User:Eithin/Sandbox2

Chef's Escutcheon notes

This is a selection of information I found useful while working on the Chef's Escutcheon. The Category:Escutcheons page already has all the information about the general process for all Escutcheons, so this one will focus on a listing of useful recipes for the various Craftsmanship upgrade bonuses. It may eventually become more of a guide specific for chefs.

Planning ahead

While maximum cooking skill is obviously required in order to obtain the starting shield, the journey ahead is long and will demand much more of you. The following things are mandatory, you will need them in order to fulfil the Guildmaster's requests for the Chef's Scutum:

• Clothcrafting skill close to 50, for the Humpty Dumpty Effigy (and Silk Cloth);
• The Noodle Kneading key item, for Marinara +1.

Other achievements are merely very helpful:

• Fishing skill. At a level of 25 to 30, you'll easily be able to catch the fish you'll need for the Marinara +1 request. Although it should also be possible to reel in Red Terrapin for the Cooking Set 90 at these levels, it is a level 53 catch that will be easier at higher levels. Since these are also a popular target for skilling up, you may have luck finding stacks on auction;
• The Hyacinth stratum abyssite II allows Atmacite Refiners to teleport you directly to Bibiki Bay - Purgonorgo Isle, where you can find Jacknifes, the third seafood in Marinara;
• The Chocobo Whistle allows you to go chocobo digging in Misareaux Coast for Misareaux Parsley. This may be your only option if you cannot source either the parsley or the Pomodoro Sauce from someone else, since the region is frequently controlled by Beastmen;
• The Mog Garden furrows and grove as well as the Gardening hobby are good sources of uncommon ingredients that you would otherwise have to buy or farm in the field. Examples: Burdock (needed for Humpty Dumpty effigy), Dogwood Log (for Yogurt) and Wild Onion (for Pomodoro Sauce). Start stocking up these items ahead of time to save yourself time and/or gil later.

As you can see, spaghetti marinara will be quite a hassle. You will need to synth a HQ2 or HQ3 result 5 times to please the guildmaster, which has a probability of 1/4 * 1/2 = 1/8. Therefore you should expect to need approximately 40 successful synths to get there, which is expected to require 40 / 0.95 = 42.1 synthesis attempts. No guarantees can be given about random processes though, so it's wise to prepare for more than this.

Improving your Craftsmanship

This is a necessary step in each of the phases. While you may choose to ignore the conditions given by your shield, the resulting slowdown will become significant, especially from the Scutum stage onward. Since high-quality results give an extra bonus, it's best to synth low level recipes whenever possible. This bonus comes in three different tiers, even if the synthesis does not yield different items.

I prefer to use water crystals, as they are common drops at exping camps and have simple recipes with cheap ingredients from the cooking guild. There are many equally simple recipes of various crystal types for fish, which you can catch yourself, buy or get from your Mog Garden. Fire crystals are not as common, so I mostly reserve these for dishes I make for consumption and sale.

Note that the recipes in this section also include some Cooking Sets. While I don't recommend risking the special crystals when your success rate is impaired, they count just like regular crystals and this can be used to your advantage on the later shield stages.

Below is a list of my preferred recipes for various crystal types, up to the Artisan/Adept requirement. Many of these use only ingredients available from NPCs. The salmon recipes are included because salmon is easy to catch and a popular ingredient due to Sublime Sushi. Ikra Gunkan is relatively cheap to make (no wasabi) and lets you get the most out of your salmon for a third crystal type and a second skill category. Honey is used in au laits and white bread and is one of the "expensive" ingredients in these recipes, at 200 gil from the guild. You can craft it yourself for a fraction of that price, using Beehive Chips bought from the Alchemy guild or your Green Thumb Moogle.

