Fun with Furniture

Picking your bin to rack ratio and what to upgrade first

Rei Note: This article was written by Yuki, who has kindly given her permission for it to be hosted here on STC.

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A common question that gets thrown around often is “I am merchant level 33, how many bins should I have and how many racks should I have?”. This is a rather simple question but the solution to this varies greatly from person to person. There is no one best answer to this question! To oversimplify what you want, it highly depends on your playstyle!

If you are a player that logs in once every few hours for a few minutes at a time, then you will want to get enough bins to fill out your crafting slots with crafts. Resource capacity is the name of the game, your resources will regenerate over time while you’re offline so if you login once every few hours then you will usually have full capacity on all your resources.

If your resource capacity is low, you will not be able to fill up your craft slots with craft which is why it is ideal to have enough bins to have enough capacity to fill up your craft slots. It is usually advised to have fewer high-level bins than to have many low-level bins if both end up having the same capacity.

If you are an active player, you generally want as few bins as possible while still having enough to craft items, preferably without going below 25% of your max capacity. You do not want to go below 25% max capacity for resources because this will allow you to not trigger worker refills, but this is only important when you start crafting items that are Tier 8 and above. Tier 8 crafts onwards are when most crafts require tier 3 resources which are Ether and Jewels.

This becomes especially important when you start Tier 13 crafts or higher when most crafts require essence. You usually want to save worker refills for the higher tier resources such as Ether, Jewels, or Essence. Tier 1 resources (Iron, Wood, Herb, Leather) and even the tier 2 resources (Steel, Ironwood, Oil, Fabric) regenerate quickly and you’ll end up having more of them than the Tier 3 (Ether/Jewels) and Tier 4 (Essence) resources. This becomes especially true for Essence which are the biggest bottlenecks for late-game higher tier crafts (Tier 13 and above).

Having fewer bins will allow you to maximize the number of racks you can have out at any given time which will increase the maximum amount of energy you can hold. This allows you to use that energy to rush crafts or surcharge for more profits. The number of bins you need to facilitate this playstyle depends. Usually, the dragon hoard bin which you can get as a reward from Dragon Invasion is highly recommended regardless of which category you fall under. Apart from that, it all starts with knowing how many resources you need to start your crafts. Once you have an idea of how many resources you need, you can use this tool to calculate how many resources you will have after getting a certain number of bins at a certain level.

The typical late-game recommendation for this playstyle is to have one of each tier 1 resource bin, one of each tier 2 resource bin, two of each tier 3 resource bin, and three to five essence beacons. For an early-mid game player you usually won’t have enough resources from just having one of each bin so feel free to get more than that amount until you’ve levelled your bins to a high enough level where you can comfortably craft with fewer bins out at one time.

The main drawback with this playstyle is that you will usually not have enough resources to fill out your crafting slots when you login after a while of not playing due to the lower number of bins that you have out at once. You will have enough after a few minutes of playtime once your resources regenerate but there are a few things you can do in the meantime.

1. Dismantling lower tier items for T1/T2 Resources.
2. Pick up the zero waste talent from the crafter’s side of the talent tree.
3. Start fusions with the leftover craft slots.
4. Simply wait for resource regeneration to get you enough resources to start those crafts.

To summarize everything. If you are an active player, go for fewer bins and more racks. If you are not as active, then get as many bins as you need to fill out your craft slots.

Furniture Upgrade Priority

Now that we’ve talked about all of that, is there an order that we should follow to upgrade furniture? Well, yes actually! But only for the upgrades that cost Dragonmarks which are all furniture upgrades past level 15 and any upgrade to the dragon hoard. Dragonmarks are a special type of currency obtained through the Dragon Invasion event which is a recurring monthly event.

These are a highly limited currency, so it is very crucial that you do NOT waste them by using them to rush upgrades. Using them to start upgrades is the best way to use them and there is an optimal order for that. The order goes as follows:

1. Dragon Hoard to level 16

This is the first recommendation because every time you get the dragon hoard to a certain milestone (Level 1/6/11/16), the dragonhoard unlocks the next tier of resource and, more importantly, these resources are also boosted by guild perks. Having this single bin will also be a huge help because this one furniture will increase your resource capacity for all resource types that you have it levelled to!

2. Counter to level 25

The counter is probably one of, if not the most important furniture you have in your shop. Each level past 15 also grants you a 1% boost to your max energy which caps out
at 10% at level 25 while also increasing the amount of energy you get from sales.

3. Vending Machine to level 22

Vending machine has double the energy than a normal rack, so you’re actually getting more energy per dragonmark spent upgrading the vending machine to level 22 before you level even a single rack to level 16. The math for this is that a vending machine from level 21 to 22 will cost you 10.42 Dragonmark per energy while upgrading a rack from 15 to 16 will cost you 11.11 Dragonmark per energy which is more expensive.

4. All racks to level 17

After getting your vending machine to level 22, the next upgrade to 23 will cost you 12.5 dragonmarks per energy which is more expensive than getting your racks from 15 to 16 which costs 11.11 dragonmarks per energy and more expensive than getting racks from 16 to 17 which is 11.36 dragonmarks per energy. After that, it’s cheaper to upgrade your vending machine again.
After that, it will alternate between vending machine to 23 > Racks to 18 > Vending machine to 24 > Racks to 19 > Vending Machine to 25.