Airship Guide

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by LionFranco

I can confirm Dinosaur Leather from Sector 20

http://i1104.photobucket.com/albums/...115249%202.png

---

Your log shows otherwise. You obtained deep red clusters and iron giant cores in SC20. You obtained the Dinosaur Leather in whatever sector you went to afterward.

Anyone who has gotten dravanian motes, which route did you send the ships on? I've been doing 6 > 11 > 13 on 2 airships and 6 > 11 > 13 > 15 on another one. Still nothing :'(

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by KittyMeowmix

Anyone who has gotten dravanian motes, which route did you send the ships on? I've been doing 6 > 11 > 13 on 2 airships and 6 > 11 > 13 > 15 on another one. Still nothing :'(

---

13-17 and got it from one of both

I had 5 motes return from a venture to Sector 6

Not sure about journey tracking but our ship hit 6 first and then went to 12

I unlocked Diadem Hard from sector 21 few days ago. Unfortunately I didn't grab a screen, but I do have a screenshot showing we don't have 22 unlocked XD

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v2...hem/sector.png

Just unlocked Diadem Hard mode on a ship that was sent to both 21 and 22... not sure which one unlocked it, the log doesn't say.

If it hasn't been mentioned already I'd say that people should consider maximizing speed to unlock routes. We had to unlock everything past route 15 when this patch hit and it hasn't taken many tries to unlock stuff with 2 rank 50 airships that focus solely on Speed while dumping Retrieval, so I think unlocking stuff may be independent of stats. Having higher speed seems like it shaves hours off of airship times which really adds up. Tatanora propellors, Invincible II Hull and Forecastle, and Bronco Aftcastle will max out both speed and airframe capacity.

Sector 12, Deep-green clusters:
http://i.snag.gy/PnDn4.jpg

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by ServerCollaps

13-17 and got it from one of both

---

So sector 17 also has the motes?

Ok,

Spend some time sifting through the airship logs and found something that may not be 100% accurate but I found it to be 100% interesting.

Long story short
Based on the data I looked at, it appears wind is the single biggest factor in the number of items collected. I believe survey and ret. are still important however, even though wind appears to RNG based it looks as if favor correlates to better wind conditions which again have the single highest impact on the number of items gathered.

Link to my sheet data
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets...it?usp=sharing

Explanation
I was trying to find the best ship build for the sole purpose of gathering deep-crystals. I filtered the airship log and collected every instance of deep-crystal collection. You can see on the first tab I sorted all collections buy quantity collected. The first thing that jumped out was how much of a negative impact turbulence appears to have on Qty.

I broke down each wind condition in the next group of tabs and again sorted by quantity collected. I also did some basic min/max/avg. stat analysis for survey,ret., and favor. I found there to be little difference between ret. and qty for any give wind condition. I found some correlation between survey and quantity collected but nothing that jumped out at me. I also took a sum of the ret and survey to create a synthetic (gathering ability) stat. This had basically no correlation to quantity gathered.

The last tab breaks down wind condition occurrences vs. amount of favor and it seems pretty clear in the areas I feel there is sufficient data that increased favor increases the chance for better wind conditions which again has a dramatic impact on the amount of a given item gathered.

I realize the data probably has some errors in it, and I didnt analyze everything here but I feel like this was worth sharing, maybe others can tackle this and take the idea a step further. The only assumption I made is that the gathering of each different color of deep-crystal would yield similar results when run through the rng and calculations that determine the quantity collected. This allowed me to have a larger sample of data to work with.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by KittyMeowmix

So sector 17 also has the motes?

---

either 13 or 17

re: minimalist/lazy bronco, some of my lalaships finally reached R50 on just bronco.
I started 7 at the same time, of those, 5 are R40+ (2 R50), and 2 are stuck in R20s because rng cockblock @ S5 not unlocking S7.

http://puu.sh/lzBDU/eb5cd1c40b.jpg
http://puu.sh/lzCog/99b01acfdc.jpg

http://puu.sh/lzBF0/f3c724d10c.jpg
http://puu.sh/lzCcA/195e46553f.jpg
http://puu.sh/lzCmI/1839d26a64.jpg

Can see there the sectors unlocked on various broncos. It's possible to unlock all of the sectors that can be unlocked via visiting sectors without base surveillance requirements.
ie, S15 and S16 are the highest 2 sectors you can visit on just bronco, but it is possible to unlock S17 and S19 without 90 surveillance - you just can't visit them.

So far I've run ~40 ventures across 11 ships to S6, 13, 17 in the hopes of getting motes. Only S6 + 13 have panned out so far, and they were both on my non-bronco-actually-geared-out ships, so I'm wondering perhaps if there's a baseline retrieval stat req. Maybe it's just that rare. None of the bronco ships have gotten motes yet though.