Recipe	Crystal	Skill Level	# of ingredients
Honey		Recruit/Initiate	4
Apple Juice		Recruit/Initiate	4
Selbina Butter		Recruit/Initiate	2
Insect Ball		Recruit/Initiate	3
Cooking Kit 15/Slice of Bluetail		Recruit/Initiate	1
Salmon Eggs		Novice/Apprentice	1
Salmon Roe		Novice/Apprentice	2
Black Bread		Novice/Apprentice	3
Iron Bread		Novice/Apprentice	3
Orange au Lait		Journeyman/Craftsman	4
Stone Cheese		Journeyman/Craftsman	2
Ikra Gunkan		Journeyman/Craftsman	5
Pear au Lait		Artisan/Adept	4
Cooking Set 80		Artisan/Adept	7

Veteran and higher level recipes call for more exclusive ingredients that are not available from NPCs. Some of the simpler recipes are listed below, along with the ingredients you'll need to procure yourself or buy from other players. Items denoted M can be obtained from your Mog Garden and/or grown in pots. You can of course substitute any recipe you prefer or ignore these conditions altogether, which may be wiser on the first two shield stages.

Veteran

Recipe	Crystal	Special ingredient(s)	# of ingredients
Sweet Rice Cake		Fresh Mugwort (M)	6
Miso Ramen		Porxie Pork, Bamboo Shoots, Miso Ramen Soup (see below)	7
Tropical Crepe		Kitron (M), Persikos (M), Felicifruit (M)	8

Expert or higher

Recipe	Crystal	Special ingredient(s)	# of ingredients
Dragon Fruit au Lait		Dragon Fruit (M)	4
Miso Ramen Soup		Chicken Bone*	7
Walnut Cookie		Apkallu Egg, Walnut (M)	6
Omelette Sandwich		Apkallu Egg, Puk Egg, Grauberg Lettuce (M)	5

*Available from NPCs if certain requirements are met.

Miscellaneous

Some other recipes that do not fit any rank condition, but could be used for "Use X+ ingredients". Cinna-cookies and Pamama tarts are guild point items, the NQ tarts can additionally be traded for Escha - Ru'Aun grisly trinkets.

Recipe	Crystal	# of ingredients
Cooking Set 90		4
Cooking Set 70		5
White Bread		5
Various sushi		5
Bubble Chocolate		6
Cinna-cookie		6
Chocomilk		8
Pamama Tart		8

Obtaining Crafter Points

Crafter points are described in greater detail on the Escutcheons page. This section focuses on the pros and cons of each option you are given as a chef. In general, the system does somewhat reward the selection of lower level recipes by giving you more points for high quality results. However, your HQ rate will never exceed 50% of all synths, at 51 or more skill levels above that of the recipe. The rate grows in tiers with the gap between your skill level and that of the synth, as follows:

Skill gap	HQ probability
0 - 10	1.56% (1/64)
11 - 30	6.25% (1/16)
31 - 50	25% (1/4)
>51	50% (1/2)

Furthermore, HQ results come in 3 tiers, with respective probabilities of 12/16 (75%), 3/16 (18.75%) and 1/16 (6.25%). Combining these results with those shown on the Escutcheons category page gives the following table, where pHQ represents the HQ probability from the previous table and L the level of the cooking set:

Result	Probability	Average reward
NQ	1 - pHQ	0.7 * L
HQ1	12/16 * pHQ	1.05 * L
HQ2	3/16 * pHQ	1.25 * L
HQ3	1/16 * pHQ	1.5 * L

Cooking Sets

See also: Cooking Sets. Cooking Set 95 is the highest level recipe, so due to the mechanics described above, all cooking sets fall into three brackets, with a minimum HQ rate of 10%. A cooking skill of 121 or higher is quite achievable for the expert chef, which places Cooking Sets 75 through 90 at a rate of 25% and 70 and below at 50%. Unfortunately though, many of the recipes we have to choose from are cumbersome, requiring the full 8 ingredients and using those I'd rather save for real synths, like Wild Onions and even Dragon Meat. For these reasons, my preferred synths are just these three:

• Cooking Set 70: All ingredients available from two NPCs.
• Cooking Set 80: Shall shells have multiple sources and uses, so they are commonly traded on the AH. They are a level 53 catch.
• Cooking Set 90: Red terrapin have the same skill level as shall shells, but no other sources than fishing and (rarely) the Mog Graden pond. They are typically more expensive per synth.