So I've just come back to the realms recently - trying to continue on with working engineering.

Since I move around a lot I've been doing bone carving, as I don't have to be tethered to an engineering society to do it but I've run into a snag.

at 73 ranks (where I was at when I came back), I would carve three pins in deer bone and get to ML. Now, at 86 ranks, I'm carving 10 wolf bone hairpins (which is the last easy difficulty plan prior to simple I believe) and getting to somewhere around 15-20/34. The skill is still moving, but I'm just trying to figure out what I'm doing wrong to get it moving well.

Ideally I'd like to get back down to carving three items to ML, as spending the time to carve 10+ items gets tedious. Are there different items I should be carving? Or should I be using different materials? I've been just using the deer/wolf bone available from the engineering societies for ease of training but if harvesting my own will work better I can easily do that.

I've tried moving to the simple difficulty item, and just fail on every step without learning anything so I know I need to stick with easy difficulty items.

I try to do hard work orders in the easiest to work material. That works for me most of the time. For a few ranks right at the transition points I'll have to do challenging work orders instead. It takes 3-4 items to lock. I don't have a career or any of the special techs. I do have the "make things faster and don't care about quality" techs. I think I was doing cloak pins or amulets at that level, but I don't exactly recall now.

~Hunter Hanryu
"Even adjusting the pace for Simu-Soon timescales, there is no way Mech Lore is still trainable in 2014 imo" - Apu(2013)

You can gauge about where you should be for carving using this chart

https://elanthipedia.play.net/Crafting#Difficulty

Should help to know when you'll have to move up a tier.

You slap Voldag hard in the face with your hand, making a nice crisp smack!! That's going to leave a mark!