Seems like "Dravanian Mote" was credited as being discovered in sectors 13 and 6, however in the big table (which is all I look at when farming items), it has been added to sector 13 and not sector 6.

Been lurking on this thread here since day one, would like to take this opportunity to say a sincere thanks. ;)

Oriental Grass from Sector 8!

http://imgur.com/FBbzgyS

Quick question. Is 90 surveillance the minimum requirement to visit the unlocked rank 50 sectors? Or do you need 90 surveillance to unlock the sectors in the first place?

Just to visit them. Those sectors that can be unlocked by visiting a serctor that lacks that requirement can be unlocked using a ship with all Bronco parts.

That said, most of those sectors are unlocked from other sectors that do require the 90 to visit, so you are forced to meet that not to unlock, but to visit those sectors that do the unlocking anyway.

Another 81 hours and neither ship has discovered Diadem Hard. Is it an issue of needing better parts? They are running Enterprise - Bronco - Invincible II - Invincible II. It's just really frustrating sitting here for almost a month and not unlocking what most did within a week.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Zaes

Another 81 hours and neither ship has discovered Diadem Hard. Is it an issue of needing better parts? They are running Enterprise - Bronco - Invincible II - Invincible II. It's just really frustrating sitting here for almost a month and not unlocking what most did within a week.

---

I'm in the same boat as you. 2 of the airships I've been sending out have Odyssey fore/aftcastles, enterprise bladder, and bronco hull (110 surveillance), and a third has a straight enterprise (90 surveillance). I'm beginning to think I'm doing something wrong. It's not that big a deal if it takes a few trips to unlock, but this is getting ridiculous. Maybe there's a glitch or something?

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by OoglieBooglie

I'm in the same boat as you. 2 of the airships I've been sending out have Odyssey fore/aftcastles, enterprise bladder, and bronco hull (110 surveillance), and a third has a straight enterprise (90 surveillance). I'm beginning to think I'm doing something wrong. It's not that big a deal if it takes a few trips to unlock, but this is getting ridiculous. Maybe there's a glitch or something?

---

My FC is also having trouble with it. We've been sending out 3 ships non-stop to sectors 18-22 in various different ways and haven't gotten it. We're definitely frustrated since we want to be able to go into hard mode as a group but I have no reason to believe we're doing anything wrong.

It appears you can access Diadem (Hard) by exploring sector 21. I haven't unlocked sector 22 yet, but obtained access to Diadem hard after exploring sector 21.

Ok enough with the Diadem HM unlock posts already! This is all common information that can be found in OP. Lets get back to business as usual please.

If you want to vent to others about how you have yet to unlock it please create another thread to complain in.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Nyalia

Sorry for vanishing, but babies are complicated. I'll try to update the spreadsheets within the next few days.

---

It isn't going anywhere, it'll be there when you have time! \o/ =)

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Arcticharm

Thinking out loud here, depending on what we're trying to do with the spreadsheet it might be smart to denote the date on entries of 3.1 entries vs 3.0. It seems like they changed where a lot of things drop from in the latest patch; they might have also changed some of their formulas and using data from 3.0 might mess up analyses.

---

This seems like a great idea, I got a little suspicious when some old items are suddenly available in new areas. I'm curious if they might have done some reshuffling.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Portley

Ok, Spend some time sifting through the airship logs and found something that may not be 100% accurate but I found it to be 100% interesting.

---

Thanks for sharing the data and the write-up! I no longer feel like I'm up-to-snuff on the latest observations for stats, so I'm definitely open to hearing some conclusions that are supported by data. If my memory serves me right, I think Nyalia also thought that Favor was important for quantity. Time to go refresh my memory!

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by CBF

Seems like "Dravanian Mote" was credited as being discovered in sectors 13 and 6, however in the big table (which is all I look at when farming items), it has been added to sector 13 and not sector 6.
Been lurking on this thread here since day one, would like to take this opportunity to say a sincere thanks. ;)

---

Thanks for pointing it out! I sometimes edit one but forget to edit the other ;)

http://i.imgur.com/ke18477.png

Seems like Sector 19 also gives you Hard mode Diadem as well.

Been trying to soley farm motes with our airships since day after patch when they were discovered. Airships usually takes a day and a half to do their trips. Here are the results.

