Check the supply and provisioning log. What do I need to craft today? What do I need to gather? Get a list of the things I need.
I don't respond to stress particularly well. I get angry, I get frustrated, I need to walk away even when it feels like the last thing I should be doing. The best solution, I've found, is to find something quick and repetitive to do to take my mind off for a bit. And as I've found recently, MMOs are the perfect fit.
Crafting is easy, but annoyingly luck based. Start the crafting: Activate Great Strides now, so you can take advantage of any possible condition changes; Use Basic Synthesis to increase the progress; pay attention to the durability so I don't waste this stuff; raise high quality chance as much as I can, and hope for the best once it's done.
Once everything is crafted, time to move on to gathering. Look up the location of the requested botany and fishing items. Go to where the botany item is, and gather 10, always 10. Figure out the right bait and location for the fish I need to gather, then cast my line. Then fail, and cast it again. Then fail again, and cast it again. The fishing always takes a while.
My poison of choice, for a while now, has been Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn. I'm well into endgame, at the moment, and eagerly await the upcoming expansion pack Stormblood. But right now, world being as it is, I'm thankful for a place to go with plenty to do when I need it.
The variety of things available in the game, as far as repetitive stuff goes, is impressive. Maybe it's nothing special for people who have sunk time into MMOs before, but as a relative noobie it can be overwhelming sometimes. Every 18 hours, I have to check in with my retainers (NPCs who can hold items, sell items on the market, and do odd jobs for you) and ensure they're still working on ventures, along with searching for treasure maps that can contain valuable crafting materials and currency. Every day, I have new Supply and Provisioning missions, where I need to craft and gather items for one of the three PVP factions; I don't participate in PVP at all, but joining a faction is required for the story and being a part has other benefits. I can also do Beast Tribe quests every day, which can provide experience or endgame currency, or do Duty Roulette, which will have me running a dungeon for bonus money and experience. And every week, the game’s Challenge Log resets, which has tons of different objectives within which can provide experience, money, and some of the special currencies such as faction seals and Gold Saucer Points.
With the Beast Tribe quests finished, I run a few dungeons; one of the roulettes picks from the two most recently added dungeons, but for some reason more people seem to be running the one that isn't required for the story. And in the roulette of the rest of the dungeons, the Aetherochemical Research Facility is almost always where you end up: it gives the most Allagan Tomestones of Lore, a currency which is probably going to be phased out once the new expansion hits, but is still valuable right now. Running the dungeons is a little rote, but sometimes the other people you get grouped with are fun to talk to.
In all honesty, it can take me hours to complete everything on my plate any given day, if I even bother to try finishing everything. But sometimes I need a few hours. Sometimes I only need like 30 minutes. Sometimes just hearing a familiar tune, a calming melody, is enough to put me in the right state of mind. To be able to face a tough day, as days tend to be lately. Just something to stop anxiety and panic attacks.
The dungeons are finished, and with it my entire daily routine is exhausted. But there's still a ton of classes and jobs I could level up, and I still need to finish the Scholasticate questline, and I still need to get my Relic weapon up to date, and finish all of the Alexander raids, and the new Dun Scaith raid, and I just saw an advertisement for a player-run club that I could check out as a goof, and...
I used to hate this stuff: it was repetitive, it was boring, it was what weird people did when they ran out of real stuff to do in the game. But now, when I need something simple and easy to do, something I can lean back on, I appreciate this stuff as more than fluff. It's the same, over and over, and it's the exact relaxation I need.
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