How Fast Can We Go? Craft Optimization

[White Blade]

In the Craft skill, if you exceed the craft budget by double you cut it production in half, if you exceed it by triple in a third (and so on). What this means is that, properly optimized, a character who exceeds the craft budget can create items extremely quickly. If we assume no skill points, what's peak that we can hit? What's the peak that can be hit with skills?

Human Cleric 1 (Artifice), INT 15, Apprentice (Craftsman) and Mark of Making has +10 to all craft rolls, meaning that you can make almost anything with a safe roll of twenty with appropriate artisanship. For base DC 10 and 20, that's 40 GP per week, one GP per hour worked, so you could turn out Artisan's Clothes every hour or a Peasant's clothes every six minutes. For base DC of 5 and 15, that's 30 GP per week.

At third level, the same cleric can cast Guidance of the Avatar to reach +28 (you lose Apprentice's bonus) and a safe roll of 38 but it's limited to the number of times per day of the casting since (as far as I know) you cannot use Craft to make things in bulk (e.g. specify that you can build ) but if you want to build something big, Guidance gives a Competence bonus and Divine Insight gives you a Insight bonus so technically speaking they stack. +36 will give you a safe roll of 46.

The standard magic items will overwrite Apprentice/Guidance's bonus (RIP), but they can exceed it - A tenth level cleric with Divine Insight and a +30 bonus to craft could easily build at +51, 255 GP per week of craftsmanship or an artisan's cloth per ten minutes. Of course, by this point you have Fabricate at least 2/day and this is all a worthless exercise.

Are there any ways to go faster before ninth level? Or sixth level, if we're trying to beat Trapsmith Eternal Wand of Fabricate (although I have a question about how Fabricate magic items work and if you can use it to mass produce whatever by including it as a material component).

[Eurus]

The problem with optimizing skill checks is that there's a trick or two out there that can boost skill checks to infinite/arbitrary levels, so "as high as possible" is a bit of a solved question.

That being said... Item familiar is a big, straightforward bonus. Aid Another is also one route to really high checks, whether you go the simple route (hire a bunch of commoners) or something more elaborate involving some kind of mass summoning. A dip in Marshal can let you add your charisma bonus to the check as a circumstance bonus. An artificer with Item Alteration can stack magic item bonuses to an absurd level.

[Saintheart]

Over here (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?570571-Worldbuilding-Through-Optimization-A-Trip-To-Sindri%92s-Forge&highlight=Saintheart+Craft+favored+in+guild) might contain some ideas.

[White Blade]

The problem with optimizing skill checks is that there's a trick or two out there that can boost skill checks to infinite/arbitrary levels, so "as high as possible" is a bit of a solved question.

That being said... Item familiar is a big, straightforward bonus. Aid Another is also one route to really high checks, whether you go the simple route (hire a bunch of commoners) or something more elaborate involving some kind of mass summoning. A dip in Marshal can let you add your charisma bonus to the check as a circumstance bonus. An artificer with Item Alteration can stack magic item bonuses to an absurd level.

Lol at hire a bunch of commoners - Reinventing the assembly line! But substantially faster! One gold piece per minute with 240 aids, just rolling through the "medieval" economy without mercy. Make the Tippy Verse cry at level 1 with fifty gold pieces to your name.

Less obnoxiously, Marshal is pretty good and I hadn't spotted Item Alteration (good lord). I don't think that Item Familiar would actually work? It doesn't seem clear to me that the bonus is floating.

[ShurikVch]

The big thing for quickening crafting process is when the crafting itself is at double-(or even triple-)speed in comparison with usual:
Craft Expertise feat (Dragon # 339) doubles the crafting progress (in money) for any time period
Master Bowyer feat (Dragon # 350) craft masterwork bows and arrows twice as fast (and twice as cheap)
Forge of Sustenance allow to craft things trice as fast, because you don't need to eat, drink, rest, or sleep while working with it; 8000 gp
Maester PrC (Complete Adventurer) Quick Crafting CF allow to craft magical items twice as fast

Hammer of the Weaponsmith (Races of Faerûn) grants +10 circumstance bonus on Craft (weaponsmithing) checks, while cost only 2055 gp
Knife of the Bowyer (Magic of Faerûn) costs 2055 gp too, and grants +10 circumstance bonus on Craft (bowmaking)

Skillful Moment - 1st-level spell (Bard 1, Sorcerer/Wizard 1; Dragon #350) allow to "take 20"

