Metallurgy Skills and Prospecting: What it means to you!

How many of you craft AND mine? How many of you have checked your mining skills and wonder why it shows "Metallurgy" "1"... I learned accidentally that Metallurgy is in fact a mining skill used in prospecting, that you do not gain through prospecting or mining! In fact, you only gain it by working with metals, i.e. crafting metal components.

If you wish to skill up in prospecting while crafting, you may want to making something very cheap (in terms of markup) such as Basic Screws, all they take is Iron ingots, and Iron is pretty much TT food right now, which coincidentally the screws basically are too. This is good for skilling, because it means you are not losing your markups from only getting TT food as a loot. It is possible to craft something with higher markup ingredients only to sell it at a big loss or end up holding it for so long waiting for it to sell that you can't do anything with your PEDs tied up.

My other favorite metal component to craft is Basic Sheet Metal... The reason is, it has a very high demand, since all those OA 101 lights and I believe the OA 101's require generous amounts of BSM per click. So, the markup is usually very nice on it, but my advice is, never to sell it for the orders. I have always been able to get 10 to 20 points higher markup listing it for a buyout higher than the order prices, and this is almost always needed to get a good return on the metal unless good residue drops are hit.

The reason I want to point out Metallurgy... I found my returns from mining actually went up over time as my Metallurgy skills did too. It wasn't until I had a decent amount of Metallurgy that I actually hit my first level XX deposit, 904 peds of Gazzurdite, maybe it was 906 or 908, I can't remember exactly, but I know it was one of those three. And last I checked on entropedia, Metallurgy had a decent size impact on prospecting... You know how they show the chart with the % effect each skill has on your overall prospecting.

I just find it helpful to do one thing that affects many things, in this case, crafting can help your prospecting too! I hope someone finds this helpful... And if not, well, stay tuned, I will bring you every tip and trick I know of! Thanks for reading!