Beginners guide to having an easy life in Luma Island

How to ez-mode this game and not be a suckerfish like me when I was a pup at this game.

Intro

Having put so many dang hours in this game the wrong way. I want to make new players lives easier. The tips apply for single or multiplayer and there will be no spoilers.

How to ProExpert Lumaknight

Step 1: Pick the Cook profession. Full stop. Farming allows you make a substantial amount of residual money. It can be a hassle, but it's to mult-task. With some automation, the only thing you might have to do is harvest and refine.

Step 2: Progress through the cook profession and make money while jumping into the mines and upgrading your tools.

Step 2-b: Don't upgrade any tool you aren't going to use. The fishing rod can stay level 1 until you pick up that profession... sometime in the future where you want to bother doing the fishing minigame..

Step 3: Explore the world once you cap your tools at each tier. You can gather wood and stone the fastest using the high end tool. Also capping out the whip makes killing baddies much faster. You're going to need wood and stone for quests and some crafts, so stock up when you are out. It's not efficient farming wood too early. But you'll have to mine to get your ax and pickax upgraded. I only recommend mining exactly the amount of ore you need. Either the ore-gravel. Not useful for upgrades.

Step 3b: Get the lumas and all the secrets while you're out. Lumas are the most important things. Books are only for decoration.

Step 4: Profit and repeat as you tier up.

Bonus step: Pet your lumas everyday for a special surprise. Also, throw a honey at a bear. It's fun.

Bottom line, you can always scale up your farm to make the product that has the least amount of work and the most profit. You can't scale up any other profession (in terms of actual scale and flexibility).

I'll go into more depth in the second section.

Actual order of difficulty and profit per profession

People wonder which profession to get, which are worth it. Make sense. I've nearly mastered all of them (archaeologist hit skilled) and I'm in a great position to give you the scoop.

Formula
I'll rate them with 3 metrics: They will be from 1 through 3, 1 being easy/low time commitment to 3, harder, more time commitment. I'll average the 3 and the lower the number, the easiest/most valuable it is.
~Time to gather resources/travel time/resource respawn time
~ Difficulty/complexity of progression (if the gathering requires puzzle completion or strategy)
~ Value across other professions or gameplay (will this affect other things beyond the profession). Rating is 1 (very valuable to other professions) to 3 (not useful at all).
Bonus Ranking: Max Tool skip-ability or the ability to progress quickly through the profession with max rank tools (A-F: Fasting progression to won't make a difference)

~~~~~~~~~
Cook: 2B star
~Time: 3/Difficulty: 2/Value: 1
Cooking requires farming which requires wood for fertilizer, beehives, a bunch of animals, land, and time among other things. If you want to maximize your farming you'll need to build plots, buy animals, strategize plot placement (map height matters), and de-pest which is the most annoying task in the game. De-weeding is a nightmare without rabbits which should be your first purchase. Trees and vine-type produce (grapes, kiwis, etc) will multi-harvest. Single harvest plots require an everseed to mult harvest. Cook requires multiple processing stations but the final product tends to be simple to make. Farming is required for brewing and is a decent profession to start. Max tools affect harvesting and gathering wood for fertilizer. Starting income that will have the largest impact on progress.

Brewing
Cooking: 2.3B star
~Time: 3/Difficulty: 2/Value: 2
It's nearly identical to cooking (ditto all the farm stuff) but you typically don't need to process multiple items (the raw produce usually is enough to make the craft). Problem is, the crafts take longer than any other profession (longer than pre-nerfed smelting). You have to make a new crafting station per tier so you might end up with 4 brewing stations at the end of this. Since you won't have the all the processing stations for farming and the longer craft time, it scores a little higher than cooking. I don't recommend starting with this at all especially to try and make money.

Fishing: 2A star
~Time: 2/Difficulty: 2/Value: 2
Fishing boils down to if you can easily figure out the fishing minigame, get bait, have a good rod, and if you want to burn your biome mushroom tokens on fish. Fishing isn't bad to start, but it's a great profession to do with max gear. Fishing won't use up your metals if you don't want and technically, you will use the fishing rod upgrades in treasure hunting so I'll toss that in for value to other professions. Not a bad one to start out with, but I recommend trying to fish without the profession. If you don't like the minigame, do the profession later.

Treasure Hunter: 1.6D star
~Time: 2/Difficulty: 1/Value: 2
Treasure hunting is so simple. You get to do the most interesting parts of the game which is explore the world and find stuff. Fishing up chest is criminally easy and super quick. The only reason I don't put the time as 1 is due to when I started treasure hunter. That was the 3rd profession I did so I had run up and down the biomes opening chests, solving puzzles, and named the treasure spawns. The only time I needed to actually farm was the required chest fishing and the final upgrade item (and I was 30 away from the only 1 material to craft it). The profession requires you to clean your chests then craft using the tiers resource and found items in the related biome. You can also find materials used in other crafts. You don't need great tools at all for this profession. Technically the fishing rod can be upgraded to possibly increase treasure chest yields from fishing and you will need ores to make magnets. This means you will have to go to the mines to upgrade gear. The materials to make the crafts are so simple and if you have a decent amount of money, you can buy the cloth needed to wash the treasure chests. This is chill profession,so I say it's definitely one of the best to start out with.

Blacksmithing: 2.3A star
~Time: 3/Difficulty: 3/Value: 1
Smithing is a nightmare. Pre-smelting time buff, it was hell on earth. Now, more tolerable. Fun factor... snore feast. Mining is literally a second monitor task. You have to deal with limited vision, spiders (which are nerfed now) and then similar grind of smelting to then make your sell-able product. What makes it difficult is find the resources as you progress through the biomes. You'll need firecrackers to make it easier to see and you'll have to have hundreds of torches. If you don't like dying as a shortcut out of the mines, you'll have to hoof it. The mines suck... plain and simple. But they are a necessary evil to upgrade the hoe, ax, and pickax which are the most used tools you'll ever have. I don't recommend starting as a blacksmith because you'll have to use the related ores from upgrades in the profession. Blacksmithing resources affects jewelry crafting (jeweler for short) and farming (technically) due to needing metal bars

Jeweler: 2.6B star
~Time: 3/Difficulty: 3/Value: 2
Take the worst parts of being in the mine and multiply it by 3. Jeweler takes the mundane parts of smithing and says "now do this as a job." The issue with jeweler is that you need mine the rarer gems (the lights in the cave) and you'll need more of the gravel-metals (bronze, platinum, etc) which require 2 refining processes. Jeweler is not rewarding and should only be taken once you have maxed your pickax, ax, and whip. You'll need them as you'll be spawning spiders left and right trying to get the gems with more than 2 hit on the node with anything less than the max pickax. If you truly want to do jeweler, do it after blacksmithing as you'll already have a the mine set up and you might have a few gems lying around. Should you be foolish to start as a jeweler, the cross profession benefits are the same as blacksmith but to a lower degree because you don't need as many ores (so you might not spend as much time looking for them...so you'll have fewer metals for other crafts).

Archaeologist: 2F star
~Time: 1/Difficulty: 2/Value: 3
This is likely the premiere job. The 3 star difficult profession that only non-scrubs take, right? Not really. The puzzles in this game are easy and only traps can kill you and you have an ever-replenishing "lives" bar to attempt to get through the temples. You're time will vary. I cruised through the temples, but if you aren't good at block puzzles or dodging fire or saws, you can bump of the time to a 2 and even the difficulty to a 3 (making this a 2.6). Exploring the temples is the 2nd most fun thing in this game and is required to find all the lumas and missing books. You barely need to upgrade your tools (your pickax and whip) so it's not like this profession will benefit your other professions. To some degree, forcing you to find the luma will help other professions, but all professions need to explore the world and find luma. I do recommend doing this profession last, or in tandem with other players doing different professions. I say this because the temples have doors which need items from other professions. Those doors have some additional resources behind them (worth skipping). Overall, a decent job that technically adds the least to the game.

