Life Skills

Life skills are professions that when mastered, grant access to unique items and skins.



General Information
 In MapleStory 2, there are two main life skill cycles.  Mining gives items to use in Smithing. Smithing gives yield increase items for Ranching. Ranching gives items to use in Handicrafts. Handicrafts gives yield increase items for Mining. Foraging gives items to use in Alchemy. Alchemy gives yield increase items for Farming. Farming gives items to use in Cooking. Cooking gives yield increase items for Foraging.  Gathering professions only work with a limited amount of resources each day. The probability of performing a succesful gathering attempt decreases as you reach the cap. However, you can continue to attempt it as many times as you like until you succeed and reach the cap. Reaching Rank 5 in Mining and Foraging unlock quests that grant access to Berg Island and Alkimi Island respectively, which has all of the resources for their gathering skills in 2 by 2 patches, speeding up the gathering process.  In addition to your own home, you can gather items for Ranching and Farming in other people's homes. Although the daily yield is a lot less, this will give your Ranching and Farming levels a significant bump in EXP ahead of Mining and Foraging. 

Related Items
All boosters for a given skill share a cooldown of 2 minutes.

Gathering Boosters
All gathering boosters increase the yield of gathering by 100% with varying duration. This does not stack with the daily bonus.

Crafting Boosters
Crafting boosters increase the EXP gained per craft by a set percentage. They all last exactly two minutes.

While it is not stated anywhere in the game, the resulting value is rounded down to the nearest integer.

Gathering

 * Always use Gathering boosters. You will gain double the materials every day which will boost not only what you can craft at a given time but also the speed at which you gain Crafting mastery.
 * Those auto-gathering Vouchers you have from various random events really come in handy when finishing up a node. By clicking on the Auto- button and Max, you can constantly see how many successful gathering attempts are left on a node before hitting the daily cap. When you are almost done and it seems to take forever to get the remaining materials, use a voucher or two to finish up. You gain full mastery and ongoing booster effects even when using vouchers - the only thing you give up on is character experience, which is negligible.
 * Remember to gather from other people's houses daily. While the yield is lower, they still give you a significant boost in mastery and materials.
 * There is a roughly 2 second cooldown waiting for the nodes to refresh if you are gathering in a stationary position. In order to boost Gathering speeds by roughly 50%, you can place 2x3 fields for Farming and Ranching, which will enable you to move one square and farm two more nodes while waiting for the other four to refresh. For Mining and Foraging nodes that respawn faster, you can efficiently do the same using the natural 2x2 nodes by moving to the side and harvesting only 3 nodes at a time instead of 4. By the time you harvest the fourth node, you will harvest 3 again as the others will have respawned.
 * If you are about to level up a Gathering skill, make sure you gather the lowest level nodes first (as well as in another players' house if applicable) because as soon as you reach the next level these will stop giving you additional mastery points.

Crafting

 * Always plan ahead. Remember that your resources are limited daily, so make sure you figure out the bottleneck materials for the things you want to craft before you spend them unwisely. (An early example is saving Pigskin for crafting Blank Intermediate Music Score instead of Pigskin Pouch.)
 * Don't craft items before they are needed, especially consumables. This saves you valuable inventory space in a pinch.
 * Do not overuse Crafting boosters. Using Gathering boosters will already boost your crafting mastery gains and you do not need a higher Crafting level than its corresponding Gathering professions because you will lack the materials to craft anything anyway. You also waste materials you might have wanted to use for other items later.
 * When using the percentage based Crafting boosters, note that the end values are always rounded down to the nearest integer.
 * When using Crafting boosters, remember that it takes exactly one second to craft any item and that a full boost lasts 120 seconds.
 * In order to avoid memory leak issues after crafting each item, switch to a different Life Skill tab while crafting. Note that actually closing the window will cancel crafting, though.
 * You can do a lot of other things while crafting, including walking around, attacking, playing instruments, and completing the Premium Dungeon. Note that taking damage or using any action that requires the action bar, as well as closing the Life Skills window, will immediately cancel crafting.