Sericulture in Othard

[FJerome]

Okay, so silk cultivation is a major historical aspect of East Asian culture and technology, right? So presumably the same goes for fictional Othard.

Except on Hydaelyn silkworms are nothing like real-world silkworms. Real world silkworm caterpillars are tiny docile things content to eat mulberry leaves all day. On Hydaelyn silkworms are the size of a full-grown Auri woman, extremely vicious, and with silk cocoons which they use to immobilize prey, more like a spider would than a moth larva.

Over in Eorzea weavers largely content themselves with gathering discarded cocoons found in the wild, so maybe that's what they're doing in Higashi and Doma too . . . but if they aren't, how the hells are they farming these things?

[Enkidoh]

Simple, they get hunters to hunt them specifically for that - ironically it's exactly what I used to do in FFXI against crawlers (the FFXIV version uses exactly the same model) and the silk I farmed from them always sold very well on the Auction House (AH) - I think the most a stack of 12 threads sold for for me was a then staggering 100k but then the in-game economy collapsed and the price plummeted, but it still sold for quite a bit.

So I'm going to assume it's the same here - because insects are of gargantuan proportions in Hydaelyn, the materials they produce would be even more valuable given the difficulty and danger in procuring them. Eorzea the most likely outcome is that adventurers would take up this task (specifically via quildleves), whereas in Othard hunters with relevant skill would instead probably be assigned to it instead (given FATEs feature crawlers in Othard, like "Leave the Meters Running" in Yanxia) this seems even more likely.

[LineageRazor]

Bear in mind, too, that in addition to hunting the things, gatherers DO just gather discarded cocoons found in the wild. While Crawler Cocoons are solely drops from monsters, Twincoons can be farmed from monsters OR they can be harvested from nodes in the Peaks. Silkworm cocoons are harvested as well, in the East Shroud (though these have no apparent monster progenitor, and may actually come from tiny, docile worms).

[Okamimaru]

The answer can be partially found in the types of silk used in crafting, the items they craft, and the source we obtain the items... silkworm silk and spider silk are used in entirely different ways in the real world... some types needed I'm sure are gathered in the wild from small caterpillars while other types may be gathered from the "nests" of the monsters or the locals rely on trade with adventures...

[Iscah]

There's also diremite silk, which they spit out as an attack, so harvesting that would probably be as simple as picking up the strands afterwards.