Trade Skill Aptitude is a form of trade skill progression that begins after reaching the maximum level of 200 in any given trade skill.

Upon reaching level 200 in a Trade Skill, the Leveling Circle will update to show 3 markers equidistant from each other on the circle. Earning Trade Skill Experience will begin progressing your trade again post 200 skill, and when you reach one of the markers you will be awarded with a container of useful items that are, for the most part, trade skill relevant. For example, craft mods, special ingredients, recipes, and schematics.



Each subsequent marker will reward you with a better reward than the one before. Gaining enough experience to go all the way around the circle will increment the Aptitude counter by one. This will allow you to keep track of how many times you have progressed in trade skill aptitude for that particular skill.

One of the rewards you can obtain from hitting a reward marker within the Aptitude system is an Equipment Pattern. They have a small chance of dropping from Arcana, Weaponsmithing, Armoring, and Engineering Aptitude Reward Caches.

Equipment patterns are crafting artifacts that will enable you to craft a guaranteed Gear Score 600 item that will have a specific appearance. The patterns will require a significant amount of high end crafting resources to create, and players will have the normal amount of control over the outcome of the perks using Craft Mods and Azoth.

Every trade skill follows the same progression with the rewards. The 1st aptitude level will reward you with a parcel of Materials for that trade, the 2nd will reward you with a crate of materials for that trade, and the 3rd will reward you with a package of specialized materials for that trade.

Earning a trade skill aptitude box will also reward you with an Emerald Gypsum. It’s important to point out that the Gypsum can be earned once every 18 hours, and it can be obtained from ANY of the trade skills, including crafting, refining, and gathering.



If you are farming specifically for an Emerald Gypsum, utilizing gathering skills vs crafting or refining will be the most optimal route. (You can view the experience tables for each craft below) More specifically, logging is the most efficient method, experience per node wise, followed by mining and then harvesting.

Skinning and Fishing are the exceptions. Skinning does not yield enough XP per kill to meet the experience requirement needed to get your daily Gypsum to make it an efficient method, and Fishing typically does not yield that much experience per cast, so using fishing to get your Emerald Gypsum isn’t going to trump the other methods listed above.

Logging requires just over 40,000 for each aptitude level. Logging a large ironwood tree (use our interactive map to find the locations of the trees) will grant you over 5,000 experience. Therefore, you would only need to chop down roughly 8-10 iron wood trees (various sizes yielding from 4k-5.9k xp per tree) per Aptitude level in order to gain you 1 Emerald Gypsum per 18 hour period.

However, gathering ironwood isn’t always going to be an option, especially on a high population server. Therefore,gathering other end game materials via harvesting and mining can also be an efficient method to reach the trade skill aptitude bump to gain your Emerald Gypsum for the day if the ironwood is contested.