Airship 1: survey 104, retrieval 86, favor 100 - has yet to bring back motes from sectors 6, 13, and 17, out of 10 tries
Airship 2: survey 114, retrieval 104, favor 118 - has yet to bring back motes from sectors 6, 13, and 17, out of 10 tries
Airship 4: survey 124, retrieval 122, favor 126 - has obtained 5 motes from 1 trip to sector 6. Yet to acquire motes from 13 and 17, out of 8 tries

So I'm not sure if RNG is just horrid crap as usual (like with retainer ventures and minions), or if you need a certain # of survey/favor in order to have a slim chance at getting these, or if SE changed the RNG factor to obtaining all the things overall. There's rarely any on the MB and not many mog homes either, maybe about 6 or 7 total in all the wards in all 3 cities. Mainly getting deep-blue crystals, empty crystals/clay, chemically treated chimera hides, and rarely some materia from these trips.
Have noticed wind factors vary in what's obtained; No wind = A few items (mainly junk like empty crystals/clay) + low quantity, High winds = better loot (HQ materials and materia) + higher quantity, Turbulent/Violent winds = junk items + low quantity (pretty much the same as no wind.).

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Malakai

No wind = A few items (mainly junk like empty crystals/clay) + low quantity, High winds = better loot (HQ materials and materia) + higher quantity, Turbulent/Violent winds = junk items + low quantity (pretty much the same as no wind.).

---

I found the same thing when looking at logged data. Its weird, you would think it would be something like:

No wind = most favorable collection condition
high wind = medium favorable collection condition
violent turbulence = least favorable collection condition

in reality the logs say high wind tends to give the most items followed by no wind and then violent turbulence being a huge penalty to qty collected

My FC's Poverty Airship with stats:
Surveillance 100
Retrieval 100
Speed 100
Range 86
Favor 104

Brought back 3 motes today from sector 13, it also experienced high wind, and then experienced violent turbulence right after getting the motes.

Unlocked HM today going from sector 17 to 18 (Sector 17 unlocked it).

Seems it is any level 50 sector has the chance to unlock the diadem.

Nyalia, have we run any analyses on whether wind condition or any stat is correlated with rarity/desirability of the item? Seems it is a popular theory! It is hard to gauge that variable, rarity/desirability. We could think of things like crystals and common airship mats to be on the low end and things like dravanian motes, shrub seedling, etc. to be on the high end.

Some quick data I gathered about repairing.

http://i.imgur.com/L6pnI1x.png

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Lirum_Shalquoir

Some quick data I gathered about repairing.

http://i.imgur.com/L6pnI1x.png

---

This is awesome, I'm glad someone has been diligent enough to do this :) (I totally mentioned it way back and have been too lazy to do it myself) :p

Sectors 17 and 18 have Cassia logs now.

Sector 17
http://i.imgur.com/2mFwqqA.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/ZRjZc8I.png

Sector 18
http://i.imgur.com/J4RLxpK.jpg

The main spreadsheet has been updated to allow the new items to be added. Please feel free to go back to using it, if you'd like.

The new items I've heard about are Dinosaur Leather, Wind Silk, Dravanian Mote, Oriental Grass, Potter's Stone, and Unaspected Crystal. (Now if only they added Duskborne Aethersand so we could make grade 3 wheels in sufficient quantities...) I've added the items to every sector temporarily so they appear in the dropdowns. I'll replace that with the actual lists once they are more known.

Also, it seems that Deep Color Crystals can be found in sectors SC02-SC10 with colors alternating as usual, and Deep Color Clusters can be found in sectors SC11-SC22, with the colors alternating as usual. I have added Cassia Logs to SC17-SC22, though they have only been confirmed in SC17 and SC18.

And, airship experience was increased by about 43% across the board, rounded to the nearest multiple of 10, or something like that. Regardless, the exp charts in the main spreadsheet have been updated with the new, correct values (and the old exp values for old log entries have been replaced by static numbers so they don't all come up as wrong).

I've removed Grade 2 materia from the "reported elsewhere" list. It's just so rare, and no one cares about it.


Thanks so much to whomever continued reporting with the spreadsheet despite it being out of date. Those logs were very helpful in figuring out the new exp values and what existing items were added to places where they didn't appear before.


If anyone would like to take over spreadsheet editing for me for accommodating major changes like this, please let me know. I really don't have the time anymore. Being a mom is hard. I really only log in to garden and send out airships these days.

Oops, I broke entering data into the sheet by adding too many new items without expanding a table somewhere. This has been corrected. In the future, if you see an issue like that, please use the rightclick->"insert comment" feature to let me know. That sends me an email and shows an alert on the tab. Inserting a note doesn't do either, so I won't notice until I happen to look at the sheet.

Also, do sectors 11, 12, and 13 have Deep Color Crystals or Deep Color Clusters?

So, I need to ask because I don't see anything about this.

Has anyone noticed some sort of diminishing returns from doing the same mission over and over?

