What is Trade Skill Aptitude?
Trade Skill Aptitude in New World is an end game system added for trade skills in the 1.1.2 patch. This introduced a further progression system to your trade skills once you have maxed them out at level 200.
When you reach level 200 in a specific trade skill, the Trade Skill Aptitude will be unlocked for that trade skill. The circle around your skill level will now have 3 markers around it to indicate milestones of experience. You can think of this like a prestige system some other games have.
As you continue to use the trade skill, you will gain additional experience which will fill the meter around your trade skill. So if you have 200 harvesting, each time you harvest now, the experience will be added to this aptitude level to bring your closer to each of those milestones. Once you have filled all three of the milestones and therefore finished the full circle, the aptitude number on the right will go up by one and you can earn these milestones again.
Rewards from Aptitude Levels
As you continue to gain aptitude in a trade skill, the rewards will become better. For each trade skill, the milestones you see on the circle will give you:
- 1st Milestone: Parcel
- 2nd Milestone: Crate
- 3rd Milestone: Package
These rewards will give you a box of materials that are related to that trade skill. Each milestone will give you better or more materials than the previous one.
Other rewards can come in Equipment Patterns. For the crafting trade skills, if you are crafting more items after you’ve already hit level 200, you will continue to earn aptitude levels. When you get the Parcels, Crates, or Packages from the milestones, you will have a chance to get an Equipment Pattern that is a crafting artifact.
Using these patterns to craft an item will mean you are guaranteed to get a item level 600 item from that pattern. Be aware, the material costs for these patterns are quite expensive or will take quite a while to gather, so even if you have the pattern, creating the item is no easy feat.
How To Get Emerald Gypsum with Trade Skill Aptitude
Whenever you get one of the rewards from gaining aptitude in ANY trade skill, when you open the rewards you will also earn an Emerald Gypsum. You can only earn an Emerald Gypsum once per 18 hours. So if you are not playing a ton of hours, try to time your aptitude level milestones so that you achieve them when the 18 hours cooldown of Emerald Gypsum is not active.
To achieve this efficiency, Let’s say you have already earned an Emerald Gypsum today and you know that tomorrow you won’t be able to play much. What you can do is continue leveling your trade skill until you are just about to hit one of the milestone indicators. When you log in the next day, perform that trade skill enough to hit the milestone, and you should be able to easily earn another Emerald Gypsum without needing to play much the second day!
It is worth noting that utilizing the gathering professions like Harvesting, Logging, or Mining will almost always be the best way to earn Emerald Gypsum. These are going to be the fastest trades to gain aptitude in and they also won’t cost you any coins. If you are trying to level aptitude in a crafting skill, you might need to buy the materials to be able to craft items. If you are just gathering using Harvesting for example, you are gaining aptitude and also gaining new items that you can either sell for more coin, or you can use in crafting skills later!
To give you an idea on how long it takes, from my first aptitude increase it took only 9 minutes farming in my favorite Harvesting Spot to gain the first milestone and Emerald Gypsum.
