Mystic Worlds: ArcheAge - Husbandry Profession

One of the more unique ArcheAge crafting professions is Husbandry. Primarily, the profession consists of caring for, harvesting from or butchering livestock. It also includes the opportunity to breed two types of battle pets or mounts – Polar Bear and Yata. This is the first MMO I’ve played with a crafting profession revolving around working with animals and had to give it a try.

The Basics

Players are introduced to husbandry in the early levels via a Blue Salt reputation quest that has them care for chickens in order to obtain trimmed meat. The infant versions of livestock such as baby chicks, goslings, etc., are all purchased from the Livestock NPC. The prices ranges from 2 silver up to 4 gold. To pursue husbandry you need to own land, preferably a 16x16 farm at a minimum. An 8x8 will work for all but a few of the livestock. However, it will be hard to house the livestock and produce the grain and/or combined feed necessary to sustain them on a single 8x8.

There are (4) basic interactions when caring for livestock. Performing each of these provides increased proficiency (XP) in husbandry

You feed them grain or combined feed depending on the animal.
You gather/harvest items from there such as eggs from chickens, feathers from ducks, fur from bears.
You slaughter them for various types of meat.
You cure them from diseases when they’re sick.

Making Money

You can make good money using the husbandry profession by simply selling off what you gather from them such as eggs, leather, milk, feathers and fur. Many of the items are required materials in other crafting professions so are in high demand. If you’re going to do livestock and also crafting armor, be sure to include livestock to support your profession. Fabric can be made from sheep wool. Leather is produced from turkeys and pigs. Yarn comes from Yata fur + bear fur + goat wool.

You can also slaughter your livestock to sell the meat. Eggs, meat, milk and feathers are used in trade packs and as a result, are always in high demand. Meat is used for cooking recipes and trade packs and is equally profitable. When you’re trying to raise your husbandry proficiency however, I found slaughtering them for the meat was more expensive and time consuming. Buying and placing them again was more effort and cost. Consequently, I took selling trimmed meat out of my rotation.

Even with slaughtering for meat removed from my options, I still have two very profitable outlets from husbandry – trade packs and raw materials. I consume whatever results in the highest cost trade pack turn-ins and then sell the other products on the Auction House.

Make Animal Pens

As you progress in proficiency, you can start crafting and selling animal cages – coops, cages and pens. These allow players to house multiples of the same type of animal in a single feeding trough, cutting down the time it takes to feed and gather from livestock. The chicken coops, duck cages and goose cages seem to sell quickly but are the least profitable, at roughly 1.5 g profit each.

Due to the cost, people don’t move their goat, sheep and cow pens around much. You buy it once and leave it there until it completely breaks or you move on to something else. Also it’s not much of a bother to feed 4 cows individually versus 50 chickens or ducks. Depending on your server you can net from 3.5 to 5 gold per pen on the Auction House – if it sells the first time you list it.

Breed Pets or Mounts

Beyond the life of being a livestock manager, you can dabble in the highly random act of breeding battle pets and mounts. The bear mounts in particular are in high demand but are VERY hard to produce. Breeding requires that one of your cubs becomes a male, from there becomes a stud and then impregnates a female. I’ve been attempting to breed bears for several weeks and have only reached the stage of having a single male.

In my case I had 10 bears being raised at any given time. I would slaughter and replace half the females hoping to get another male. All the while hoping the one male I had would become a stud. After doing this for weeks I still only have one male and never a stud. The sheer randomness of breeding makes it a very expensive undertaking.

The larger animals take up more space on a farm and cost considerably more to purchase. With space being a premium, using farm space for breeding is costly in and of itself. Add to that the random nature and needing to slaughter females to increase your chances of getting a stud by having more males, it’s not something you should do unless you have gold and farm space to spare. I’ve recently reduced my operation down to just 4 bears and 2 yatas, reclaiming the other space for livestock that will generate gold.

Be a Beekeeper

The last part of husbandry I’ve yet to try is beekeeping to produce honey. Honey is expensive and used in alchemy and higher tier cooking recipes. This activity requires you to create nets, go out into the world to catch bees and then care for them in a beehive. Like breeding, this can be an expensive undertaking because the hives consume a lot of farm space. And while I have multiple properties, I only have one 16x16 farm plot which is currently housing all of my livestock. If I’m able to place a cottage sized farm house in Auroria, I may move smaller livestock there and give beekeeping a try. Or if/when I give up on the bears. *smile*

40K/60K

A few days ago I reached 40K husbandry which is no easy feat. It required a LOT of livestock management – time and gold commitment. One of the biggest challenges is maximizing your property as you gradually add livestock and produce to your repertoire, which typically happens over a period of time. As such, it won’t make the best use of the space because things vary in size and putting them down wherever you have space at the time, isn’t going to make best use of space. With produce, it’s not as big a deal because you harvest them regularly, completely removing them from the farm in cycles, which allows you do construct a new layout.

To maximize space with livestock means slaughtering them and waiting for them to mature all over again, which in some cases, is 2 days or more. As I added more livestock, I’ve had to slaughter my whole farm twice to move things around to get the best use of the one 16x16 farm I have available. That’s not cheap. The cages to bigger livestock are 2g – 4 g a pop. By the second time, which was earlier this week, I had enough proficiency to make my own coops and cages so that saved money.

It’s a Fun Profession

I’d recommend husbandry to anyone that would like to try a more novel profession. However, you have to be playing often enough to feed them on a regular basis. That or you could trust a friend to care for them when you’re not on by making a family and giving family members access to your farm. A few of our guild members do that to help each other out during the week.

Comments

"... I consume whatever results in the highest cost trade pack turn-ins ..."

How do you calculate this? Do you have to run around to individual traders or can you see it some other way?

Loving your Archeage posts, they are gold.

Posted by: Adam | October 31, 2014 at 04:48 PM

Hi Adam and thanks very much. There's a Trade Info option in the Vocation menu (third icon from the right / lower right of your screen). Using this you can see what percentage is currently being paid for particular combinations of trade runs. The maximum pay is 130%.

So for example, if you have materials for Halycona to Gwen Forest and Biscuits are trading at 110% and Yams at 128%, go make yams. Being equal distances, the higher % paying trade pack is the one to go for in that case.

However, if they're different distances, such as Olive Oil out of Lilyut at 97% but is furthest so should pay more but Figgy Pudding fro White Arden is at 130%, I'd do White Arden instead. It's a matter of distance which yields the highest payout + the turn in percent which is based on how many other players are doing that same turn-in at the time.

There's also a trade pack calculator which tells you the base turn in amount but is not good for calculating profit as it's assuming all materials at 0 cost. However, until you know the base fees for the various combinations, it's very useful (http://eloth.org/tradeprofit/). Enjoy.

Posted by: Alysianah aka Saylah | October 31, 2014 at 05:32 PM

You're a legend, that's extremely useful. Thanks very much for taking the time to write that out for me.

Posted by: Adam | October 31, 2014 at 07:40 PM

You're welcome. :-)

Posted by: Alysianah aka Saylah | November 01, 2014 at 11:16 AM