Also, if Symbiotic Creature template is allowed, some of them can give notable bonus to craft checks: like Chitine - Craft (trapmaking) +6; Flamebrother Salamander - Craft (blacksmithing) +8, or Euphoric Imp - Craft (alchemy) +18

[AvatarVecna]

Alchemist Savant allows you to craft at 10x normal speed for alchemical items, and that's a single level investment (beyond meeting the prereqs anyway). Craft Expertise for x2, Forge Of Sustenance for x3, and Alchemist Savant for x10 is all well and good for getting x60 speed. We can't combo with Master Bowyer (while x4, it's not compatible with Alchemist Savant) or with Maester (alchemical items aren't magic items).

That has us making [Craft DC]x[Craft Check]x60 sp/week. Now let's see how high we can get our bonus without just giving up and going NI:

We start off with items enhancing our intelligence directly - all enhancement, all but one are slotless. We have artificers change all but the slotted one from enhancement to alchemical, armor, circumstance, competence, deflection, dodge, insight, luck, morale, natural armor, racial, resistance, shield, and size. A lot of those are usually more restricted to boosting particular stats, but the only restrictions the infusion places are "no profane, no sacred, and no dodge bonus to ac". Anything else goes. This gives us +90 to Int. We have base 18, +3 from age, +5 from tome, +5 from HD, +2 from race (let's say...grey elf?), and +90 from items, for a total of Int 123 with a modifier of +56. Technically speaking, circumstance, dodge, and racial are bonuses that can stack with each other indefinitely, but we're not going NI on purpose, so we're leaving that alone. For craft, we're pulling a similar stunt, but this time with the competence items. This ends up giving us +450 to our check.

We also have a Marshal friend who's doing similar things with their Cha modifier, except they've got +6 from race instead of +2 (unseelie fey/magic blooded lesser aasimar, for example). So they've got Cha 127 (+58) to help with our check, which is an circumstance bonus. We'll let that one stack with our Circumstance item, since it's a different circumstance, but multiple marshals explicitly can't stack with each other, so let's stop there.

Ranks 23
Int 56
Item Familiar 23
Skill Focus 3
Items 450
Marshal 58
Total +613

A spell that lets us "take 20" without taking extra time was mentioned earlier, I believe? So total check is 633. Let's assume we find an alchemical item with a DC of 13 or 23, and we use epic Accelerated Crafting to get the DC to exactly 633. That has us making 2404134 gp of progress per week (although it's a solid 24 hours per day spent crafting cuz of the forge). That's 343447.71 gp of progress per day, 14310.32 gp of progress per hour, 238.50 gp of progress per minute, and 23.85 gp of progress per round. That's almost but not quite 1 flask of holy water per round. If you spent a whole week making as much holy water as you could, you would mix up 96165 flasks worth. If we assume holy water weighs the same as regular water, and that the flask weight itself is negligible, that's 96165 lbs of water. That's 1040 cubic feet. That's a 10x10x10 ft cube of holy water.

Additionally, if you wanted to improve on this, I'm sure you could. I'm sure there's some spells out there that give profane/sacred/untyped bonuses to craft skills, or to Int/Cha directly. Any of those would improve on this. You could maybe use that feat that gives you a bonus rank to get you another +2 (1 rank, and 1 item familiar), and I'm sure there's feats besides Skill Focus that can boost craft. I stayed away from Aid Another cuz it gets NI easily.

[daremetoidareyo]

I did one of these:

https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?593029-Daremeto-s-Buildiworks-E6-Mundane-crafter

[MaxiDuRaritry]

Be an illithid savant. Pay a high-level caster to clone himself, then eat the clone (since eating a high-level caster is...somewhat difficult), giving yourself high-level spellcasting.

Cast polymorph any object onto a devastation vermin (https://www.d20srd.org/srd/epic/monsters/devastationVermin.htm) to turn it into a Gargantuan mountain giant to give it an Int score. It still has 128 HD, despite being a mountain giant. Now infect it with all four* types of devastation vermin entomanthropy (http://archive.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/re/20040621a) for another 512 HD, turning into a 640 HD creature with a 643 point skill cap. Have the x4 devastation vermin entomanthrope mountain giant devastation vermin retrain skill points into a bunch of Craft skills (or whatever other skills you want, really). Now clone the critter several times and eat the clones for their skills. Have the entomanthrope retrain, then clone and eat again until you have as many skills as you can hold.




