Like a Dragon: Ishin! – Assorted Tips for the Crafting Grind

While going for all the achievements I looked up a lot of guides and forums for tips, mainly regarding equipment crafting, which is by far the toughest grind of this game. I read through most of the main tips like chicken racing and the craft method to assure you’ll get a seal. After many hours I ended up doing some things that I didn’t really see highlighted a lot (or even at all). I decided to post them here as they may help you on your journey as well.

Note: this post assumes you’ve also read countless other guides and know about the whole reloading a save to get seals thing as well as other important details if you’re going for 100%. These are mostly things I found helped me improve upon that

The first roadblock I found was obviously how much money crafting was going to take. You’ve probably already read about going to the chicken races, trying your luck and reloading if you fail. I did this for some time and I found it quite tedious, as well as not paying off particularly well. 60k tags get you 40 platinum plates which sell for 150 ryo at the pawn broker. A lot of the weapons you have to craft will cost you 77 or 150 ryo, so this wasn’t necessarily great. Others recommend planting and selling ginseng which is even worse, in my opinion.

In the end the solution was much simpler: sell your gear. If, like me, you hadn’t even thought about selling gear to the pawn broker and you’re hoarding a bunch of it, selling it will net you a lot of money. This becomes especially more natural due to the fact that you have a long grind ahead of you on the battle dungeons. Just the grind for the materials needed for The Last of the Dragons will assure that you pickup a ton of expensive weapons, ranging from 13 ryo all the way to 100, if not 300. Take care to keep the ones that have seals you can disassemble, use those for your seal completion, but otherwise, sell them.

This was probably extremely obvious and it may only serve .01% of you, but in my case I was so wrapped up in chicken races and ginseng dealing, with some people even suggesting grinding the last battle dungeon for ryo (20 ryo per run), that I didn’t even consider this. Selling all my unneeded gear on the endgame after an entire game of collecting it netted me more than 2000 ryo. I more than tripled this on future visits to the battle dungeons and I never touched a chicken race again.

To start things off, so I can maybe avoid you some wasted time as was my case:

• The latest patch of the game added a bunch of seals to dungeons, one of them being a particularly rare one that only dropped from Golden Sneaks previously. Most of the guides I found still only referenced the Golden Sneaks.
• Try your best to have weapons with the Greed seal on them before going to grind for item drops.
• When grinding for specific material drops, don’t stick to what you read on the guides only. For example, you’ll need 20 Aquamarines to trade for a Worn Pistol. They drop in several dungeons and can also be traded for arena points. I found the arena to be very boring, so I tried each dungeon that dropped Aquamarines and found one that gave 1 per run, sometimes 2. I was done with that grind in under 2 hours.

My suggestion for tackling the crafting list in a more efficient way is to take the “Stonecarver Method” for finding the seed for your seals, but instead of crafting Stonecarvers start working on your crafting completion list. Save after every crafted weapon. When one of them has a seal, reload the save and go hunt for the seals you need. Find or make a list and go through every weapon you need. If the first weapon you craft for a seal does not have a seal you want, you won’t get it on this try, but you can go down to the next seal on your list and craft the weapon needed for it. It’s highly unlikely you won’t get the seal you need or even, as it happened to me once or twice, a weapon you’re crafting for a particular seal comes with another you also don’t have. When you get a seal, disassemble the weapon and go back to following your crafting list.

By following this logic you may also get lucky with something else. Since you aren’t just crafting Stonecarvers, you may end up crafting weapons with more than 1 seal slot. If by chance you craft a weapon that comes with 2 seals (not including the locked ones, of course), take the chance to reload the save and look for particularly hard seals. Some weapons will have their seal almost guaranteed, while others have 3 or 4 possible seal spawns. From my experience, if you reload that save where you got 2 seals, you will always get 2 seals on that craft. Use it for those weapons as it will increase your odds.

To summarize, if like me you reached the endgame and looked at a crafting completion list that looks something like 10/206, you can make the grind easier and actually a bit more fun by embracing this loop:

• Start crafting equipment in accordance to your list and save after each craft
• If you get a seal on a crafted weapon, reload. Use that to hunt for a needed seal
• If you need a specific material that can only, or most easily, be acquired through dungeons, go there and grind
• Go to the pawn broker and sell everything that you don’t need and does not have a needed seal
• Selling things to the pawn broker gives you a bunch of Virtue. Use that to buy materials from the priest or buy training food if you’re also level grinding
• Go back to step 1

I understand this all may look obvious to some, but as I previously mentioned, by looking at the guides I was finding, I was mostly getting stuck on chicken race grinds or Stonecarver grinds. As soon as I started doing this, I stopped needing to craft Stonecarvers or do chicken races.