As the title says.. or asks.

Is it possible, to gather 1000 shards in 1 hour, at any level? Most interested about the level 50's, as I am yet to reach that.

The reason I'm asking is because I've run rather low, or completely empty on shards lately, due to crafting like mad... I like to keep all my crafts roughly at same level, to support eachother.

So I looked to shard farming... and oooh boy.. to farm 1000 shards or more. Yeah, that looked like a very time consuming nightmare.

So I tried something else... I made an alt character. Leveled that to 15, and during the envoy mission, I took the time to unlock all crafting classes, and leveled them to 5, did the class quests for each.

All this, took me about 6-6½ hours.
It brought me:

Fire - 1176
Ice - 713
Wind - 1486
Earth - 1041
Lightning - 756
Water - 757

Total: 5929 shards. (And about 11500 gil from quests).

I did use a few shards ofcourse, getting the classes to level 5, so total amount is just a tad over 6000.
Reaching level 5, only took about 10-15 mins per class.


So is gathering the shards with mining/botanist faster at 40+?