A Mathematical Guide to Farming Supports Efficiently

[DefyingFates]

I've been grinding Supports for a while before v1.2.0 and have been especially working at it for the last few days. I just finished getting them earlier today and wanted to share my findings. Despite the title I know aren't the most rigorous results you could get and I beg welcome anyone with better statistical inclinations to also do some experimentation and let us know what they find. The pattern I settled on was:

1. Enter a Tempest Trials at Lv 1 and auto-battle it to completion. You can only auto-battle one turn at a time though, so you can't just leave Engage running and go do something else.
   1. Enable "skip enemy turn" and "skip auto-battle" in the settings. You'll still need to skip start of turn effects (e.g. healing/ flame tiles) but this will save a ton of time nonetheless.
2. Cook a meal and do all three Recreational Activities in the appropriate order (more on this later).
3. Repeat (consider the underlined points of the next section though).

The Tempest Trial took ~3.5 minutes for me, with another 3~4 minutes to do everything else. Each support conversation added another minute or so, so assuming you get one per loop you're looking at a ~9 minute loop.

Some quick facts before we start:

• Recreational Activities (added in v1.2) are easily the best way to get Supports.
• I don't know the actual number of Support points used so I will be using the above as my unit of measurement (I think that'd be easier to understand too).
• A successful meal counts for half of the above unit. Meals have their own section below.
• I think the Arena also counts as half of a unit, but since this involves a lot of reloading you may opt to skip it.
• As in other FEs, once you reach the threshold for a conversation, the affinity between those two characters will freeze until you view said conversation - there's no "carry over" of leftover points, so planning is important.
• Even if all you care about is Supports, I still recommend stopping by Sommie's shrine and the farmyard to collect the dropped Bond Fragments/ Ingots (if you have 5 dogs out).
  • Likewise, you'll get a bunch of packed lunches using this method. They only sell for 50G, but money is money if you want to get rid of them before restarting the loop. Just... make sure you don't accidentally buy or sell the wrong thing as I did once.
• Also, if you ignore Sommie for two(?) Somniel visits in a row, its affinity will start dropping. Once affinity drops below 25% it'll stop following you so... if you don't want that to happen, maybe give it at least a pet every so often.

About Meals:

• THE RANK OF THE MEAL DOES NOT MATTER. Just get Rank D or better. I don't think ingredients matter either, outside of increasing your odds of getting a better meal.
• Meal RNG is set as soon as you enter the Somniel. For example, if Yunaka botches a meal she has neutral proficiency in, all of her neutral meals will fail no matter how many times you reload or what else you do before cooking. However, you can reroll your "meal RNG" by resting (this also changes the chef).
• Both of your allies liking the meal is more important than the chef being good at cooking it.

About the Arena:

• The process here is to enter it as anyone and see who the opponent is, then reload and re-enter the arena as someone who gets Support with them.
• You can only "preview" one opponent at a time though: if you change who you take into the arena, you also change the seeded values that generate the next opponent.
• Equip a Bond Ring on whoever enters. This doesn't help Supports, but you'll get some SP this way (Emblem Rings are ignored in the Arena so they won't do this).

Completing all three matches with this "reload method" took ~6 minutes, not counting any unlocked supports. This may be worth adding them to the above loop, but if you do so do these before anything else: you can't control who shows up here so it's better to plan around them instead. The arena requires brainpower though: if you prefer the "no thoughts, head empty" approach then just use RAs and meals. It may keep you from getting burned out.

Gifts:

• I think gifts offer even less support than meals/ the arena? If I had to assume based on what I saw, I'd say "ideal" gifts (e.g. Spirit Gems) give the same as those two, but other gifts give half of that? As I'll say later, I think Alear has a really stingy A Rank threshold that's skewing my perception of results so that could also be part of it.

Support Points:

Here's what you wanted to know! There are a few specific patterns for how Supports are built that will be formatted like this:

{RAs needed to go from 0 -> C/ RAs needed to go from C -> B/ RAs needed to go from B -> A}

The patterns are thus:

• 1.5/1.5/3 - this is the default that most Supports use. If you put two characters together in an RA and they don't get a Support as soon as you do one of them, this is the pattern you're using, so let them share a meal afterwards to make the most of your resources.
• 1/1/2 - this is what the last four characters to join use, which makes sense - they need to keep pace with your other units, after all!

The next two are pretty rare and I'm not sure how accurate they are. If anyone's done the math or wants to do the math, please let me know if I hallucinated these or not!

• 1/1.5/5 - this is used for "slow burn" Supports like Diamant/ Alcryst. I think Alear uses this pattern too.
  • Re. Alear: On one hand, they get two supports per mealtime AND can use gifts so I kinda get the longer pattern. On the other: IT TAKES SO LONG FOR ALEAR TO GET "A" SUPPORTS, AHHHHHHHHH
• 1/2/3 - I'm pretty sure this only happened once or twice (I think Merrin and Kagetsu used this pattern?), so... again, any help is greatly appreciated!

