Guide to farming research points / mass gathering

Mini-guide of sorts for farming research points

Skills

None of these are strictly required, but they will help.

• Detector - Shows rare gathering points on the map.

• Helpful

• Geology - Increases the number of times you can use a gathering point.

• Critical

• Forager's Luck - Increases the chance of finding rare gathering points.

• Very Helpful

• Botanist - Increases the quantity of herbs and other consumable items you gather.

• Very helpful

• Honey Hunter - Increases the amount of honey gathered.

• Not very helpful

• Master Fisher - Improves fishing skill.

• Not very helpful unless you like to farm points by fishing

• Master Gatherer - Allows you to gather more quickly and prevents knock-backs.

• Extremely helpful

• Scenthound - Increases scoutflies' gauge fill rate when you find tracks.

• Situational

• Scholar - Speeds up progress on research levels and special investigations.

• Situational

• Scoutfly range up - Extends scoutfly range.

• Helpful

For research points ONLY, you simply need Geology, Foragers Luck, Detector, Scenthound, and Scoutfly range up. Scenthound is not critical as once you find a couple tracks your scoutflies level will already be high enough to find more tracks easily.
I usually strive to get all of the skills above as you might as well gather while you are doing this, you can stock up on tons of goodies and make quite a bit of zenny as well.

Now what you ask? Well, you are going to go to the little construction lizard gnome in the hub and search your investigations. What you are looking for is any investigation that has UPSURGE: BERYL / AMBER DEPOSITS

Flourishing will do if you don't have any upsurge investigations. Also, you can do this in any zone, Elders recess will yield by far the greatest amount of research points, but if you are short on some materials from another zone, you can easily do this in any zone and make a significant amount of points in a short time, just search for upsurge or flourishing investigation. Here is a list of what to look for:

• Flower beds / Unique Mushrooms for Ancient forest

• Cacti / Hard Fruit for Wildspire

• Pearls / Conch for Coral Valley

• Fossils for Forgotten Vale

• and Beryl / Amber Deposits in Elders recess

• Now, enter your chosen area, run around and start gathering at the gathering points. Between the Felyne food effect and the above mentioned skills you will gather up to 5 and on rare occasion 6 times! The Beryl / Amber deposits depending on luck, can yield up to and over 1000 research points in a single gather if you are lucky. After you are done with the investigations, the Felyne Researcher food effect will multiply everything by 1.2, for even more points!

If you grab tracks as well this will help unlock more investigations for you, I always go for the tracks, but you will get more research points per hour if you just focus on the gathering nodes.

I worked this out the other day finishing canteen ingredients and I was getting over 30,000 research points an hour and I was also gathering everything I could see, including tracks.

Extremely helpful, basically required:

Use a food voucher, and create the following custom platter.

The custom platter you want to make is from the drink section. You want 4 drinks from the top row, and 2 from the bottom, doesn't matter which.

This will provide you with 2 skills, * Felyne Harvester and Felyne Researcher. *

Felyne Harvester increases gathering nodes/respawn, and Felyne Researcher will multiply the research points gained at the end of your investigation.

HOW TO GET MORE FOOD VOUCHERS:

So... there are a couple of ways you can get more vouchers:

• A) The argosy: Sometimes this horrible inept "trader" will have some for sale in his list, as for which catergory they come in I am not entirely certain, I leave mine on All, although I would suspect it would be consumables

• B) Arena quests: I'm talking about the arena quests you can do from the lady on the left side of the counter in the Gathering Hub. The quests where you have to use a predetermined weapon/ armor.

• C) Preferred method, most reliable Befriend the pig! Once you are friends with Poogie, you can pick him up and carry him around the hub, if you take him up by the canteen and set him on the right side of the handler, our little porkish friend will dig up food vouchers for you. MAKE SURE YOU DO NOT BRING HIM NEAR THE MEAWSCULAR CHEF!!!
  I did this, and apparently he thought I was going to cook him. He developed PTSD and ran away, I haven't seen him in DAYS. So... legitimately, do NOT bring him too close to the oven.

• If you have not befriended Poogie yet you have to do 4 successful pets to be able to pick him up. You can only do 1 pet per return to the hub upon a quest completion.

EDIT: I have been told after a quest when you zone into the hub, if you just run and talk to research staff, check your plants, and manually run up to the canteen by the time you get done eating poogie will be there waiting for you, which saves you from having to carry him up there every time. Apparently if you are quick about taking care of your business downstairs, and can make it to the steps before poogie reaches you, he will follow you all the way up to the canteen to greet you. Could be a nifty little timesaver. Can anyone confirm this?

I still have some more information to add but I have to go to work, I will update more this weekend, if anyone else has more tips feel free to let me know and I will add more information!

I have edited this like 100x, sorry, I'm still figuring out how to use formatting here to make it easy to read.