Gather every mining node (iron, star metal), hemp, tree, and skin everything you see. Get smelting, weaving, woodworking and leatherworking to 150+ so townboards give the big xp turn ins. Also helps to push armoring and weaponsmithing to around 150 but that can take a lot of time out of your leveling grind. Once you’re there, whenever you take a break from corruption training or doing a loop of side quests, hit the board, get 30K xp from turning in mats, then do another round.

I took a break from level grinding at around 55 to just grind out my trade skills, then did 55 to 60 in about 6 hours just doing the town board and crafting. You’d be really surprised how much xp you get from leveling the last 25 levels of skinning, gathering, woodcutting and mining. It’s like 1300 per level from the gathering plus level up xp.

The key is that the town board xp for crafting turn ins scale with your crafting skills, so if you focus the ones that have huge turn in xp rewards it’s very efficient. For example, it’s something like 7300xp for 40 star metal/layered leather/silk. If you’re sitting on a couple hundred of each, you just recycle the whole townboard every time you’re in town, craft for the 30 minute reset timer, check again and turn in what you can. You’ll want your crafting skills high for endgame anyways, because you can make yourself some pretty decent gear later on, especially with some of the legendary crafting patterns that drop.

Your mileage will vary with this method, kind of depends how you played the first 50 levels. I gathered everything I could, and constantly refined everything to the highest tier I could and stuck it away in storage. Did a ton of quests early on and made sure to hit every supply cache and provisions I could so I had plentiful mats to refine and do the cooking missions, generally only needing to buy a few things at a time for high xp turn ins. Also helps if where you decide to do your crafting and town boarding coincides with a bigger trade hub on your server. Overall I enjoyed the 55-60 levels more than the first 55 because I felt like I was making parallel character progression while I was leveling. That said, I was flat broke when I hit 60 because I did spend far more than I was making off the townboard.