Hey, I noticed the tradeskill guides are crazy out of date, if there is interest I will write new ones. I have composed a tinkering guide to start. I welcome any suggestions or modifications.
Phinella’s Guide to Tinkering. Rain of Fear ed.
Tinkering was the last of the tradeskills I completed. This turned out to be a very good idea, because it is the most expensive and time consuming; tradeskilling in general has become much easier, (even fletching, which was difficult pre-RoF for those who were not wood elves or followers of Karana.) Tinkering did not really follow the other tradeskills into the "new era" where just killing level appropriate mobs will net you tradeskill items for almost anything. Instead, it remained frustrating and expensive, though keep in mind it is much simpler than it used to be. Classic tinkering was particularly torturous. So appreciate what you have. Tinkering today still requires a lot of farming and a great deal of platinum. Pay attention to the cost of the ingredients for the listed combines, I have tried to make them as easy to farm and as cheap as possible, but that really doesn't say much. Also, you will benefit most from this guide if you read it at least once in its entirety before starting to learn the skill.
In the process of learning any tradeskill, it is advised you do the trophy quest from the NPCs in West Freeport. They are to the left of the gate if you are facing it, in the field outside the city. Do this as soon as possible, and always keep your trophy equipped. I will be discussing the best way to skill that up as well. I assume you have mastery of tinkering in this guide and the maximum level of salvage. This requires level 85 (for salvage,) and a quest from Ak'anon, (for mastery.) The mastery quest NPC is the one that sells tinkering supplies, in fact he sells all the supplies you need to make the stalking probe you have to make for the quest, (that's the entire quest.) When you give this to him, he will give you three books. They cost 3, 6, and 9 aas to scribe consecutively. Somehow these aas count towards your total aas, but not the total spent. This is the only way to get mastery, it is not an aa gnomes start with.
All gnomes start with a 75 tinkering, and as all tinkers are gnomes, you can generally skip to that point immediately. If your character has lower than a 50 in tinkering for whatever reason, visit Crescent Reach* and talk to the tinkering tradeskill gnome behind the bank. This should raise your skill to a bit above 50. You can use this guide from there.
* Alternately, you can do the tinkering tasks in Abysmal Sea, this will give you the ability to process raw dark matter and raw infused dark matter, but it takes many, many more combines to complete the quest than in Crescent Reach, where you can combine until your skill is up and move on for the most part. Dark matter and infused dark matter are important for various items, but you can also just turn the raw forms into the appropriate NPCs for less than if you had processed it yourself - 2 from the npc, versus 3 if you did the quests and have done the combine enough times in the past. Look up Gates of DIscord TInkering Freebie on eqtraders.com for more info on these quests.
Before I forget, most things you will tinker do not stack, and have horrible, if any, resale value. A lot of times you are just better off destroying the items as you go.
low 50s to 75 - standard bow cam, all purchased components
75 to 95 - spyglass. This requires you to make collapsible fishing poles. All purchased components.
95 to 102 - stalking probe. This requires you to make firewater, you'll be making that quite a lot. All purchased components.
102 to 122 - powered gloves. All purchased components.
122 to 135 - tinkered catapults. Save as many of these as you can, you will need them. This is a frustrating step because you need a 148 trivial crafted bow to make it, (shaped ashwood recurve bow (hemp).) I suggest skilling up fletching to the appropriate skill and making them yourself. All of the components besides the bow can be purchased, and the bow is crafted from purchased components, as well.
135 to 162 - Advanced propulsion unit. Now the farming begins. Learn to enjoy Plane of Innovation, where the saltpeter and coiled springs can be found. This will be your new home. Save the pinions, steel ball bearings, and other tinkering tradeskill items you get there, they will be useful to you later, and you want to minimize your farming time. (I became very burnt out on farming, especially in Plane of Innovation by the time I was finished, but I did almost reach 5k robots killed.) Once again, save as many of the advanced propulsion units as you can. You will need them.
162 to 187 - Happy Dragon . This uses the advanced propulsion unit, which, of course, uses the tinkered catapults. You can destroy the Happy Dragons if you like. This requires gnomish fireworks. That recipe makes four fireworks, you can inventory the first one and destroy the other three. Only the first one can be used in this recipe.
187 to 196 - Meteorological rocket (optional) You can keep going with the advanced propulsion units and make these to raise your skill a bit higher. I skipped these, partly because I was getting impatient.