Closing:

I'm pretty sure I had a few more things I wanted to include when planning this post but I can't think of them now. Hmm...

• Anyway, this will take time. You don't have to get them all right away as I did, or even get them all at all since conversations can be found on YouTube. This is just for completionists. If you do want to get them all though (over whatever stretch of time is preferable to you), the following points may help.
• If you're still going through the story you'll at least be able to incorporate the math above into how you play, but if you're doing this in the postgame you're just going to be in and out of the Trials, so I recommend having a podcast or some YouTube videos playing in the background: something simple enough that you don't have to actively pay attention but not dull enough that you get bored.
• If you play with a laptop or some other device nearby, it may help to have a spreadsheet open that you can track Supports on. For example, I made this by pasting the list of characters in one of SerenesForest's tables):

Spoiler

Unit names on one side, their remaining supports on the other and a simple "true/false" column that checks if the latter is empty/ set to 0. You can come up with your own notation for column 3 to depict how many B and C supports everyone has too, if you want to.

• If you really want to get all the supports and feel overwhelmed by all the empty slots in the Support menu though, remember that each support chain is between two people. In other words, if you complete a support for character A, you're also doing it for character B and thus the number you actually need to complete is half of what you see. That sounds really obvious out loud but it took an embarrassing amount of time to dawn on me and if I can help you figure that out sooner, I'm happy!

I'll keep this post updated if new information comes to light or I remember something, but for now... I hope this is useful to you all! Happy Engaging Support Farming!

[lenticular]

The SF main site has a good page about the mechanics of supports, including how many support points you get from which activities and how many points you need for each level of support for each different pairing. I assume that most of it was datamined, so it should be pretty accurate. It mostly agrees with your findings, but with a few discrepancies and some more detail in places.

For farming supports, I've only done so casually during story progression, but my approach has been to always send Alear into the arena. Whoever the opponent is, Alear is always going to support with them, so there's no need for the time and thought of saving and reloading. Plus, since Alear has the most supports, and they take the longest, it's not a bad thing to focus arena support gains onto them. It might be worth changing this up once you already have a lot of their A supports unlocked, but it's a decent mindless strat up until that point.

[DefyingFates]

9 hours ago, lenticular said:

The SF main site has a good page about the mechanics of supports, including how many support points you get from which activities and how many points you need for each level of support for each different pairing.

I... I asked so many times if there was any datamined info for Supports and no one answered... When did that page go up, because I could have sworn the link to that guide wasn't up when I checked a while back.

Still, thank you very much for the information, it's cool seeing what we both agree on or have different data for! Sending Alear into the Arena is a really good call too!

[SunnyGuy1054]

On 2/16/2023 at 10:39 PM, DefyingFates said:

I've been grinding Supports for a while before v1.2.0 and have been especially working at it for the last few days. I just finished getting them earlier today and wanted to share my findings. Despite the title I know aren't the most rigorous results you could get and I beg welcome anyone with better statistical inclinations to also do some experimentation and let us know what they find. The pattern I settled on was:

1. Enter a Tempest Trials at Lv 1 and auto-battle it to completion. You can only auto-battle one turn at a time though, so you can't just leave Engage running and go do something else.
   1. Enable "skip enemy turn" and "skip auto-battle" in the settings. You'll still need to skip start of turn effects (e.g. healing/ flame tiles) but this will save a ton of time nonetheless.
2. Cook a meal and do all three Recreational Activities in the appropriate order (more on this later).
3. Repeat (consider the underlined points of the next section though).

The Tempest Trial took ~3.5 minutes for me, with another 3~4 minutes to do everything else. Each support conversation added another minute or so, so assuming you get one per loop you're looking at a ~9 minute loop.

Some quick facts before we start:

• Recreational Activities (added in v1.2) are easily the best way to get Supports.
• I don't know the actual number of Support points used so I will be using the above as my unit of measurement (I think that'd be easier to understand too).
• A successful meal counts for half of the above unit. Meals have their own section below.
• I think the Arena also counts as half of a unit, but since this involves a lot of reloading you may opt to skip it.
• As in other FEs, once you reach the threshold for a conversation, the affinity between those two characters will freeze until you view said conversation - there's no "carry over" of leftover points, so planning is important.
• Even if all you care about is Supports, I still recommend stopping by Sommie's shrine and the farmyard to collect the dropped Bond Fragments/ Ingots (if you have 5 dogs out).
  • Likewise, you'll get a bunch of packed lunches using this method. They only sell for 50G, but money is money if you want to get rid of them before restarting the loop. Just... make sure you don't accidentally buy or sell the wrong thing as I did once.
• Also, if you ignore Sommie for two(?) Somniel visits in a row, its affinity will start dropping. Once affinity drops below 25% it'll stop following you so... if you don't want that to happen, maybe give it at least a pet every so often.

