"Whoo hoo, halfway there!" Don't we wish that were true? So far you've had to do a bit of tradeskilling and a bit of running around hither and thither, in some moderate danger. The fifth shawl will test you even further, by requiring that you delve a good bit into tailoring and engage in some phenomenal feats of patience in collecting the components. The fifth is no cakewalk, but when you get on to the higher ones, you'll get downright nostalgic about the easy golden days of the fifth shawl...well okay maybe not about collecting the wurm biles.
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Highest Skill Trivials
Drops to Collect
Ask Loremaster Borannin, "What can I do to further advance my reputation with the coldain?"
Loremaster Borannin says, "Verdandi! Thank Brell you're here. I was about to send one of my Lorekeepers looking for you. It appears that the information Tanik acquired is most perilous indeed. The Dain has called an emergency session of the council and I must attend. We don't have the luxury of waiting for an appropriate task to arise, you must advance as soon as possible. Unfortunately, I have neither the time, nor the components to fashion the next few shawls for you. Ask Rexx Frostweaver about the prayer shawl and follow his direction carefully."
You say, "Hail Rexx Frostweaver"
Rexx Frostweaver says "Hmmm, ye be one o them offlanders, don't ye? I've heard some strange tales o yer kind so don't be tryin' any funny business with me. I know the value of a platinum piece and I'll not get cheated by yer foreign coin."
You say, "I am here for the next prayer shawl."
Rexx Frostweaver says, "Gather five strands of crystalline silk thread and combine them in a sewing kit to make a crystalline silk fiber. Take this container and combine a glowing shardwurm bile with three of the fibers to form a piece of glowing crystalline silk. Five pieces of glowing crystalline silk sewn to your fur-lined shawl will yield a beautiful silk shawl. Become a master in the art of tailoring before risking all you've worked for and be sure to let me inspect your work when it's complete."
[Receive: Bile Soaker]
[Give Rexx Frostweaver: Silk Coldain Prayer Shawl]
Rexx Frostweaver says, "Splendid, Verdandi, this is beautiful workmanship! As the Grand Historian may have mentioned, our esteemed Dain Frostreaver the fourth is making some important plans with his council. These plans will doubtlessly include you if the Dain deems you worthy."
[Receive: Silk Coldain Prayer Shawl]
Alrighty...we need 5 glowing wurm biles and 75 crystalline threads. First, we combine the threads in sets of five to make crystalline fibers. Then we combine three fibers each with a bile in the glowing bile soaker that Rexx (located among the merchants in the bank) so kindly provides, to make five glowing crystalline silks. Then we combine those five glowing crystalline silks with our fur-lined shawl. There are a few steps but they're pretty simple, right? Well...first we need to get that tailoring up!
Basic Tailoring Information
The fundamentals of tailoring are very straightforward. You combine your recipe ingredients in a sewing kit. Many recipes require a pattern, like all armor recipes, but some do not, like silk swatches or small tailored bags. The thing that makes tailoring such a horrible beast to work on is that there is no point whatsoever at which you can improve your skill solely with store-bought items. You must hunt and collect ingredients for every single attempt at anything tailored. Thus, there are long stretches where you will be working on the same kind of item, and therefore need mind-numbing quantities of the same ingredient. The most common of these are spider silks and various kinds of pelts. Hence the joke: "'What's the fastest way to work up tailoring?' 'Well, first you level a necro to 50 to farm for ingredients....'" The scary thing is that it's not entirely exaggerated. For the purposes of this step of the quest, you need to get your skill to 115, which is slow and tedious and frustrating and painful but not yet as heartbreaking as the 150+ stuff. You can get your recipes from the Basic Tailoring Recipes page, where there's even a link at the top to where you'll find pelts and silks. There are links to other kinds of recipes, but if you follow them you'll see that the skill for those is well beyond what you'd need for this shawl.
The other thing that confuses many people is that there are several different tailoring kits. The most basic are the small (two-slot) and large (eight-slot) kits that you can find on vendors in cities all over the place. There are also looms with ten slots in many cities, to allow people to make items that require more than eight ingredients. Looms are stationary containers like ovens or brew barrels that you use on the spot. The only other kind of tailoring container that is readily available is the Coldain Tailoring Kit (eight-slot), sold only in Thurgadin. This is the only tailoring kit that can be used to do some of the high end Velious armor, although old world recipes will all work in it, too. You may also have heard of Deluxe Sewing Kits. These are no longer available except from other players who happen to have them. At one time the large kits sold by vendors had 10 slots on them. Then, perhaps to help the handmade backpack market, Verant decided to change it so that the vendors only sold containers with 8 slots. They could not change the existing ones because people might have stuff in them, so they renamed the original ones Deluxe kits and restocked vendors with the new large 8-slot ones. So the only Deluxe kits in existence now are from large ones that people had when the change was made. The ONLY way to get a Deluxe kit now is to buy it from another player, or find one on a merchant that a player sold to that merchant. Given the existance of looms and the fact that there are only a very few recipes that require 10 slots, it is probably not worth your while to bother trying to find one. For the purposes of this quest, you would do fine with either a large kit or coldain kit. You could also use a city loom if you are willing to travel outside of Velious, as there are none in the cities there.
