I found out by accident a few days ago that crafting survey material levels match your crafting skill levels when you switch between armory slots with different skill levels. My character is configured with 2 armory slots, named "Crafting" with all crafting skill lines at level 50, and "Combat/Fish/Antiq" *** for other things i.e. combat, fishing and antiquities, and this latter slot has all crafting skill lines with the "Keen Eye" skills maximised and all other skills at minimum.

After getting a woodworking survey, I went to collect it with the non-crafting slot equipped, and found that all the materials were the lowest level, i.e. maple instead of ruby ash. Without collecting anything, I went back home and used the armory to equip the crafting slot, then returned to the survey, and found it had only ruby ash.

This raises an interesting possibility: if we want to stock up on materials at any level, we can simply forage, or collect surveys, with an equipped armory slot that has the crafting skills at the requisite level. I'm guessing that the material level is determined by the "main" crafting skill for each craft type, i.e. the one that appears at the top of the list of skills for that craft type. That means we would only have to modify those skillls to be able to collect different levels of materials.

Just thought I'd share that! It's probably obvious to some of you, I'm only mentioning it for those less familar with crafting.


*** This was mainly because, for both skill points and CP points, I had too much trouble configuring my character to be able to do combat, fishing, antiquities *and* crafting all in one configuration.