Soils - what's the drop rate in best locations?

[cptkloss]

My dillema is this: with only 1 character hight enough to farm cultivation mats i have to pick either scavenging or butchering, right now i'm a butcher --> i get tons of nutrients, cans are cheap and plentiful on AH...and then there are soils...just one viable spot to farm it in chaos wastes, and drop rate is pretty horrible - something between 5-10%. Is it much better for scavengers, given you farm "right" mobs? but even if it is... how about nutrients?

[NicWester]

Are you Destruction or Order?

As Destruction, I like farming in that first PQ in Avelorn (forget the chapter number at the moment) where you kill Spites and Dryads. They're high level, so you get really good soils, and by then your skill is high enough to the point where you're getting a good number of greens, the occasional blue, and the rare purple.

But, basically, to answer your question, you're going to find the best soils off of undead and spites/dryads with Scavenging.



EDIT: Whoops. Misread your initial question. The drop rate seems to be about 20% or better in Avelorn. I'll check WarDB later to get exact numbers.

[Burlok Blackaxe]

From my own experiences anywhere there is a good concentration of sprites, dryads(as mentioned above) and undead I'll have bags full of soils from whites to blues.

[uberbartos]

Well am order and the best place i have found Scaven soil is Chap 16 Elf Well of sar-saroth just west of the chap 16 town! I love farming this pq Why?
Teeming Peat 171 Blue soil
Lush Soil 162 blue soil
Nourishing Loam 180 Purple soil
Aerated Soil 189 Blue soil
These drop alot!!!!!!
Enjoy \
From ArmyStrong

[vjek]

My dillema is this: with only 1 character hight enough to farm cultivation mats i have to pick either scavenging or butchering, right now i'm a butcher --> i get tons of nutrients, cans are cheap and plentiful on AH...and then there are soils...just one viable spot to farm it in chaos wastes, and drop rate is pretty horrible - something between 5-10%. Is it much better for scavengers, given you farm "right" mobs? but even if it is... how about nutrients?

Soil is the hardest "factory" component to get. That is, if you want to become a mass producing apothecary, this will continue to be your bane.

The reason is pretty straightforward. Watering cans are trivial to obtain from any humanoid through scavenging, and as you know, not that big of a deal later in the apothecary game anyway. Find any PQ with humanoids, AoE grind for a few dozen minutes, and you'll be swimming in water. (ha!)

With butchering, when you kill squigs (best source of nutrients, imho) there is only one other thing that squigs can drop, and that's squig bits. So, when you butcher squigs, you either get a squig bit, or a nutrient. Very high nutrient drop rate! huzzah!

There are several sources of non-stop squigs T3 and T4 (for both destro & order) and if you just must have those duration enhancers, Boars are always a good second choice, as they too drop only one other thing from butchering. They're harder to find in quantity, though, that is, there's only one spot I'm aware of that you can kill them -almost- non stop (but not quite, hence my preference for Squigs).

So, we come to soil. There are really only two reasonable choices here, undead and dryads/spites. Dryads/Spites take longer to kill, and they do more damage, but setting that aside, scavenging provides SO many other things, the the drop rate is insanely low. For example:

From a level 31+ undead, with scavenging, you have a chance to get:
150 or 175 white, green, blue, or purple curio
150 or 175 gold essence
150 or 175 dirt (spirit resist potion main ingredient)
162, 171, 180, 189 soil

for a 31+ dryad/spite, with scavenging:

150 or 175 white, green, blue, or purple curio
150 or 175 gold essence
150 or 175 husk (thorn shield potion main ingredient)
162, 171, 180, 189 soil

Now I'm not very good at math, but even I can see that when the list for butchering nutrients looks like this from a 31+ Squig:

150 or 175 squig bit
162-200 nutrient

and you compare that to the scavenging list... it's pretty easy to see why your bank (and mine) is overflowing with nutrients and perpetually low on soil. If you count them all up, it would be (if I can count) 3 item types in the loot table for non-nutrient scavenging results, and versus 1 item type in the loot table for nutrient scavenging results. (25% at best?) Butchering Squigs/Boars it's 1 non-nutrient butchering results vs 1 nutrient butchering results. (50% at best?) Not a trivial difference!

