F2P Players: Tips for stretching your labor

3/6 - A few points have been updated.

I played during alpha/closed beta, and during the closed beta I was one of the many who lacked patron benefits (including offline labor regeneration). I learned some nifty ways to make the most out of my labor points that may be useful to f2p players. I'll add more if anyone drops some in the comments!

Here they are:

• Focus on ONE aspect of the game to put your labor into at a time. This is probably the biggest tip I can give. If you want to mine, don't also smelt the ore or craft with it. Just use all your labor to mine, and sell the raw materials off or stockpile them for later use. It is better to mine a ton of ore, sell it off, then buy whatever crafted items/other things you need with gold. This will increase your proficiency in that one skill as fast as possible, making each use of labor more lucrative on average.
• Don't open coinpurses unless you really need to, or to..    Update - Lower level coinpurses are a poor way to make money, but they do give you money easily for the price of your labor. Once you hit max level one of the best ways to make money is to farm Jester's coinpurses. They drop around 9 silver and a rare chance to drop archeum which is very valuable. Opening the early coinpurses raises your larceny which once you gain enough proficiency lowers the labor required to open coinpurses.
• Stay away from labor cap. Five minutes after you cap on labor, you begin throwing away labor points. If you're saving labor for something specific, just open a coinpurse every time you come within 10 labor of cap; anything to keep from capping.
• Work together. Meet someone who crafts a lot? If you are focusing on gathering, offer to give them the raw resources to craft what you need, + a little extra. This may be a non-existent practice on release, but further down the line a lot of people (mainly pvp players) will have extra labor for sale for relatively cheap. This helps you to save labor to use for whatever skill you are focusing on.
• Don't gather every random thing you come across. Wild flowers and potatoes are rarely worth the labor, and you will learn the exceptions to this quickly. Trees are usually worth it, mining nodes are always worth it if that's how you want to spend your labor.
• Don't uproot, even if you have a "reason" for it. Waste of labor 99.9% of the time.
• Make friends that PVP. Seriously, chances are high that you will spend a lot of time in pvp zones, and having people to help you on trade runs and stuff is great. Also, PVP players don't need nearly as much labor as crafters and other people do; use this to your advantage! Offer someone 40 raw stone to make you 10 stone ( 3raw = 1). They are likely to accept, as it's free resources for them to sell- and it means more labor towards your focus for you.
• Want a place to call "home"? Find a patron and offer your labor/services if they add you to their Family (which allows you access to the house, storage if you have your own, set recall location, etc) Offer to plant/harvest the land for them in return for 1/4 of the yield and access to the house. Lots of patrons would be eager to accept, that saves them time and labor points every day that they can spend doing other things. Not only do you get to make a bit of money/resources for the future from this, but you also are likely to make a friend.
• If given the choice, spend gold over labor. I really can't push this enough, but if you as many labor points as possible into one skill; you will benefit enormously in the long run! It may take a little while to get the ball rolling if you plan on crafting, but just quest and get a solid gold pool, then buy raw resources rather than gathering them yourself.   Update -  Labor is primarily used to earn gold (secondly to craft gear, but a lot of the time it's easier to just buy the gear since it is very difficult to craft great gear). Value both gold and labor, don't waste either. The only time I would use my labor and not directly earn a profit on it was if I were leveling up a proficiency. Even then, many can be done while earning a profit, but others cannot. It's up to you which you value more.
• Conserve gold. I realize this almost contradicts the above statement, but gold is the second most valuable thing in the game.
• Don't waste your gold on vocation pots. It may be tempting as they aren't too expensive on the AH and they really make leveling fly if you are doing a lot of gathering/crafting, but they aren't worth it. Whether you're level 10 or 50, you will gather the same amount of ore per node.
• Once you get the gold to do it (and barring any massive price increases) buy labor pots off the AH and use them on cooldown. As of right now, the 1000 labor is worth so much more than the cost of a labor pot. Not only do you make profit out of it, you level whatever vocation you used the labor on. Two birds with one stone!   Update - This depends on two factors: How much labor potions currently cost on the AH and how much silver per labor point you are getting with whatever means you are spending your labor.
• Don't waste hereafter stones! The labor cost to make them is high. Set your recall location smartly, learn airship routes and use them to your advantage. Mounts run faster than carriages, bind auto-run to a convenient key and get used to using it.

I hope this will help some incoming players! Please leave other things for me to add, and if any of my information is incorrect/not helpful let me know as well so I can explain/remove if I'm wrong!

Thanks to redditor scipherneo for his helpful post on stretching your labor, especially helpful for free to play players since they do not get offline labor regeneration that patrons do. To view his original post head over to the thread here.