Making your own shovels vs. buying them.

[superqtip182]

So I can get 6gp per piece for iron ingots. A shovel is 14gp at the shop in minoc. Making a shovel 6 ingots (which you can get 24 gp for), so it's cheaper to buy shovels than to make them yourself.

Or is it? Do exceptional shovels last longer/does the life of a shovel depend the skill of the tinker?

Thanks

[Weigraf]

I made my own shovels to GM mining.

I did this not for a monetary reason, but because I slowly raised some tinkering and other stats, and the exceptional ones seem to last longer.

Also, while mining it is convenient to just carry a tool kit and keep mining.

[RaveGreen]

raised some tinkering

This is why I did it. Between shovels for mining and lock picks for... lock picking, I got my tinkering into the high 70's.

[Workdawg]

I'm not sure if exceptional shovels last longer or not. I read someplace that exceptional mortar and pestle last twice as long, so it wouldn't surprise me if exceptional shovels did as well. If they did, that would make it worthwhile to make them, as 2x shovels is 28gp, vs the 24 you would sell the iron for.

You could easily test this by simply counting the number of hits you get per regular shovel versus an exceptional one. Or, if you mine the same location often, you could make an educated guess by just bringing regular shovels on a mining trip one time, and exceptional the next, and see how many you have left at the end from mining the same area.

[corruption42]

Exceptionals last longer for sure. I wanna say its around 50 strikes for an NPC shovel, and around 70-75 for an exceptional.

Also, shovels use 4 ingots to make, not 6.