Combine in tailoring kit: 5 Crystalline Silk Thread = 1 Crystalline Silk Fiber (trivial 51)
Combine in Glowing Bile Soaker: 3 Crystalline Silk Fiber + 1 Glowing Worm Bile = Glowing Crystalline Silk Piece (never fails)
Combine in tailoring kit: 5 Glowing Crystalline Silk Piece + Fur-lined Coldain Prayer Shawl = Silk Coldain Prayer Shawl (trivial 115)
Note that if you fail at the final combine here, you will get your fourth shawl back. The same goes for the final combines for the sixth and seventh, you will always get your previous shawl back if the attempt to make a new one fails. Also, you can trigger Rexx to give you the Glowing Bile Soaker with the key words "I am here for the next prayer shawl", so if you would rather not lug this thing around, you can destroy it after use and keep going back for another one when you need it.
Biles: These are dropped by all kinds of shardwurms in Great Divide...young, guardian, elder, ancient...you name it. So, you could go out and just start randomly slaughtering them, in which case they will be a very rare drop. Or, you could take advantage of a fantastic feature and look for the wurms that glow! After all, this is *glowing* wurm bile that we seek, is it not? Unless you have another reason to kill wurms (needing spell drops or getting exp) then I recommend you wait until nightfall and look for the wurms that glow. You need to be careful, because if they are standing near the velium river, spikes of velium on the ground, campfires, or torches in the tunnels, then they may sometimes appear to glow when they have no bile, or may not seem to be glowing when they do have it. So I focused on the wurms outside of the tunnels. There are many of them that roam around to the south of the tunnels, and plenty from there around over to the dragon ring (the teleport spot). So I just ran around at night looking for glowing wurms. They are still pretty rare, I averaged one bile for every one or two (game) nights that I looked. If there are a lot of people looking at the same time, then you might find even less. If there are people out hunting them who are not looking for them, then you might find even more because they'll be respawning as they're killed. It all depends. If you have trouble finding them, kill a few here and there to refresh the population for yourself and others, and hopefully get some glowing ones to spawn.
Some people have reported that they absolutely cannot see the glow. Make sure that you have your dynamic lighting on ("/dynamiclights on"). You could test to be sure by heading back to Antonica and finding a wisp. If you see the wisp glow at night, then my guess would be that there isn't any reason why you wouldn't see the wurm glow too. If you are of a race gifted with good night vision, you can also try turning your gamma all the way down. This will make the world in general very dark and help any light sources stand out better. In the new UI go into your Options on the Window Selector, under the Display tab. The Gamma slider should be at the top right. In the old UI I'm not sure exactly where it is but it should be under your Options as well.
It is imperceptible during the day, however, so I highly recommend that you spare yourself the heartache of looking during the day and just do it at night. Either way, killing wurms will make new ones spawn and hopefully bring out some new ones with biles. So if you are having trouble finding any, try killing some and see if ones with biles don't turn up eventually. The picture below demonstrates what a glowing wurm should look like the one below, courtesy of Chenier. Thanks to Leafrat Pineheart and Chenier Sangeforet for their screenshots and for not letting it get forgotten!
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Crystalline Silk Threads: These drop off of crystalline spiders in Velketor's Labyrinth. As these spiders are right at the zone and all give experience all the way up to level 60, this is a very popular place for high levels. If you are under level 50 you will probably have a lot of trouble finding a group. However, with so many people hunting the spiders you may not have to do any killing yourself. I got most of my threads by going around to each group on the ground floor (not worth the danger of going up the slippery ramps to groups up above unless you're feeling really impatient or know the zone well) and asking them if they had anyone collecting threads. Those that had no use for them agreed to send me a tell when they got any, and I'd just scoot over and loot em.
There are several varieties of spiders in Velks: crystalline spiders, blizzard spiders, and shard spiders. The crystallines are the only ones that drop threads, and are the easiest of the three. Only a few rare spiders called crystalline hunters or blizzard hunters (I don't think there are shard hunters) can see invis. So, you are almost completely safe moving about the spider area with invis up, just watch for the hunters. Shortly after spawning the spiders also invis themselves, so make sure you have some form of see invis on if you want to know where they are. The ground level area is otherwise pretty straightforward, except for an icy patch just past the big mound of snow that is straight ahead from the bottom of the ramp at zone-in. Piece of cake.