Crusaders of Light, a free-to-play mobile RPG, seems to have all the major bells and whistles of typical MMO gaming. These include life skills, such as the ever-prevalent mechanics of crafting and gathering. You can make some good gold off of both activities, and it’s not even all that difficult to do so.
There are currently two life skill paths in Crusaders of Light: Ore mining and plant gathering. Both certainly have their uses, but you can only choose one or the other, and once you’ve chosen, you also gain access to that life skill’s basic refinement processes.
Let’s go into the basic ins and outs of the game’s life skill system, including how to get started and how to keep up your newfound crafting and gathering skills.
When Life Skills Open Up
At level 13, you will receive a quest to open up life skills. This is easily taken care of and won’t take more than a minute or two of your time to complete.
Changing Life Skills
Don’t stress over your choice of life skill, as you can easily drop one and pick up the other at any time via the life skills menu by tapping the “Forget Skill” button.
It doesn’t cost anything to drop or pick up a skill, but you do permanently lose your proficiency level if you do decide to drop your current skill. You’ll have to grind it up all over again.
How to Find Plant and Ore Nodes in Crusaders of Light
As with most other traditional MMORPGs, you have to find gathering nodes in Crusaders of Light to get those useful raw materials.
In the life skill menu (which is found at a tab at the bottom of the skill menu), tap on your gathering skill and then the Ore Exploration or Plant Exploration button depending on which you chose.
You’ll be presented with the map, this time specially marked with areas with one to a number of nodes available. Tap on a node to auto-travel there.
When you arrive at your destination, you should be able to see multiple nodes on your minimap, and each one of those nodes can be harvested — provided you have the stamina.
Thar be iron nodes!
Nodes come in small, medium, and large sizes. The larger the node, the more times you will be able to harvest it.
Gathering Limiters: Stamina and Character Level
If you’re like most, you probably want to rush straight toward higher level materials. Unfortunately, there are limiters in place to prevent you from doing so.
The first limiter is your stamina. Stamina is used to gather materials and open the treasure chests you’ve surely seen on your travels. You can see your stamina gauge in the character attribute screen.
Each time you gather from a standard node, no matter the size, you spend 1 stamina. Gathering from your guild’s special node patch costs 10 stamina each time you gather, but may give you more than just the typical materials.
Once your stamina reaches 0, you can no longer gather.
The second limiter, your character level, prevents you from leveling your life skill proficiency past your current level. So if your character is level 19, you’re only going to be able to get your skill proficiency to 19.
These are both pretty reasonable requirements and, luckily enough, refining doesn’t use any stamina at all.
How Do You Get More Stamina?
There are a few ways to do this. Some of which are:
- Completing raids (Once per raid, per day)
- Completing daily events
- Completing reputation tasks (I’m not sure about the details on this yet)
Refining
This is actually very simple. When you initiate smelting, extracting, or weaving, the game will auto-run you toward the relevant workbench. It’s done one by one and can take some time, so refining is the perfect time to take a break.
Which Life Skill Should You Choose?
I would say it’s up to you, but frankly, the imbalance between miners and plant gatherers in Crusaders of Light is pretty huge. Far more people choose to mine ore than gather plants, and that’s something to keep in mind.
Because there are so many people mining instead of plant gathering, going with plants is the easier money maker of the two. You can gather cotton and toss its refined products up on the trading house for an easy and fast gold profit. But the same can’t be said for dark iron ingots due to the high supply compared to demand.
Conversely, there is surely going to be high demand for high-tier ores, bars, and other items gained from ore mining as more players hit higher levels and don’t have the stamina (or patience) to hunt down materials for their own crafting.
You can choose based off prospective profits or your own long-term crafting needs, but I go the lesser-done route every time. Competition for ore nodes is fierce, and the potential gold to be made off of plant materials in the long and the short term just seems like a no-brainer.
That’s about it for this rundown of Crusaders of Light‘s life skill system. It’s fast, easy, and ultimately, profitable.
Make sure to check out our other Crusaders of Light guides to get even more tips, tricks, and strategies:
- Crusaders of Light Stamina Guide: How to Use and Recover Stamina
- Crusaders of Light Classes and Paths Overview Guide
