Retainer mining: why does it have collectibles

[Remnar]

When I send my mining retainer out on a venture to collect items, some of the items cannot be used to craft but are only for collectibles. Pyerite, or Yellow Copper Ore for example. Why did SE put those on the list for retainers to get? They are useless unless you, as a miner, get them as a collectible.

[XiXiQ]

I have often wondered that myself.
and about the fish....

[XiXiQ]

I shouldn't have spoken. Today one of my retainers bought back a collectable fish.

[Remnar]

I guess the question still remains. How can I get retainers to get collectibles? A collectible item that the NPC's take has a icon to identify it as a collectible.

[HyoMinPark]

I guess the question still remains. How can I get retainers to get collectibles? A collectible item that the NPC's take has a icon to identify it as a collectible.

This isn’t a feature available to retainers. They can gather the collectible items, but they can’t actually gather collectibles, sadly.

[DrWho2010]

there are a *few* (not many) recipes where it uses a collectible item.

[Stormfur]

Like Maximum said, in a few cases, an item that was once a collectible shows up later on in a recipe in its non-collectible version. So I suppose those items are there in case they'd fit into a future recipe somehow. Of course if you've never gotten them as a collectible, your retainer will give you that dumb message of "you can't send your retainer out for this because you never gathered it."

[Remnar]

I have checked some of the items that can be gathered as collectibles, to see if they are used in recipes. Some of them are, but things like Yellow Copper Ore isn't one of them. It does not make sense to put these items on the retainers and have them there for so long. It is a waste of their money, and resources the software is using. So what I suggest SE to do is either add the ability for retainers to gather collectibles, or remove them all together and put in items from Ephemeral nodes (that are used for crafting only). If SE has no plans on making these collectibles be part of a recipe, or give retainers the ability to collect, why bother to waste money and resources to put them in, in the first place?

[XiXiQ]

I think these days the real problem with the retainers quick ventures is the pool of items is just too large, and half of it is pointless trash (a single ore or other mat, a single level 5 fish, some sub-50 weapon). A lot of it just needs to be gone from the list.

[Nanami_Naniwa]

I was confused for a second. I thought you'll get a collectable with an actuall collectability - Like 380 Torreya Log.

So when do you actually get this? I sent all my retainers either on quick exploration (for maximum effort) or for specific items (hunting, mining, etc).