material the catalog does document. The material planner /material-planner shows the documented alternatives, and the quest database /quests shows the story work that may unlock the missing source, so the fallback is a plan rather than a surrender.