Macro crafting on a poor connection tips?

I live in a very rural area, and have a really terrible internet connection (3 mbps DSL that doesn't even work half the time). It's bad enough that I actually usually use my cell phone's 4G hotspot for connection but it is prone to occasional bouts of lag.

I'm tired of hand crafting everything. It was okay in Heavensward and at the start of Stormblood when I could more or less count on HQing a final product with NQ mats, but now that it seems HQ mats are important, it takes me forever to manually do a craft. But on such a poor connection, macros can be pretty unreliable for me.

TL;DR of this is: Are there any of you out there that craft with macros on a shoddy connection? I realize the only thing I can probably do is to stretch out the pause time at the end of each line (I have it at 4 seconds right now which seems to be okay but I'm still occasionally breaking crafts) but I was just wondering if there were any other ideas like a better pause time or any third party tools to help even my connection out.

I'm still never macroing an end product, though. Too risky.

HQ macros shouldn't be necessary unless you're doing non-spec craft. At which point if you're using more than 2 requisite crafts of HQ mats then it's probably better to skip out on doing that and just going straight into maker's mark to guarantee it from all NQ. It will even out, if not be more efficient using maker's mark if you aren't doing requisite HQs.

All I can say is if you're on a shady connection, try using WTFast VPN in hopes of alleviating it. But aside from that all you can do is manually craft, or increase the wait times in the macros :)

only other solution is something that unfortunately would get you banned and that would be using a software called simba which you take pictures of skill icons assign it a variable and a timer and you construct your macro there and tell it to trigger when skills can be used (use grey'd out icons) to say not usable. but this falls under "botting" despite it being non adaptive. i wish they would make it run on system where you can put <ac> at the end instead of the <wait.3> and it would wait for the timer. like i said this would be a way of doing it however i don't suggest you do this as it is a TOS breach but other than that there is no way of doing macro's with lag unless you do it manually :(

Used to do this on War of Legends back when it was up but took a intermediate level of coding to do. Else you can follow Kaurhz advice.

If certain times of day are more stable, try and plan crafting sessions around that. I get awful lag in evenings at times, so I try not to craft during those hours. If it is truly random, you're doing as much as you can by adding an extra second to the `<wait.#>`.

Using a cancel macro when you notice a spike can help as well. I've salvaged a few crafts from breaking by having this handy:

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/echo Macro stopped <se.1>

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Another thing you can do if your connection is causing you to fail macros is open your macro list so it's on the screen when you craft and just input the steps manually during times when your connection is giving you issues.

Elamys, my best advise. Make every wait.2 a wait.4 and every wait.3 a wait.5. Avoid evenings, netflix lag is real. No idea of your seclude but think about waking up a bit early and crafting during breakfast because there will probably be fewer people online and sucking bandwith then.

Now I am going to get political on you but not in a bad way.

I too live in a rural area. I have fiber to my wall and the second lowest electrical rates in the USA. This is because my electricity comes from a public utility district (look this up) which owns the full vertical shebang. Parts of several dams, the transmission lines and their right of way, the transformers, everything.

In most of the country the electrical companies might own nothing. They buy electricity on an exchange, they pay transmission companies to get it to you and then bill you. The transmission companies have no incentive to run fiber like my PUD did. You will get a decent connection when they get a government subsidy to provide it.

But even privately owned electrical companies that are full vertical, like New York's Con Edison, who could reduce costs and generate income from fiber like my PUD did, are waiting for that subsidy.

/rant

Sorry but stories like yours touch a nerve with me.

One thing that helps would be to craft in a house plot, even if you don't own a house. Living areas are often devoid of players and a bit small, it'll lag less. Whenever I'm crafting, I always do it at home, either in the garden or better yet, in my room. It's a slight improvement, but an improvement nonetheless.

Thanks for the replies everyone, I'll just drag out my pause times for now.

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Originally Posted by Shadygrove

Sorry but stories like yours touch a nerve with me.

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It's something my fiancee and I have discussed many, many times. AT&T is the only internet provider available here, and they know it. We pay more for our crappy DSL than fiber customers do, sometimes twice as much. And a lot of game companies completely forget that they have a rural fan/customer base. Automatic downloads, huge file sizes, constant patching, streaming, terrible handling of latency... FFXIV is particularly unfriendly to those with bad connections. The fact that you don't get even a tiny chance to get your materials back if you DC kills me.

inb4 "just move somewhere else" - we're trying, obviously.

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Originally Posted by Elamys

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inb4 "just move somewhere else" - we're trying, obviously.

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If you wish to stay rural, I would suggest Douglas or Grant counties, WA. I am not sure, but Whatcom County WA. might be going fiber as well.