Final Fantasy 15: Max Out Every Skill | Cooking, Fishing, Photos, Survival

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There are four skill trees in Final Fantasy 15 — each with their own benefits. Cooking allows you to create delicious dishes at camp sites to buff your team before battle, while survival skills unlock bigger combat rewards. Fishing can net you some sweet seafood, and photography is all about appreciating the fantastic environments. Here you’ll find tips to reach Level 10 in all four categories.

Beware, some of these will take days of real-time work to complete, even when you’re using every tip and trick available to make things (slightly) easier. Whatever the case, here are some ways you can grind out those skills. I recommend that you start with Cooking first and Survival second, but you should start working on all of these skills early and often.

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Max Out Every Skill | Cooking, Fishing, Photos, Survival

Each of your four main characters has a skill — cooking, fishing, photography, and survival. To increase these skills, you’ll need to do the following activities:

Cooking skill increases every time you cook a meal at a campsite.
Fishing skill increases when you catch fish at lakes.
Photography skill increases when you take pictures.
Survival skill increases as you run around the environment.

There are individual tricks to make these skills easier to increase. Let’s go over each one, and how you can reach Level 10 with the least amount of effort.

Cooking Skill – How to Max Out In 20 Minutes

It doesn’t matter what type of food you cook to increase the cooking skill — start with the basic ‘Mystery Meat Sushi’ and cook it about 60-75~ times to completely max out this skill, unlocking the best recipes in the game.

Purchase Luncheon Meats (100 Gil) from vendors in Lestallum.
Buy about 60-75~ meats — you’ll need them to cook ‘Mystery Meat Sushi’
Cook 60-75~ ‘Mystery Meat Sushi’ using (1) Luncheon Meat per cook.

Using this method, you can max out the cooking skill in about 20 minutes of grinding.

Fishing Skill – How to Max Out With the Best Equipment

To improve your fishing skill fast, you’ll need to catch lots of rare fish. To do this, you’ll need the best fishing equipment and a great spot to fish — Vesperpool fits the bill on both counts.

Purchase high-level reel and fishing rod from the Vesperpool fishing shop.
Equip and start fishing at Vesperpool. The more rare fish you catch the better.
Take a break at a campsite to increase your rank to make catching easier.
Continue to catch!

Vesperpool is the best fishing spot in Final Fantasy 15. If you’re willing to dump 3-5~ hours (depending on your luck) then you’ll max out this skill.

Photography Skill – How to Max Out With Combat Photos

The toughest skill to max is photography. Right away, you’ll want to unlock the ability to take combat photos.

Purchase the “Snapshot” Ascension to take photos during combat. This costs one Tech Bar.
- Purchase “Tech Strike / Tech Damage / Quick Tech” to recharge your Tech Bar faster.
To fully max this skill, you’ll need to take pictures during every combat encounter, every time Prompto gets a Tech Bar.

That’s going to take a long time, but there’s another way — one that requires a little less input.

Strap a rubber-band to your controller to automatically walk around. Prompto will take pictures every 3~ minutes or so. That’s 20 pictures per hour.
- You’ll need about 1,200~ pictures to completely max out your photography skill.

Thankfully photography isn’t that useful, so maxing it out doesn’t have to be a priority. No matter what, it will take a very long time.

Survival Skill – How to Max Out Automatically, No Input Required

Survival will also take a very long time to complete, but you can use the same trick — use a rubber band to move around automatically. You don’t need to sprint, just moving around is enough to get what you need.

Attach a rubber band to your controller stick so that your characters run in circles.
Leave the game on for hours. Check back once an hour to rest the party or make sure you’re still moving and haven’t got caught up on geometry.
Let the team run around for a full day or more, depending on your progress in the story.

You’ll do lots of running as you play, so this will be unlocked naturally during the story — the game in total takes about 50~ hours to complete, and the survival skill requires about 25-30~ hours of running.

To speed things up, you can also use the infinite sprinting trick. With Noctis, just as you’re about to run out of stamina, press the sprint button again — wait for him to slightly straighten up, then hit sprint to refill your stamina bar instantly.

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