Clamming: An Analysis By Sushomi

CAUTION!

This article is only a guide. Information expressed in a guide is usually more opinion than fact and should be taken as such. Guides are written by players, based upon their experiences, successes and mistakes, and are meant to aid other players. However, there may be differing opinions than those expressed in a guide. Strategies and information in guides may not work for everyone.

The Pre-Amble

Firstly, this is not a clamming guide as such, and instead is meant to be more a look at the recent changes to clamming (as of patch 1.2), as well as analysing the available data to determine the potential of clamming as a method of gil farming.

If you are looking for a guide, then check out Sushomi's Clamming Guide. I don't know who wrote it, but it must have been some awesome dude!

If you're still here, you're probably some kinda data nerd, and that's cool. Read on, fellow numberphile!

A Comparison of Clamming Pre- and Post-1.2

On 16th November 2023, an adjustment was made to the clamming loot table in an attempt to bring the gil/hr made from clamming in line with other HELM activities.

The general concensus from the community was that it was a direct nerf to clamming, however, due to the heavy reliance of RNG (random number generation) on this activity, it is hard to quantify this without a significantly large enough dataset. Luckily, I had already gathered 6,557 datapoints prior to the patch, and have now completed the exact same sample size following the patch 1.2 adjustments.

To enable a direct comparison, I have calculated the profits I would have made from both samples using a mix of vendor and current Auction House prices (I will mark AH values where applicable, so keep in mind that these values could change by the time you're reading this).

Note: While I am using the gil values as a method of comparing the two drop tables, the profits will not be a true reflection of what you could expect to make as it does not take into account items lost from buckets breaking.

Item	Value (gil)	Vendor/AH	Old Drops	Old Profit	New Drops	New Profit	Difference
Bibiki Slug	10	Vendor	666	6,660	619	6,190	-470
Bibiki Urchin	750	Vendor	69	51,750	68	51,000	-750
Coral Fragment	3,750	AH	73	273,750	61	228,750	-45,000
Crab Shell	392	Vendor	148	58,016	127	49,784	-8,232
Elm Log	4,250	AH	76	323,000	35	148,750	-174,250
Fish Scales	23	Vendor	346	7,958	307	7,061	-897
Goblin Armor	170	AH	132	22,440	139	23,360	+1,190
Goblin Mail	1500	AH	160	240,000	131	196,500	-43,500
Goblin Mask	650	AH	139	90,350	142	92,300	+1,950
Hobgoblin Bread	91	Vendor	130	11,380	153	13,923	+2,093
Hobgoblin Pie	153	Vendor	146	22,338	146	22,338	0
High Quality Crab Shell	3312	Vendor	41	135,792	31	102,672	-33,120
High Quality Pugil Scales	260	Vendor	82	21,320	110	28,600	+7,280
Jacknife	35	Vendor	633	22,155	605	21,175	-980
Lacquer Log	6000	AH	35	210,000	38	228,000	+18,000
Maple Log	15	Vendor	101	1,515	85	1,275	-240
Nebimonite	250	AH	158	39,500	154	38,500	-1,000
Oxblood	13,250	Vendor	45	596,250	31	410,750	-185,500
Pamtam Kelp	7	Vendor	48	336	439	3,073	+2,737
Pebble	1	Vendor	1,320	1,320	1,375	1,375	37
Petrified Log	3,500	AH	26	91,000	35	122,500	+31,500
Pugil Scales	24	Vendor	338	8,112	286	6,848	-1,248
Seashell	30	Vendor	271	8,130	178	5,340	-2,790
Shall Shell	300	Vendor	327	98,100	329	98,700	+600
Titanictus Shell	357	Vendor	98	34,986	80	28,560	-6,426
Tropical Clam	5,100	Vendor	101	515,100	86	438,600	-76,500
Turtle Shell	1,190	Vendor	77	91,630	55	65,450	-26,180
Uragnite Shell	1,455	Vendor	39	56,745	40	58,200	+1,455
White Sand	250	Vendor	140	35,000	203	50,750	+15,750
Broken Willow Rod	0	NA	142	0	145	0	0
Vongola Clam	192	Vendor	450	86,400	342	65,664	-20,736
SUM			6,557	3,161,483	6,557	2,616,256	-545,227

So that's a lot of numbers, but what's the takeaway from this? In short, the patch 1.2 rebalancing of the clamming loot table represents around a 17% decrease in value. Your mileage may vary depending on whether you choose to auction house or vendor certain drops.

