Etrian Odyssey HD – Farming Tips

Do Not Level Up Gathering Skills Too High on Your Farming Teams

Just some advice, as I looked into this and this was the case in the DS original, and wasn’t changed here.

(If you’re playing a later EO game, ignore this. All leveling up gathering skills there is increase the number of attempts.)

• Mugwort. 50% chance.
• Hardwood. 30% chance.
• Red Fruit. 10% chance.

This is the data from the eastern B1F Chop point in EO1. As you can see, the chances don’t add up to 100%. So if you manage to hit that missing 10%, you end up getting nothing. Thankfully no gathering ambushes in this game at least. This is where the gathering skills come in.

Gathering skills in this game not only increase the number of gathering attempts, they also increase the chances of finding an item. There is a multiplier of 1 at level 1 to 1.2x at level 10, which can actually eliminate the chances of finding nothing. But this comes at a cost…

• Mugwort. 60% chance.
• Hardwood. 36% chance.
• Red Fruit. 12% chance.

With a level 10 gathering skill, the rates become equal to what I listed above instead. Except this doesn’t add up to 100% either, going up to 108% instead. So what happens to the excess 8%? This is where the bad news comes in. The game still only does a X out of 100 roll here, and more relevantly, the game checks the rates from common to rate instead of rare to common like with item drops. Yes that’s right, this means that leveling the gathering skills too high makes it harder to gather rare items! So the rates would actually look like this instead:

• Mugwort. 60% chance.
• Hardwood. 36% chance.
• Red Fruit. 4% chance.

Ouch. A level 10 gathering skill makes it more than twice as hard to snag the rare drop here. While leveling gathering skills does grant more gathering attempts, it also makes it harder to hunt for rare items! Fortunately the multipliers from these skills don’t stack, only the gathering attempts given. The game only checks for the highest leveled gathering skill, so you thankfully can’t screw yourself into common drops only with a gathering party.

If you want to know where’s a good stopping point, level 5 is a good place to do so at a 1.1x multiplier, which gives you a 1% chance of getting nothing at most points, but shouldn’t screw you out of the rare drop at most points.