The Adventures Of Pirotess: Botanist Helps With Many Crafting Jobs

As many remember in the last Adventures of Pirotess post, I tried out crafting with culinarian and found that I liked it. One of the big things for crafting of course is having the necessary materials to craft. This is where the gathering job of botanist comes in handy. Botanists can harvest a variety of resources from plants and trees. Since I use fire and water shards for culinarian, I do a lot of gathering for those in the various areas where they can be found. I also find a lot of ingredients I need in the different places such as sun lemons from trees or button mushrooms from fern plants.

The Botanist's Guild can be found in Gridania and you can join it by talking to the receptionist in the guild when you're level 10 or higher on another job class. You get a primary tool which is a hatchet for logging and a secondary tool which is a scythe for harvesting from vegetation. You have a harvesting and logging journal that gives you a list of things for you to harvest so that you get credit and experience points for them. 

Botanist also comes with some abilities that help you know where to search for things. For example, the ability triangulate activates automatically on botanist and allows you to survey the land so that you can find mature trees and lush vegetation. Stealth is a handy ability that allows you to conceal yourself from enemies. It reduces your movement speed, but it's a trade off to not be a tasty snack for nearby enemies.

There are two types of nodes you can gather from and they're shown on your map as two different colored feathers. We'll start with blue feathers first. Blue feathers on your mini map represent lush vegetation and for this you need your secondary tool. 

Mini map in the top right corner showing the blue feather icons for lush vegetation.

When you start harvesting, a list of items that you can gather from the node will appear and you can choose which one you wish to harvest. You can use the ability Field Mastery to increase the success rate of obtaining items. As you level, you get higher leveled Field Mastery abilities as well as a better luck rate.

List of items that can be gathered from the vegetation node.

For logging, the icons on the mini map are a different color. These are yellow feathers representing mature trees that you can harvest resources from. Just as with the vegetation, when you start harvesting an item list will pop up showing you what can be harvested from the tree and you can choose which item you wish to gather. 

Top right mini map showing yellow feather icons for mature trees.

I like botanist because it is incredibly useful. While it's not the most exciting job, it helps with many crafting jobs. For my culinarian it's been great to be able to gather the shards and ingredients I need because that is less money that I'm spending on the market boards for items. This is also true for a couple of other crafting jobs I started doing. Culinarian also helps my botanist job because I can craft meals that increase not only my experience points, but also my gathering and luck rate. That's quite handy to have when I need to replenish crafting items. 

It's also helped our resident Free Company gardener, Sekilini. I often find a lot of elemental light seeds such as firelight or waterlight which become fire and water shards something we need because of all the crafters in our Free Company. As I said before, botanist is quite useful. Usually, I pick a quiet night to do it and just chat with my friends in the game or watch a movie while I'm gathering. It makes the time go by a lot faster and before I know it, I have resupplied all the things I need for crafting successfully. That's a pretty good deal all around. See you at the next adventure everyone!

No doubt about it, botanist helps a lot. 

*Final Fantasy XIV is playable on the following platforms: PC and Playstation4