About Meals:

• THE RANK OF THE MEAL DOES NOT MATTER. Just get Rank D or better. I don't think ingredients matter either, outside of increasing your odds of getting a better meal.
• Meal RNG is set as soon as you enter the Somniel. For example, if Yunaka botches a meal she has neutral proficiency in, all of her neutral meals will fail no matter how many times you reload or what else you do before cooking. However, you can reroll your "meal RNG" by resting (this also changes the chef).
• Both of your allies liking the meal is more important than the chef being good at cooking it.

About the Arena:

• The process here is to enter it as anyone and see who the opponent is, then reload and re-enter the arena as someone who gets Support with them.
• You can only "preview" one opponent at a time though: if you change who you take into the arena, you also change the seeded values that generate the next opponent.
• Equip a Bond Ring on whoever enters. This doesn't help Supports, but you'll get some SP this way (Emblem Rings are ignored in the Arena so they won't do this).

Completing all three matches with this "reload method" took ~6 minutes, not counting any unlocked supports. This may be worth adding them to the above loop, but if you do so do these before anything else: you can't control who shows up here so it's better to plan around them instead. The arena requires brainpower though: if you prefer the "no thoughts, head empty" approach then just use RAs and meals. It may keep you from getting burned out.

Gifts:

• I think gifts offer even less support than meals/ the arena? If I had to assume based on what I saw, I'd say "ideal" gifts (e.g. Spirit Gems) give the same as those two, but other gifts give half of that? As I'll say later, I think Alear has a really stingy A Rank threshold that's skewing my perception of results so that could also be part of it.

Support Points:

Here's what you wanted to know! There are a few specific patterns for how Supports are built that will be formatted like this:

{RAs needed to go from 0 -> C/ RAs needed to go from C -> B/ RAs needed to go from B -> A}

The patterns are thus:

• 1.5/1.5/3 - this is the default that most Supports use. If you put two characters together in an RA and they don't get a Support as soon as you do one of them, this is the pattern you're using, so let them share a meal afterwards to make the most of your resources.
• 1/1/2 - this is what the last four characters to join use, which makes sense - they need to keep pace with your other units, after all!

The next two are pretty rare and I'm not sure how accurate they are. If anyone's done the math or wants to do the math, please let me know if I hallucinated these or not!

• 1/1.5/5 - this is used for "slow burn" Supports like Diamant/ Alcryst. I think Alear uses this pattern too.
  • Re. Alear: On one hand, they get two supports per mealtime AND can use gifts so I kinda get the longer pattern. On the other: IT TAKES SO LONG FOR ALEAR TO GET "A" SUPPORTS, AHHHHHHHHH
• 1/2/3 - I'm pretty sure this only happened once or twice (I think Merrin and Kagetsu used this pattern?), so... again, any help is greatly appreciated!

Closing:

I'm pretty sure I had a few more things I wanted to include when planning this post but I can't think of them now. Hmm...

• Anyway, this will take time. You don't have to get them all right away as I did, or even get them all at all since conversations can be found on YouTube. This is just for completionists. If you do want to get them all though (over whatever stretch of time is preferable to you), the following points may help.
• If you're still going through the story you'll at least be able to incorporate the math above into how you play, but if you're doing this in the postgame you're just going to be in and out of the Trials, so I recommend having a podcast or some YouTube videos playing in the background: something simple enough that you don't have to actively pay attention but not dull enough that you get bored.
• If you play with a laptop or some other device nearby, it may help to have a spreadsheet open that you can track Supports on. For example, I made this by pasting the list of characters in one of SerenesForest's tables):

  Reveal hidden contents

Unit names on one side, their remaining supports on the other and a simple "true/false" column that checks if the latter is empty/ set to 0. You can come up with your own notation for column 3 to depict how many B and C supports everyone has too, if you want to.

• If you really want to get all the supports and feel overwhelmed by all the empty slots in the Support menu though, remember that each support chain is between two people. In other words, if you complete a support for character A, you're also doing it for character B and thus the number you actually need to complete is half of what you see. That sounds really obvious out loud but it took an embarrassing amount of time to dawn on me and if I can help you figure that out sooner, I'm happy!

I'll keep this post updated if new information comes to light or I remember something, but for now... I hope this is useful to you all! Happy Engaging Support Farming! Oh, I really liked this! It's like finding a hidden treasure chest in the middle of a battlefield. I especially like how he effectively breaks down the mathematical intricacies of supporting agriculture. It's like leveling up your character by sipping a mana potion. By the way, I came across a wonderful nursing academic writers service that offers excellent resources for those diving into the depths of medical research. It's like having a trusted healer in your group, always ready with the right antidote. Happy farming, guys!

Thanks. Good job.

Edited April 25 by SunnyGuy1054

[DefyingFates]

11 hours ago, SunnyGuy1054 said:

Thanks. Good job.

I'm glad this helped!