Airship Guide

[Nyalia]

As far as I remember it's 26 hours and 53 minutes =) Not that it really matters

Though they sounded precise, my numbers were an estimate created with the trip planner tool on the airship log spreadsheets. Since I don't have exact coordinates for sector 24, I had to use the rounded distance numbers the game displays. The formula we're using is exact, but internally, the distances between two sectors aren't whole numbers for calculating trip times. So, instead of it being "28" away from the Home sector, SC24 is actually more like 28.1 away. But, as you say, it doesn't really matter - the numbers are close enough, and the relative difference between the 150 speed and 154 speed builds should be the same (about 30 minutes).

I'm not having very much luck opening the new sectors (23 and 24). Any hints?

Increase your speed. Having a Tatanora and/or Viltgance rigging is really nice for when you want to discover new sectors or get small numbers of specific drops. Also, hit both sectors with all ships that can. It's not super-efficient as far as time goes, but it's more efficient (imo) than hitting other sectors. Do home -> 21 -> 19, of course, because it's shorter than the other way around. Give up on getting other items for now and just have all four ships hit those two sectors. When our FC did it, we unlocked both at once with the second ship and obtained total junk with all four, wasting two days of airship ventures. But, not really wasting, 'cause we got both unlocks.

[Nyalia]

From what I've been able to tell, for every item and retrieval score, there's a range of values you can get as far as the number of items obtained. This is modified by the sector number as well - the later sectors drop more than the earlier sectors for the same item and retrieval score. I'm not sure if it's the sector number, the number of stars for the sector, or the number of ceruleum barrels that matters for that part (it could be any of those three). This does not mean that a score of "Normal" will always give less than a score of "High" - the ranges overlap, so you can get like 10 of an item from a Normal yield, but only 9 from a High yield. On average, higher scores mean more items.

From what I've seen, Iron Voyage Spoils from SC24 have the following yield ranges:
Low: 1 (is this Disappointing, or is Disappointing even lower than Low?)
Sub-normal: 1
Normal: 1
High: 1
Optimal: 1-2


The letter score is, theoretically, a general evaluation of how well your ship did on the last sector visited. My datamining way earlier in this thread proves that. Because only the last sector is used, I tend to think that each sector gets a letter grade, but the game only shows you the last one due to a last-minute design change to the screen (or the UI folks didn't talk to the mechanics programmers). Regardless, in practice, the letter grade really has little to do with how well your ship did. Instead, the grade is based almost entirely on your Favor stat and has nothing to do with how many items you obtained or whatnot. If you look carefully at a bunch of logs, you'll notice that your letter grade is always either equal to or one higher than the exp bonus rating for the last sector the ship visited. So, if it says your last sector was "abysmal," you will only ever get a C or B grade. If it was "substandard," you'll either get a B or A grade. "satisfactory" means A or S, "decent" means S or SS, and "outstanding" always gives SS. Your rating was "outstanding" and it was the last sector you visited, so you got an SS grade. If you look at the screenshot just above this post, they reported an "abysmal" rating in their last sector and were given a B grade.

In other words, the letters are totally meaningless and misleading. Ignore them.

[Suirieko]

[Waeksyn]

I'm not having very much luck opening the new sectors (23 and 24). 0/6 in sector 19 to open 23, 0/9 in sector 21 to open 24.

My 4 airships are:

Survey / Retrieve / Speed / Range / Favour

1: 120 / 140 / 050 / 084 / 136
2: 110 / 122 7 068 / 094 / 118
3: 100 / 104 / 086 / 104 / 100
4: 090 / 086 / 104 / 114 / 082

Any hints? I've been sending ships 2 and 4 to sector 21, ship 3 to 19. I have all other zones open BUT have not visited Sector 22 yet if that makes a difference.

FYI, Ship 1 is a beast at low level farming. I've been sending it to sector 3 to farm TIII crafting materia and it returns with between 20 and 40 materia or between 30 and 60 Moko grass each time. Single sector, once per day (about 23 hours).

My goal is to open the new zones, get myself a Zu mount then shift back to crafting materia farming. Since the update, I've had zero Tier IV crafting materia. Not sure if that was nerfed.

I can alter my ship configs but it takes some time to craft the airship parts as mine is a solo FC. Right now, I took the easy way out to minimize the amount of parts constructed as per the original post's suggestions for 4 ships that avoid duplication of parts.

[Jeykama]

I'm not having very much luck opening the new sectors (23 and 24). 0/6 in sector 19 to open 23, 0/9 in sector 21 to open 24.

My ships took a week or to unlock, but I set them to ~80 range (what you need to hit both 19 and 21) and the highest speed of what parts I had available. That way I'd be getting 2 hits every 3 days or so for each ship.

I too haven't really been getting much in the way of materia (Command III from S23 come on...) but maybe once we've gotten our fill of Zus I'll check out materia farming again.

[mayonnegg]

Is Dinosaur Fossil really just sector 15?

[Waeksyn]

Looking at the information posted since the 3.2 update, I would guess that they adjusted the algorithm to require more favor to get the higher value drops. At the same time, they introduced a new tier of parts that has higher stats. Forecastle is key for Favour and Aftcastle is key for Retrieval. Using higher values of those components results in reduced speed and range, which makes the trips take longer. By doing all of the above, SE are slowing down how fast people can collect high value drops, which balances out the increase in the value of those drops (addition of tier V and IV spoil).

So, slow, high favour builds seem to be the choice for farming now?

[Nyalia]

Looking at the information posted since the 3.2 update, I would guess that they adjusted the algorithm to require more favor to get the higher value drops.

Nothing in the update says they changed how favor works. They just said that drop rates changed, not the algorithm.

[Waeksyn]

Nothing in the update says they changed how favor works. They just said that drop rates changed, not the algorithm.

Changing the algorithm the way I've noted will change the drop rate.

[Nyalia]

Changing the algorithm the way I've noted will change the drop rate.

They've never changed an algorithm, ever, with one exception (and they explicitly stated it when they did - tank attack power). Why would they start now changing things in secret? The simplest explanation is always the most likely.

Sorry if I sound a little sharp, it just grates on me how often people make up fanciful explanations for what they see, trying to fit an extremely tiny dataset into a generalized pattern. You need at least a few thousand datapoints before trying to fit sample data to a pattern, and that's still a small dataset.