*You can contract lycanthropy and entomanthropy multiple times.

[Maat Mons]

You mention Fabricate coming online at level 9 to make mundane Crafting obsolete. But Psionic Fabricate comes online at level 7. So I'd argue that 6th level should be the cutoff for builds to be considered.

If Dragon magazine is permitted, you can double the bonus from the Artifice domain with the Domain Focus ACF. While a +8 Competence bonus is less than you'd get with Hammer of the Armorsmith, Knife of the Bowyer, or Tongs of the Armorsmith, it's pretty close, and outfitting a large workforce with magic items would get expensive.

For people who aren't awesome enough to have PC class levels, there's also the option of getting the Artifice domain granted power from the Eberron variant of Adept. Or for people too lame to even have the good NPC classes, there's the Planar Touchstone feat. Though Planar Touchstone requires 5th level, and the idea that someone can get to 5th level but can't manage to get a level in something other than Commoner has always struck me as absurd.

[MaxiDuRaritry]

Even better, Linked Power + psionic fabricate comes online one level later, so you can craft whatever you want in a round or less. If the power you've Linked psionic fabricate to is an immediate action power, you can have that suit of full plate in your hand less than a second after you want it.

[Fouredged Sword]

You mention Fabricate coming online at level 9 to make mundane Crafting obsolete. But Psionic Fabricate comes online at level 7. So I'd argue that 6th level should be the cutoff for builds to be considered.

If Dragon magazine is permitted, you can double the bonus from the Artifice domain with the Domain Focus ACF. While a +8 Competence bonus is less than you'd get with Hammer of the Armorsmith, Knife of the Bowyer, or Tongs of the Armorsmith, it's pretty close, and outfitting a large workforce with magic items would get expensive.

For people who aren't awesome enough to have PC class levels, there's also the option of getting the Artifice domain granted power from the Eberron variant of Adept. Or for people too lame to even have the good NPC classes, there's the Planar Touchstone feat. Though Planar Touchstone requires 5th level, and the idea that someone can get to 5th level but can't manage to get a level in something other than Commoner has always struck me as absurd.

A cleric with the cold domain, a scroll of lesser planer binding, a way of inflicting negative levels, can call and command a Rejkar, giving him access to unlimited fabricate at level 5.

Costs 1150gp, but lesser planer binding can call up a Rejkar. You then inflict 3 negative levels to reduce it's HD until you can command it via rebuke cold creature. You can then heal the negative levels and it remains controlled as it's total HD do not exceed your own.

Rejkar have, as a SLA fabricate at will. Being a SLA it ignores material components, so you can largely bypass the requirement to have the base material equal some GP amount of the end product. GM calls vary if you still need a material target at all or just fabricate from nothing whatever end product you want. It's also a large goat like creature so you can use it as a mount.

So 5. Level 5 is the point that a pretty bog standard character can get access to basically unlimited fabricate via evil devil goat mount.

[unseenmage]

The Dedicated Wright homunculus explicitly uses its creator's daily allotment of magic item crafting time.
Not so for mundane item crafting!

That said a tireless minion who uses your skill ranks to make stuff that doesn't require rest or sustenance is great for item production.

Also, the Unseen Crafter spell is a thing. Combined with War Magic (https://forums.giantitp.com/showsinglepost.php?p=16135682&postcount=54) it makes its own assembly line.

[MaxiDuRaritry]

The Dedicated Wright homunculus explicitly uses its creator's daily allotment of magic item crafting time.
Not so for mundane item crafting!

That said a tireless minion who uses your skill ranks to make stuff that doesn't require rest or sustenance is great for item production.

Also, the Unseen Crafter spell is a thing. Combined with War Magic (https://forums.giantitp.com/showsinglepost.php?p=16135682&postcount=54) it makes its own assembly line.Note that not only can you use dedicated wrights for item creation, but psicrystals can do the same. They gain their own feats, they gain your skill points, and they are also tireless constructs that embody one of your passions and/or aspects of personality. This includes passions for crafting. You can even get bonuses to crafting from them, and I'd bet that such a psicrystal would be happy to while away a good chunk of each day indulging in your passion for creating things.

And you can use both at the same time to double your output.

[Lans]

How fast can you make something big enough to provide cover

[MaxiDuRaritry]

How fast can you make something big enough to provide coverImmediate action just prior to your turn to manifest Linked Power (grip of iron + psionic fabricate or psionic minor creation) so the wall appears an instant after you begin manifesting it?