People are vastly overestimating how many shards you can bring in via mining, botany, or retainers.

Quote Originally Posted by Chiramu View Post
1000 shards takes 10 minutes to farm, plus if you grind them on 50 nodes you can get a piesteskin, toadskin or boarskin map while you are getting them.
That's 1.6 shards on average every 1 second. Even if you use proper cooldowns and chug cordial on cooldown, you won't get anywhere even remotely close to that many.

Quote Originally Posted by RegnumMagik View Post
I think a much more realistic answer is 2.1K every few hours if you're actually going for mastercraft.
This is the closest thing so far. Over the course of a 24 hour period, a single retainer can bring in 2160 shards if you send them out the split second they get back. If you have 4 mining/botany retainers for some reason, that would be 2160 in 6 hours, or 8640 per day. That's a lot of shards, but it means really being on the ball with sending them out, too.