How long is a day to a mundane crafter?

Question

Well, obviously 24 hours :-)

but how does it work with crafting? I came across this while calculating crafting times for various mundane items.

If the result × the DC equals double or triple the price of the item in silver pieces, then you’ve completed the task in one-half or one-third of the time. Other multiples of the DC reduce the time in the same manner.

(Emphasis mine) So, if you want to craft something worth 20gp with a Craft DC of 20 and get a 20 on a roll (not natural), you have crafted Your Roll x Craft DC in sp = 400. This is exactly double the amount you needed, so the crafting time is not a week, but one-half of a week.

How much time does a character need to spend crafting? 4 days (rounded up)? 3 and a half days as in starting monday morning, finishing wednesday at noon? How much hours are in a day of crafting? 8, 12 or 24?

With some feats and magic to supporting your craft, you can get to lots and lots of multiples of the DC. This can reduce crafting time to mere minutes, depending on how you calculate fractions of a week.

For example:

1 week = 7 days*24 hours = 168*60 minutes = 10080 minutes

vs

1 week = 7 days*8 hours = 56*60 minutes = 3360 minutes

How long does 1/30th of a week take? Other way round, does it take 10080 minutes of crafting to finish "1 week"?

Are there any rules clarifying this a bit more to me?

Links:

Craft Skill

Master Alchemist Feat

Alchemist Swift Alchemy (Ex)

Answer 1

A crafting day is 8 hours of work

This can be seen in the magic item creation rules:

The caster can work for up to 8 hours each day. He cannot rush the process by working longer each day, but the days need not be consecutive, and the caster can use the rest of his time as he sees fit. If the caster is out adventuring, he can devote 4 hours each day to item creation, although he nets only 2 hours’ worth of work.

Brewing potions take 2 of those 8 hours per potion (if they are under the 250gp limit).

This has been clarified in the (optional) downtime rules as well, and no matter how much extra work you do, you can only produce work for the first 8 hours of work a day. There are many ways to increase your production (like Cooperative Crafting), but none (that I can remember) will increase the time you can spend crafting.

However, most of your doubts can be answered by playing for a bit with this online crafting calculator. Beating the DC by a high score means that your character produced more within the given time, not that he extended his day in any way.

Master Alchemist increases your production, of N instead of 1 during the crafting process. While Swift Alchemy will cut down the total time spent crafting to half. But those two feats apply for alchemical items only (not magical potions, mind you). So, if you calculated that you would take 2 days to craft something, that time is cut to a single day. The calculator already handles those two feats, drastically increasing your production.

Protip: Always calculate the production per day, not per week, as that causes unnecessary complications to the process. The GM will have to decide then if a crafting week is 7 days or the standard 5 working days as suggested in the downtime rules.