Working on crafting skills I got to wondering what were the likely number of trials needed to get to the 500 level.
Using the formula given on gswiki -- (500 - level)/500 -- I wrote up a small program using the C standard rand() RNG and started it up.
I ignored the LOG bonus as I don't have >= 20.
Although the results were all over the map, after 1000 passes it established some likely bounds:
2000 < N < 4000
Those are rounded numbers but gives me an idea at least. With a median of 3000 and about 3 min per, This looks like about 150 hours.
Sure will use up aa lot of maoral blocks!
Possible?