~~~
Final tally (with some adjustments). Best to start to worst.
1. Treasure hunting
2. Archaeologist (if you don't care about getting all the loot)
3. Fishing (if you like the mini-game)
4. Cook
5. Blacksmith
6. Jeweler
7. Brewing (until they make the crafting time the same or bump up the profit, it's not worth it).

[Jaspurr]

I mostly agree, but it all depends on how someone wants to play. I think for a balanced playthrough though, this would be my ideal profession pick order, while keeping in mind that you should start a small farm very early on so you can unlock later seeds sooner.
Picking "pairing" professions in your first 4 or 5 picks is only worth it if you want to focus more on one thing (mining/farming)

1. blacksmith (because you are already going to need to mine a lot to upgrade your tools, and it doesnt depend on exploration like TH and arch)
2-3. treasure hunter and archeologist
4-7. any order, depending on what you want to focus on (mining gems, fishing, or farming)

The first three professions are the most important since they dont cost much. After that, new professions take a lot of money to unlock.

[DarkOutX]

And taking "pairing" professions is a bad advice leading player to TOTAL grind
Like, take Cooker + Brewer and you will have to do ONLY farm tasks to get money

[DarkOutX]

Archeologist is TOP2 while it can't be progressed till you open new world
And Brewer/Blacksmith is low on top while it brings a lot of money
Brewer doesn't require animals + works semi-automatic, brew time is a PLUS, not a problem
Blacksmith has expensive goods on Tier3-4 with low cost of a single run into some dungeon, which is super-profitable

I would complettely reverse 2-7 positions, lol
Fishing takes too much time and alsmost all of it requires concentration in minigames

Played 88h

[Jaspurr]

Just to add my thoughts after 80+ hours (1/3)

* Blacksmith and Jewelry Maker pair really well together (since they both rely on mining)
* Cook and Brewer pair well together (since they both rely on crops)
* Cook/Brewer might not be good to pick super early, since you have to buy seeds and water them manually. You'll get a lot more mileage out of these professions if you wait until you can upgrade your Hoe and get a hose or sprinklers to make farming easier.
* If you plan to get every profession eventually, Archeologist should be picked relatively early (within the first 3 professions). Otherwise you'll need to redo all the temples for the archeology progression.
* Treasure Hunter relies heavily on exploration and loot, so it's hard to farm it quickly like with other professions (like how you can just catch fish or mine all day)

[Jaspurr]

more thoughts (2/3):

* Brewing is probably the best imo for very late game passive money, since it requires less crops/ingredients than cooking and still sells for good money. The crafting speed is slower than other professions though, so it helps to have several casks to match your crop-growing speed.
* If you plan to go for 100% achievements, you'll need to save and not sell a few "sell" items: 50x coffee, 50x of each ectoplasm, 10x of each meteorite
* when mining, coal is just as important as ore, and you'll need tens of thousands of coal throughout the game
* You'll need lots of animals on your farm to take care of your crops (which can be expensive). Make sure to keep your crops and animals fenced in, but put your Goats outside the fence so they can protect your farm from foxes. Pigs also need mud (plowed ground without crops planted).

[Jaspurr]

more thoughts (3/3):

* Always upgrade your pickaxe first. You'll need a lot of ore to upgrade all your tools, so upgrading your pickaxe first will help you mine quicker to upgrade your other tools
* Pick up as many berries/mushrooms/flowers as you can while exploring each area for the first time. You'll need a lot for crafting. You can harvest them using the Hoe to sometimes get more than 1 per harvest.