196 to 208 - innovative bow cam. The ingredients are farmed from Plane of Innovation, but the clockwork grease is -foraged- there. However, it can also drop in the Mechamatic Guardian, Fortress Mechanotus, and related zones. In Dragonscale Hills is a Cannon to Fortress Mechanotus. One of the NPCs next to it will give you a "mission" that simply lets you enter the Mechamatic Guardian if you say "head into" to him. I personally prefer the Mechamatic Guardian to Fortress Mechanotus. Possibly because there are more robots to kill and you can respawn the zone at will. Save any tradeskill items you get from these places, except the mechanotablets, (unless you intend to get into high end research.) You will need to make a small grease jar to put the clockwork grease in. This requires pottery at a trivial of 31. Just do the Crescent Reach quests to get as high as it will take you in pottery and this will be easy.
208 to 220 - Geerlok modules. Pick an item you want to farm from the listed ingredients for each one and focus on that. I chose the geerlok automated hammer module because I had a great deal of acrylia lying around already. Everything else is purchased.
*At this point, or sooner, depending on how fast you skill up and your supply of platinum, you should be buying large quantities of miragestones, dream dust, bonded loam, and rhenium ore. If you are skilling up a trophy, you will need at least 1k bonded loam and rhenium ore, possibly more. Try not to think about what this means the future combines cost in total, especially since one of the combines will also require a platinum bar.
220 to 282 - Molten metal bow cam, e'cian ice bow cam, wind metal bow cam, or planar steel bow cam, (personal preference.) this one is a much larger jump than previously. These require bricks of ore from PoP. You have to fashion the bolts and gears using blacksmithing with a trivial of 102, (both are made from one combine.) Fortunately, this is not very high, but I advise going at least a bit higher to make for more successful combines.
282 to 288 - Crab cracker (optional.) Honestly, you are probably not going to get enough knuckle joints, even in all your farming of springs, to make enough of these for 6 skill ups at this level. It's possible, but unlikely. Knuckle joints drop uncommonly in Plane of Innovation. Just do as many combines as you can to skill up, and then move to the next step.
288 to 295 - Mirage goggles. If you didn't think tinkering was expensive before, start adding up what you spent on miragestones from the bazaar, (or how much time it will take you to farm as many as you need!) and the platinum bars you will need to use. You will also be using the dream dust on these. Altogether, this is a very expensive, pretty much unmovable, novelty item. This has no resale value. To make the feymetal bars for this (which are what require the dream dust and platinum bars,) you will need to skill jewelcrafting up to at least 100. I suggest going higher if you don't want to lose your investment, and consider jewelcrafting mastery.
295 to 300 -Wok (optional.) Clockwork carapaces drop even less than knuckle joints, so chances are you aren't going to be fully skilling up to 300 or even putting a dent in your trophy by making woks. Either way, you'll have to farm Plane of Innovation for the carapaces. Just make as many combines as you can from what you have saved up farming and move on.
295+ - Sacred chest symbol of the skeptic, veeshan, etc (personal preference.) To do this, you have to do a quest for every 200 combines. It involves killing Lichtors of the Heart is Sanctus Seru, (which is easy and there are generally enough up,) and chetari warriors in Dragon Necropolis. The warriors spawn randomly and everywhere in the chetari area and there generally aren't that many of them up. This part of the quest is torturous. It takes 9 successful combines to move a rank 6 trophy 1% towards rank 7. This means you need to quest a minimum of 5 times to get enough patterns, (you are able to make 200 chest symbol patterns per book.) This requires 1 bonded loam and 1 rhenium ore per combine. I hope you were saving up. On my server, rhenium ore was easy to find, but I had to regularly buy bonded loam long before I got to this point to have enough. Coincidentally, rhenium ore and bonded loam happen to drop in Dragon Necropolis. It will, however, take you a very, very large amount of time to farm up enough loam, since it is a rather uncommon drop. To get the quest for the symbols, do cntrl+f in Ak'anon and look for Artisan Vidi Cogsworthy. Unless you are intimately familiar with his location, you will need to use find to locate him. The path to him is fairly convoluted.
Now that you have achieved 300 in tinkering and a max rank trophy, I assume you are probably ready to start making ambleshift's opal automated amalgamators to sell and make nice chunks of plat, (especially with how much you've spent.) Not so fast! This item requires a number of other tradeskills, as well, including blacksmithing, fletching, tailoring, brewing, and possibly others, (I was a master artisan by this time so I didn't have to skill anything up, and hence I might have missed a skill or two.) Most of the subcombines are not tinkering. However, you will be able to make some of the strangest items tradeskilling can produce, and you'll have mastered the skill, which is really the point of all tradeskilling, right?