Some of the biggest changes appear to be a slight reduction in drops for Oxblood and Tropical Clam, and a significant reduction in Elm Log. Pamtam Kelp had the biggest increase, having previously been confirmed to have incorrect drop rates prior to 1.2.

How Much Gil Can I Expect to Make Per Hour?

This is the question everyone seems to want to know the answer to, and it's a very difficult question to answer for several reasons:

• Firstly, it depends on how much of your spoils you put on auction house, versus how much you vendor. Several items sell for more on AH, and yet people vendor them anyway due to how slowly they sell.

• Auction house prices will vary. At the time of my sampling, 40% of my profit would come from AH sales, so any fluctuations in market price could have a significant impact on the overall profit.

• Clamming is extremely dependent on luck. During my time on the beach, I had sessions where I could go 6-7 hours without a single Oxblood. On the other end of the spectrum, I once got 5 in a little over an hour. The gil/hr will eventually balance out, but don't expect to turn up for an hour or two and immediately rake in 50-60k/hr, you may need to spend 10's of hours before you hit that magical "average".

With that little disclaimer out of the way, I am going to attempt to analyse the potential of clamming, expressed as a theoretical maximum average gil per hour

The Assumptions

First off, let's recognise that there are going to be a number of assumptions made here.

• We assume that the drops obtained will follow the exact same drop rate as shown in my latest sample of 6,557 post patch 1.2
• The value of the items will be based off a mix of vendoring and AH, and the AH prices will be based on current market value at the time of writing this.
• Which items are sold to vendor and which are sold on AH will follow exactly what I did during my sampling (see table in previous section for which items I vendored/AH'd)
• We will assume the bucket never breaks - I will address this somewhat towards the end. But remember for now, we're just looking at a theoretical maximum.
• The player will obtain a new item every 12 seconds while stood at the clamming point (10 second cooldown on hitting the clamming point, plus 2 seconds for the character to dig and obtain the item).
• It takes approximately 40 seconds for the player to run from the clamming point to the NPC, talk to the npc to upgrade/cash-out/get a new bucket, and then run back to hit the clamming point, without any movement speed bonus.
• We're also going to assume that the player will take a reasonable amount of risk. In other words, none of that always cashing out the second you hit 31pz nonsense. We want to know the maximum potential, and that means pushing for maximum capacity!
• Upgrading a bucket essentially saves the player 500gil on their next run as you don't need to pay the NPC again. We will assume that for every 3 times the player pays for a bucket, they will get 1 free bucket. This number may not be entirely accurate, but honestly it didn't make a huge difference to the calculations anyway.

The Model

So using those assumptions, let's start to do some calculations.

First up, how much gil on average do you get every single time you hit the clamming point. Well, I multiplied the value or each possible item by its drop rate, and then summed up all those values. This gives us an average value of 403.4 gil every time we clam.

Now we have to work out how much a bucket is worth, and how long each bucket takes to fill.

Following a similar calculation to the previous step, I multiplied the weight of each item by its drop rate, and summed up those values. This works out at an average of around 6.3pz per item. Or to put it another way, a bucket can hold on average 7.9 items.

7.9 x 403.4 gil = 3,186.9 gil per bucket

Each bucket costs 500gil, however, remember we made the assumption that every 4th bucket would be free. So we can say that each run to the npc would cost us 375 gil (500 * 3/4), so this would bring the profit per bucket down to 2,811.9 gil.

Our assumption was that the player would click the clamming point to obtain an item every 12 seconds. You don't need to wait for the cooldown on the first click as you will have just ran there from the NPC, which takes 40 seconds. So, on average a bucket will take 40 + (6.9 x 12) seconds, or 122.8 seconds.

There are 3,600 seconds in an hour, divided by 122.8 seconds, gives us an average of 29.3 buckets per hour.

Now for the bit we've all waited for...

29.3 buckets x 2,811.9 gil give us... 82,426 gil (rounded up) per hour!!!