At the start of the Patch cycle I sent out about 2 Airships around sectors 6 and 13 to get Drav Motes. I got about 16 of them in total.

Now that our team has stopped doing Diadem and our last airship got to rank 50, I've been sending all 4 airships out and none of them has brought anything even remotely useful in about 2 weeks.

Every single time one of them comes back it's about the same log: "Violent Turbulence" over and over. Even our two slowest airships with high Retrieval/Survey are coming back almost empty-handed. All we're getting are Crafting Crystals basically.

I was going to call RNG on that for the first week but I haven't noticed a change in trend and I don't remember "Violent Turbulence" being so predominant before.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Kyros

So, I need to ask because I don't see anything about this.

Has anyone noticed some sort of diminishing returns from doing the same mission over and over?

---

I was going to ask if anyone was trying to do a % on obtaining housing/craft items. Before 3.1 patch our airships were bringing back toy schematics, far eastern coins, dusk leather, etc by the truckload. It was like good hauls all the time. Since 3.1 the day after the patch when people reported 6 + 13 + 17 for drav motes. We have sent our airships out repeatedly to farm those sectors. Over 50 trips now and so far only 1 has ever returned with Dravanian Motes. A months time farming those islands and only 5 motes? That's a pretty piss poor RNG % rate to obtain a glamour item. The MB is hardly ever full of them either. And also it's usually always violent/turbulent winds when collecting from the islands.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Malakai

Over 50 trips now and so far only 1 has ever returned with Dravanian Motes. A months time farming those islands and only 5 motes? That's a pretty piss poor RNG % rate to obtain a glamour item.

---

I've been doing the same, and have zero motes. The drop rates are just absolutely terrible.

And no, the diminishing returns thing isn't a thing, that's just observation bias. Most FCs have found zero motes in the time you found the amount you did. You happened to get lucky twice early on, and then you got the same terrible luck as the rest of us the rest of the time. Putting a pattern to that is silly - it's like winning the jumbo cactpot on day one and then saying that because you never won it again, there must be diminishing returns on winning the jumbo cactpot.

I have a Quick question: If I just want to maximize obtaining Crafting Materia I should just make 1 voyage to Sector 17? If I select just 1 Sector do I have a better chance to obtain those items?

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Jade-Nephrite

I have a Quick question: If I just want to maximize obtaining Crafting Materia I should just make 1 voyage to Sector 17? If I select just 1 Sector do I have a better chance to obtain those items?

---

No, you have equal chance of finding items in a sector regardless of what other sectors you visit. The sector visits are completely independent and do not affect each other. Hitting just one at a time can be faster than hitting multiple because most sectors are closer to other sectors than home is, and all trips out have a 12 hour fixed initial cost added to them. Also, sector 17 does not have Cunning materia, only Comp and Command IVs (IIIs too of those, but the IIIs are much rarer than the IVs - weird, but don't complain!). Sector 13 has Cunning and Competence IV/III materia. But, irritatingly, 13 and 17 are on opposite sides of the map. Hitting them both with one ship takes a 82 range just for those two, and it's very slow (relatively speaking). With a speed 100 ship, it takes ~48 hours to hit both, while it only takes ~26 hours to hit 13 on its own and ~37 to hit 17 on its own. However, if you want IV materia, those are the only two sectors with crafter IV materia. If that's all you care about, IV materia, then just hit those two sectors if you can. On a freighter-style ship (bronco rigging, invincible hull, tatanora fore/aft castle), it actually takes longer to hit 13->17 than to hit 13 twice on two different trips.

But, it should be noted that sector 7 has grade III crafter materia, as does sector 3. Sector 7 has Cunning and Command, and sector 3 has Competence and Command. Hitting sector 7 and 17 is much quicker than 13 and 17. It's also better to do 7->17 if you care most about Command materia, as 13 doesn't have any. It's worth noting though that the earlier a sector is, the fewer items you seem to get. An optimal yield from sector 3 is like a normal yield from sector 13, or something.

Not sure if this is relevant but i thought it might be intresting. Thanks for the awesome guide btw, it helped me a lot!

FOUR dravanian mote.

http://i66.tinypic.com/25tymty.jpg

And this is the airship... All Bronco parts.

http://i63.tinypic.com/2llnll2.jpg

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by KogentaStormbringer

Not sure if this is relevant but i thought it might be intresting. Thanks for the awesome guide btw, it helped me a lot!

FOUR dravanian mote.

http://i66.tinypic.com/25tymty.jpg

And this is the airship... All Bronco parts.

http://i63.tinypic.com/2llnll2.jpg

---

oh man, that's great news. I'd given up on bronco orz.
At least now we know it's possible, if unlikely.

But maybe the chance will be like... 1% for Broncos? lol