Phinella’s Guide to Tinkering. Rain of Fear ed.
Tinkering was the last of the tradeskills I completed. This turned out to be a very good idea, because it is the most expensive and time consuming; tradeskilling in general has become much easier, (even fletching, which was difficult pre-RoF for those who were not wood elves or followers of Karana.) Tinkering did not really follow the other tradeskills into the "new era" where just killing level appropriate mobs will net you tradeskill items for almost anything. Instead, it remained frustrating and expensive, though keep in mind it is much simpler than it used to be. Classic tinkering was particularly torturous. So appreciate what you have. Tinkering today still requires a lot of farming and a great deal of platinum. Pay attention to the cost of the ingredients for the listed combines, I have tried to make them as easy to farm and as cheap as possible, but that really doesn't say much. Also, you will benefit most from this guide if you read it at least once in its entirety before starting to learn the skill.
In the process of learning any tradeskill, it is advised you do the trophy quest from the NPCs in West Freeport. They are to the left of the gate if you are facing it, in the field outside the city. Do this as soon as possible, and always keep your trophy equipped. I will be discussing the best way to skill that up as well. I assume you have mastery of tinkering in this guide and the maximum level of salvage. This requires level 85 (for salvage,) and a quest from Ak'anon, (for mastery.) The mastery quest NPC is the one that sells tinkering supplies, in fact he sells all the supplies you need to make the stalking probe you have to make for the quest, (that's the entire quest.) When you give this to him, he will give you three books. They cost 3, 6, and 9 aas to scribe consecutively. Somehow these aas count towards your total aas, but not the total spent. This is the only way to get mastery, it is not an aa gnomes start with.
All gnomes start with a 75 tinkering, and as all tinkers are gnomes, you can generally skip to that point immediately. If your character has lower than a 50 in tinkering for whatever reason, visit Crescent Reach* and talk to the tinkering tradeskill gnome behind the bank. This should raise your skill to a bit above 50. You can use this guide from there.
* Alternately, you can do the tinkering tasks in Abysmal Sea, this will give you the ability to process raw dark matter and raw infused dark matter, but it takes many, many more combines to complete the quest than in Crescent Reach, where you can combine until your skill is up and move on for the most part. Dark matter and infused dark matter are important for various items, but you can also just turn the raw forms into the appropriate NPCs for less than if you had processed it yourself - 2 from the npc, versus 3 if you did the quests and have done the combine enough times in the past. Look up Gates of DIscord TInkering Freebie on eqtraders.com for more info on these quests.
Before I forget, most things you will tinker do not stack, and have horrible, if any, resale value. A lot of times you are just better off destroying the items as you go.
low 50s to 75 - standard bow cam, all purchased components
75 to 95 - spyglass. This requires you to make collapsible fishing poles. All purchased components.
95 to 102 - stalking probe. This requires you to make firewater, you'll be making that quite a lot. All purchased components.
102 to 122 - powered gloves. All purchased components.
122 to 135 - tinkered catapults. Save as many of these as you can, you will need them. This is a frustrating step because you need a 148 trivial crafted bow to make it, (shaped ashwood recurve bow (hemp).) I suggest skilling up fletching to the appropriate skill and making them yourself. All of the components besides the bow can be purchased, and the bow is crafted from purchased components, as well.
135 to 162 - Advanced propulsion unit. Now the farming begins. Learn to enjoy Plane of Innovation, where the saltpeter and coiled springs can be found. This will be your new home. Save the pinions, steel ball bearings, and other tinkering tradeskill items you get there, they will be useful to you later, and you want to minimize your farming time. (I became very burnt out on farming, especially in Plane of Innovation by the time I was finished, but I did almost reach 5k robots killed.) Once again, save as many of the advanced propulsion units as you can. You will need them.
162 to 187 - Happy Dragon . This uses the advanced propulsion unit, which, of course, uses the tinkered catapults. You can destroy the Happy Dragons if you like. This requires gnomish fireworks. That recipe makes four fireworks, you can inventory the first one and destroy the other three. Only the first one can be used in this recipe.
187 to 196 - Meteorological rocket (optional) You can keep going with the advanced propulsion units and make these to raise your skill a bit higher. I skipped these, partly because I was getting impatient.
