Mastery Rank Data

More than that, we'd basically need 3 or more characters, all at wing skill start of 0, one with no silks, blue silks, and sky blue silks, and keeping meticulous track of exactly how many successful digs/items occurred per rank every single rank from 0 through 100.

Doing this gives a rough baseline of the digs per rank, if it's linear or hard changes at a specific rank, and to what degree the silks impact it which can help with insinuating if it's varying exp per rank or just varying skillup rate per rank.

But uh, yeah, good luck with finding anyone insane enough to track that for months. I barely managed to do it for myself and I didn't even track every single skill level since it was pre-wing skill, or have perfect consistent usage lol.

You don't need to do any silks tomfoolery to know if it's an exp-based system, all you need to do is track 2 people's skillup / dig ratio.

If they don't have the exact same number of digs, it isn't an exp system.

Then you say "oh well a pebble is worth more exp than gil" or whatever to justify it.

It doesn't matter, because ultimately there's nothing you can do with this information if it were true, but it's totally silly.

It is good to be skeptical, but your argument pre-supposes that all items have exactly the same EXP value. We know this cannot be true given the data already reported.

The fact things can be seen with a strong correlation and a pretty linear increase in the number of successful digs through the lower value to the higher value wing skills is enough to show that Chocobo digging does not operate on a system of random .1s. The very low ranks during digging do not even take 10 digs to get a wing skill and on average it seems to go up closer 1.4x digs per level and increasing to over 2x digs per level in the mid-range. If it operated on 10 separate 'skill ups' intervals we'd see pretty wild swings even from level to level and not a variation of ~10%.

Here is the first part from Akumasama's data:

6 > 7 = 8
7 > 8 = 9
8 > 9 = 10
9 > 10 = 11
10 > 11 = 14
11 > 12 = 13
12 > 13 = 15
13 > 14 = 16
14 > 15 = 19
15 > 16 = 22
16 > 17 = 23
17 > 18 = 26
18 > 19 = 22
19 > 20 = 25
20 > 21 = 24
21 > 22 = 28
22 > 23 = 29
23 > 24 = 34
24 > 25 = 35
25 > 26 = 36
26 > 27 = 37
27 > 28 = 43
28 > 29 = ?

We see a clear progression with a few outliers - from this we can assume that some items may be worth more EXP than others, and I am not sure if this counts beastmen caches (probably, but Akumasama may confirm) - yet we see a clear progression.

It may be that Pebbles give 1 exp and something like a mythril beastcoin gives 2 exp. If you have multiple people reporting similar bands of digs for the levels you can make a statistical comparison to reveal that (barring errors) that dig values are not occurring out of some .1 or .2 basis and that it is exactly as said 'experience' is being gained and those gains are in a fairly small band.

Also this evidence goes to show there is no 'test item' or point at which an item or zone becomes useless for digging. Chocobo Digging does not operate like a regular craft guild.

What would you then say about pulling up multiple items? My skillup bird was bore + burrow, and depending whether or not I used the egg helm I could get as many as 4-5 items per dig.

As far as I'm aware, you only get a skillup once per dig as long as it's a success (you don't get multiple sky blue silks messages for multiple items, only one per dig).

The difference in his numbers could simply be that he didn't get random skillups some days more than others, which would explain why a 26 was before a 22/25/24.

After the crafting skillup rework, there's a huge chance to get them at lower levels (isn't it like 50% without campaign all the way to 60 now?) and at a high chance it normalizes pretty well, while something like a 10% or 1% chance will show way more variance rank to rank.

As I mentioned, my early ranks flew by as well, I was into the 40s within a week or two only. But post 70, it would take 2-4 weeks to get a 10 tier jump. So either the "exp" requirement gets way higher, or the skillup rate drops.

Honestly, given that the system likely reuses the same levels as crafting, it stands to reason it has the same skillup system, and I know people who only dug up garbage every day (me) who still capped quicker than those hunting rare items the whole time while they did it.

Couldn't we just as easily assume it works like fishing. Low levels you get skill ups often with fairly common +2s. High level skill ups are +1 only and few and far between. This is how I always assumed it worked.

See also: every crafting skill, combat skills, and magic skills.

.2 are possible and common on low level crafts. .5 are possible on combat and magic skills. There's nothing at all to show that it couldn't be exactly the same as all the other skill up systems in the game.

I've think I've seen a 0.3 on crafting once (not personally, someone's screenshot). I think they were attempting something far above their current skill but still lower than the auto break point.