I'm pretty sure you don't mine fine sand anywhere.
The best you can do is mine river or sea sand and then goldsmith it into fine sand.
If you convert fish into sea sand or river sand, it takes shards, and it takes some more shards to goldsmith the river/sea sand into fine sand, so you don't or barely gain when you crack crystals that way.
You can probably drop some money on fine sand from the market wards. It's in the mason's row under stone. Before it was gone, Jemimi at the Alchemists guild sold it for 358ea. Hmm and right now on my server you can get ~2 stacks of 99 for 1400ea, 2 for 1499ea, and 6 priced at 1500ea
unit price--------stack of 99-------cost per shard from cracking
358------------------35,442---------22.375
1400----------------138,600---------87.5
1500----------------148,500---------93.75
The 'cost per shard from cracking' column is just the cost of the sand, it doesn't include what you paid for the crystals. It assumes a yield of 16 shards from each of 99 crystals for 1584 shards total (i.e. no botches).
So unless you didn't pay anything for the crystals, on my server it's pretty close but cheaper to buy shards than sand. And in terms of time, you're way better off just buying shards.
I suspect that's what this is really all about, getting people to buy shards instead of create more, until 1.20 comes around at least.
Shard prices are very low these days, like 100ish on Mysidia. Sadly crystals are almost as cheap as shards, they cost just a few hundred more (300-600, which is what shards cost back around launch in late 2010)...demand for crystals is dropping now that you have to pay so much for fine sand. The super cheapness of crystals makes it very close cost wise but you have to crack them yourself.
Other than that, you can buy a fishing pole and some bait and go after the low level fish that convert into shards.
Or you can level some unused DoW/DoM for a while I guess.
I bought ten stacks of fine sand before they took it off the npc market...but now what do I do with it hmm...I could level up alchemist on it, or sell it...
There is supposed to be a bunch of stuff for alchemist in 1.2 but of course they haven't said what. I suspect this situation will be effected in some way...either fixed or made irrelevant or something. I think whatever I do with it, I should do it before then.
Edited by user Wednesday, October 19, 2011 8:06:28 AM(UTC)
| Reason: fixed my little attempt at columns and added some stuff