A More Realistic View

A little over 82k per hour is in theory the maximum average you would expect from clamming. As already mentioned, this is assuming the player is 100% efficient in their clamming, and also that you're doing enough that the good and bad luck averages out. You'd also have to never break a bucket, and pretty much hit 50pz every single time. It also doesn't take into account situations where a player may get a high-value item early on, and therefore may choose to cash out early.

So how about we look at a few more realistic figures? To start out, what happens if we assume the player will generally stop around 40pz on average? I chose this number because this is the point where a Jacknife will break your bucket, and is a decent mid-point between the no-risk 31pz cash-out, and the daredevil push to 45 strats. Well, the gil/hr drops to 75,381. Still a very respectable amount.

Note: The 40pz average still accounts for the fact that some buckets will go up to 100, or even 150pz because each time you visit the npc you essentially pick up a new 50pz capacity, and we're not looking at total bucket capacity, but rather how much weight you'll collect between each time you visit the npc.

What about bucket breaks? Sometimes they are unvoidable. Chances are if you've hit a break it's because you had a worthless bucket and weren't gonna make your 500gil back so you kept pushing in the hopes of getting an upgrade or a big ticket item. Sometimes this will happen because you kept getting worthless items, or maybe you got really unlucky and got the dreaded Tropical Clam at 31pz. I feel your pain on that last one!

Either way, we can assume that the majority of the items lost were worthless to begin with, so would have minimal impact on the gil/hr. The only significant impact comes from the dreaded clams themselves, being valued at 5,100 gil each. However, they are still quite rare with a sub 1.5% drop rate. Still working with the assumption of a 40pz average, you will hit around 2.8 Tropicals per hour. So let's assume 1 out of the 2.8 will cause a bucket break, and we'll value that bucket at 5,600 gil (the value of the clam, plus the bucket price since being below 500gil value is probably what made you decide to keep clamming). This now brings our gil/hr down to 69,781.

And finally, the other way you will lose gil is simply by not being a machine. No player is ever going to be 100% efficient. We can probably assume that most players will be able to hit the 40 second NPC run fairly consistently as it's not difficult to manage this. However, hitting the clamming point exactly 10seconds after you obtained your previous item isn't realistic every single time. And sometimes you're going to mess up and forget to pick up your new bucket after turning in the previous... Don't lie, we've all done it! So let's just apply a ballpark figure of 10% loss simply for being human.

69,781 * 0.9 = 62,803 gil/hr

And there we have it, probably about as realistic of a figure as I can come up with.

Ways to Improve

With that baseline established for what most players can reasonably expect, let's take a quick look at ways we can possibly improve this figure.

The first obvious one is by being an absolute maniac and reducing the overall inefficiency as much as possible. If you can recover some of that 10% inefficiency, that will bring you closer to 65k-70k per hour. However, I doubt many people would have the level of focus required to be able to do this, even in short bursts.

Movement speed is another option. Those 40seconds running to/from the NPC really add up over time. However, some of that time is taken up by unavoidable interacting with the NPC menu, so the actual time saved isn't all that great.

In theory, a BRD/THF (or any /thf job with gaiters/w.legs/trotters) would likely be the best at this. They can cast Mazurka between clamming attempts so it is nearly always up when they need to run back, as well as having Flee every 5 minutes. Let's say they save on average 6 seconds per bucket. This would increase their earnings by 4,160 gil per hour... not bad!

The Summary

First off, I just want to say that there are no doubt some other considerations that haven't been factored in. But I would like to think I've covered most of the main points, and based on my own experiences I believe the value I've come up with here is a very reasonable estimate for what we can expect from clamming.

Again, I want to make it clear that due to heavy RNG-dependency, this value will most likely only be achieved as an average over many hours. Some of you will start clamming and instantly exceed this figure, whereas others could clam for hours and feel like they've been shortchanged. RNG giveth, and RNG taketh away. Over time, however, we will all experience streaks of both good AND bad luck, and so your income will eventually average out.

But for those looking for the TL;DR version, here's the end figures:

• Clamming with 0 inefficiencies, 0 movement speed bonus, and 0 bucket breaks, based on current market values = 82.4k / hr

• Realistic figure taking into account human inefficiency, and bucket breaks due to bad luck = 62.8k / hr

Praise be to the Clam!