New World’s grind is real, and trying to level yourself up in various skills can be a tremendous amount of time and energy. I’ve been putting the time in, and have come up with some tips in terms of how to hit level 100 at the very least for some of the major gathering skills, which will allow you to access a bevy of materials.
One key thing is to make sure you have the best tools you can, which requires some investment in engineering to get yourself up to Iron and then Steel tools, so craft a bunch of muskets and reach level 50 there.
Interactive maps are hugely important to finding where resources are, so be sure to start using those. This is the one that I use here, and is a godsend for finding good farming spots. Hit “hide all” to get a blank map and then add stuff from there.
So, let’s go through these.
Level 100 Logging – So far as I can tell, there is no real trick here, only time. The key point is when you hit 50, you can start chopping down mature trees, but after that, keep chopping down essentially everything you see. It will take you more time to discern between mature and young trees than it would just chopping down them all and getting XP. You will likely end up getting more Aged Wood from mature trees than you can process, and there’s nothing wrong with simply dropping it to keep farming, losing the weight. This is one of the slowest grinds in the game, so try to craft an axe that gives you bonus XP for logging.
Level 100 Mining – This is tricky because so many people are trying to do this, meaning farming spots can be hard to come by. While you can just mine random boulders everywhere, the best way to do this and level smithing at the same time is to find a good silver spot. My favorite one is right outside Brightwatch where there’s a mountain with about seven nodes that are easy to access. Silver weighs a ton, but even if you get overencumbered here, it’s so close to town you can slow walk back if you need to.
You will also need iron though, maybe not for mining XP necessarily, but for leveling pretty much everything else from engineering to armor and weapon forging. Iron spots are hard to come by with so many people farming them, but this one below has been one of my favorites that people rarely seem to visit, south of Brightwatch. Maybe I shouldn’t give it away, hah.
Gold is a lot of mining XP, but most smelters are not upgraded enough to process it yet, as it requires a level 4. So that’s why I’ve mostly stuck with Silver.
Level 100 Tracking and Skinning – This is a weird one because it seems to just have wildly more XP given than most others. I’m at level 130 when I just hit 100 on the other categories, and I wasn’t even doing a dedicated farm. Pretty much if you see any large animal, a wolf, a deer, an elk, kill it and skin it. Level 100 actually does not do anything, but 125 will start letting you track “small predators” like wolves and attack dogs.
Level 100 Harvesting – This one is annoying, and mainly comes down to finding a good Hemp farming route, as that seems to be one of the only high XP harvesting things that grows in groups. Hemp is usually found in open fields and the best area I’ve found for it, one that is not exactly a secret for most players yet, is in this area below, near where some of the first main story quests are turned in. Do loops, hit the respawns.
Generally speaking, I’ve found it’s about 10 minutes for things like small plants or ore piles to respawn, closer to 15 minutes for larger ones, so time your farming accordingly. As for fishing, the final category, I haven’t got any advice for you yet because I’m only level 4 and have skipped that grind entirely so far. I’ll work on that next, probably.
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