It's gotten to the point where I send all my 162 cans and nutrients to a storage alt because I have so damn much of them, and I only use 171+'s cans/nutrients for cultivation, as that matches my soil availability pretty well.

The loot tables are probably not exactly as I describe above, but the results in practice match my theorycrafting, so I'm going with that until someone comes along with a better explanation.

One final note. You can butcher daemon vines for soil, but the drop rate is very very low. Just as bad as scavenging, in my experience, because the butchering loot table is filled with all the daemon butchering body drops, as well as the thorned husks, and then the soil. I think it's sinewy flesh, daemon blood, husks, and soil, all sharing the same butchering loot table. You end up with stacks of "junk" and not much soil. :(

EDIT:

To make sure I wasn't talking out of my butt, I parsed out 324 kills + butchers of boars between December 11 and December 14th.

Of the 324 butcherings:

Imbued Lifeblood 74
Glistening Bile 15
Blackened Viscera 4
Infused Blood 52
Saturated Gall 4
Glistening Viscera 5
---
154 nutrient total

Thick Boar Blood 144
Viscous Boar Blood 26
---
170 non nutrient total

making the nutrient drop rate 154/324 (48%) and the non-nutrient drop rate 170/324 (52%)

Close enough to 50/50 for me. :cool: Source log available, just PM me. (it's 34k)

[spliffington]

I found that the skeletons next to the first destro camp in the chaos wastes drops good soil, did an quest there and killed around 20 mobs, i got an total of 7 blue, 3 green and 4 white, skille level 160-180.

[vasil]

seems they've nerfed it even more, I get low % and only one type of soil from mob that used to provide the high level soils

[Grueller]

God I hope not. They're already almost non-existent on the AH on my server.

[vjek]

I made my post above in this thread before the Crafting Info Tooltip add-on was available, so here's the short version:

Unless you want 3 or 4 main ingredient results or special moments from cultivation, use vendor soil. There is basically no practical benefit in using dropped soils to the mass-production apothecary. A rare seed + skill 1 vendor-bought arid soil + 162 watering can + 162 nutrient will return 2 main ingredient results (plants) and return the seed 100% of the time.

Skill 189 soil will return an additional main ingredient (+1 Herb is how it's displayed in the add-on) but there's no increase in crit rate from using creature-dropped soils from skill 2 to skill 188.

Vendor Soil ftw! :cool:

However, my comments about nutrient drop rates are still accurate, if a bit off topic. :p

[Grueller]

I can think of at least 3 reasons why I want high level soil instead of using vendor soil.

1) Converting "normal" seeds into "Rare" seeds.

2) Getting 4 ingredients instead of 2 or 3.

3) Maintaining Goldweed seeds, which never become rare.

If people want soils, let them post threads asking where to find them! I'm certainly curious, personally, where to find a good dryad farming spot for around level 32 or so.

[Irinia]

vjek was talking about once you have your rare seed collection estabilished

Considering prices, it may be cheaper to get 3 results 4 times than to get 4 results 3 times.

Only vendor soil will help you keep your goldweed, because only vendor soil has any crit bonus at all.

[vjek]

I'm certainly curious, personally, where to find a good dryad farming spot for around level 32 or so.

For destro, north Caledor, east of the river mouth where it meets the ocean. From the warcamp, run north, and when you hit the water, run east for about 30 seconds. but seriously, my cultivation satisfaction (and overall Apothecary volume) increased dramatically when I switched to vendor soil. Aerated soil is great, but the drop rate is so low... /shrug

[Ard Righ]

I must say, with my 200 scavenging, I tend to vendor all the stuff, because I don't want to take the time to gather stacks, and put stuff in the bank to AH later.

What are some good prices to sell stacks of soil for?

I usually end up with a decent amount of soil from Sigmar runs for example.

[Irinia]

On my server, I would expect to pay 70s-1g a piece for lvl180+ soil. I'd rather pay less, but that's what I end up paying.