196 to 208 - innovative bow cam. The ingredients are farmed from Plane of Innovation, but the clockwork grease is -foraged- there. However, it can also drop in the Mechamatic Guardian, Fortress Mechanotus, and related zones. In Dragonscale Hills is a Cannon to Fortress Mechanotus. One of the NPCs next to it will give you a "mission" that simply lets you enter the Mechamatic Guardian if you say "head into" to him. I personally prefer the Mechamatic Guardian to Fortress Mechanotus. Possibly because there are more robots to kill and you can respawn the zone at will. Save any tradeskill items you get from these places, except the mechanotablets, (unless you intend to get into high end research.) You will need to make a small grease jar to put the clockwork grease in. This requires pottery at a trivial of 31. Just do the Crescent Reach quests to get as high as it will take you in pottery and this will be easy.
208 to 220 - Geerlok modules. Pick an item you want to farm from the listed ingredients for each one and focus on that. I chose the geerlok automated hammer module because I had a great deal of acrylia lying around already. Everything else is purchased.
*At this point, or sooner, depending on how fast you skill up and your supply of platinum, you should be buying large quantities of miragestones, dream dust, bonded loam, and rhenium ore. If you are skilling up a trophy, you will need at least 1k bonded loam and rhenium ore, possibly more. Try not to think about what this means the future combines cost in total, especially since one of the combines will also require a platinum bar.
220 to 282 - Molten metal bow cam, e'cian ice bow cam, wind metal bow cam, or planar steel bow cam, (personal preference.) this one is a much larger jump than previously. These require bricks of ore from PoP. You have to fashion the bolts and gears using blacksmithing with a trivial of 102, (both are made from one combine.) Fortunately, this is not very high, but I advise going at least a bit higher to make for more successful combines.
282 to 288 - Crab cracker (optional.) Honestly, you are probably not going to get enough knuckle joints, even in all your farming of springs, to make enough of these for 6 skill ups at this level. It's possible, but unlikely. Knuckle joints drop uncommonly in Plane of Innovation. Just do as many combines as you can to skill up, and then move to the next step.
288 to 295 - Mirage goggles. If you didn't think tinkering was expensive before, start adding up what you spent on miragestones from the bazaar, (or how much time it will take you to farm as many as you need!) and the platinum bars you will need to use. You will also be using the dream dust on these. Altogether, this is a very expensive, pretty much unmovable, novelty item. This has no resale value. To make the feymetal bars for this (which are what require the dream dust and platinum bars,) you will need to skill jewelcrafting up to at least 100. I suggest going higher if you don't want to lose your investment, and consider jewelcrafting mastery.
295 to 300 -Wok (optional.) Clockwork carapaces drop even less than knuckle joints, so chances are you aren't going to be fully skilling up to 300 or even putting a dent in your trophy by making woks. Either way, you'll have to farm Plane of Innovation for the carapaces. Just make as many combines as you can from what you have saved up farming and move on.
295+ - Sacred chest symbol of the skeptic, veeshan, etc (personal preference.) To do this, you have to do a quest for every 200 combines. It involves killing Lichtors of the Heart is Sanctus Seru, (which is easy and there are generally enough up,) and chetari warriors in Dragon Necropolis. The warriors spawn randomly and everywhere in the chetari area and there generally aren't that many of them up. This part of the quest is torturous. It takes 9 successful combines to move a rank 6 trophy 1% towards rank 7. This means you need to quest a minimum of 5 times to get enough patterns, (you are able to make 200 chest symbol patterns per book.) This requires 1 bonded loam and 1 rhenium ore per combine. I hope you were saving up. On my server, rhenium ore was easy to find, but I had to regularly buy bonded loam long before I got to this point to have enough. Coincidentally, rhenium ore and bonded loam happen to drop in Dragon Necropolis. It will, however, take you a very, very large amount of time to farm up enough loam, since it is a rather uncommon drop. To get the quest for the symbols, do cntrl+f in Ak'anon and look for Artisan Vidi Cogsworthy. Unless you are intimately familiar with his location, you will need to use find to locate him. The path to him is fairly convoluted.
Now that you have achieved 300 in tinkering and a max rank trophy, I assume you are probably ready to start making ambleshift's opal automated amalgamators to sell and make nice chunks of plat, (especially with how much you've spent.) Not so fast! This item requires a number of other tradeskills, as well, including blacksmithing, fletching, tailoring, brewing, and possibly others, (I was a master artisan by this time so I didn't have to skill anything up, and hence I might have missed a skill or two.) Most of the subcombines are not tinkering. However, you will be able to make some of the strangest items tradeskilling can produce, and you'll have mastered the skill, which is really the point of all tradeskilling, right?
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