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!

What you need to know about Skill Implants

Here is something I wish I would have paid more attention to when I first started in Entropia Universe. You start out with only one skill point in each skill. The lower your skill, the cheaper it is to buy skill implants to increase your level. The higher your level, the more costly your per point increase when you buy a skill implant.

Let me explain better... Say I have 1 point of prospecting... And that I am looking at a prospecting implant with 1,000 skills on it. When I buy it and insert it, I should get about 950 to 1001 skills, not sure of the exact numbers, but I just want to explain the principles of why it's cheaper to buy skills early on... If I have 1000 skill points, and I buy a thousand skill implant, it might give me around 1500 skill points after putting it in. So each point has less of a effect the more you have.

But when you have say, 3000 skill points, adding a 2,000 skill point chip would give you around 3300 points at the end. You have diminishing returns and increasing costs. If you wish to skill, I recommend doing it at the beginning when it is cheapest.

But you can also chip out. You should look at my previous post with the links... Information on ESI sizes needed and how much skills they hold, and their values is there. Suppose an ESI has a markup of 700%... Your 50 ped ESI TT value, would cost around 350 PEDs. If you add a skill that is selling for 3000% to it, you have a TT loss of about 10% from chipping out, so you might end up with say 45 ped TT implant of the profession you chipped out. 45 X 30 = 1350 PEDs. 1350 - 350 means you will pocket about 1000 peds of your skills you sold.

Of course a 50 ped implant is quite large.

On smaller amounts of skills, the values are lower, and your gains are less significant.

A more detailed explanation of skills will come in a little while... But I wanted to give you a basic understanding of how they work, and keep it simple. Stay tuned for more great info!

Entropia: Helpful Links You Should Know

I have ran into a lot of Entropians who still don't know a lot of the best places to get information they need. A lot of things in Entropia Universe seem to have a high degree of confusion, such as how big of a skill implant do you need to cash out 2500 skill points? Or, how big of an implant do you need to go from 2000 prospecting to 3500 prospecting? Then you have times when you need to find out every possible item you can manufacture with the resources you have on hand.

A lot of things are learned by trial error, which for most Entropians is expensive to do, so fortunately there are those who have tried, and sacrificed, but have been nice enough to share their information and research with us all.

Because it is an important matter, I wish to share these useful resources so that you may have a more pleasant experience in Entropia.

http://www.entropedia.info/... A must visit. They have a full Wiki on everything. They have a database of all ores, enmatters, materials, blueprints, skills, every last thing you could need to look up can be found here. Even a complete list of mobs, and their common loots, and even where you can find them. They even have maps that you can select what you want to find, whether it be an ore, or a mob, and it will show you the reported areas on a map!

http://www.entropiabay.com/... Their numbers are off on markups, but other than that, is a free alternative to the auction house. And they have an inventory calculator, just copy and paste all your items from your account list when you log in at http://www.planetcalypso.com/ and it will tell you what your value is before and after markup.

http://www.entropiatracker.com/ is a must visit too.. They use Optical Character Recognition to provide real time global and hof stats. It tracks each item, each ore and enmatter, each mob, what globals and hofs they have had... Their average loots, highest loots, total for that day, the times they were hit. A lot of patterns can be studied and perhaps theories derived. But importantly, it tracks each persons hofs and globals, so it keeps a running record of everything you hit :)

http://www.entropiatools.com/numchips.php If you wish to ever chip out your skills, this tells you how many skills will fit on a certain TT value chip. If you have say, 5000 skills, and you wish to sell 2000 skills, you would go to the 2000 skills on the chart, and it would tell you the smallest chip you can use to hold 2000 skills would be 11.64 TT... The more skills on a chip, the disproportionately higher the TT value goes. Likewise, it tells you if you want to buy a 5,000 skill point chip, the TT value of implant to look for! I will make a post soon about how chipping works, so you can get the most out of it.

And last but not least, http://www.planetcalypsoforum.com/ .

There are more great sites, but you can find their links within the pages I've given you. These are probably the most important of them.

Stay tuned for more posts coming soon!!!

Welcome to my Entropia blog!

There are a lot of people wondering where the best places to mine what are, or what items they should craft, what skills to focus on... I am here to help. I have been an Entropian since summer of 2007... Hard to believe my avatar will be four years old :( Time goes by so very fast.

I have done a lot, I have tried a lot. I have experimented with theories. I have studied statistics. I have successfully been in profit mode numerous time... But like all of us do, I get greedy from time to time and want to go big or go home... I have not hit it big on there yet.

I am not perhaps widely known in EU yet, as fame has not reached me. However, I have done some trading part time as well... And if you must know, my identity in EU is Goldbaron Goldbaron357 Maximus. Goldbaron is a nickname I've always used since I am a real life gold prospector... Yes, I have caught the gold fever, and one of the main attractions to Entropia is the fact it is a real cash economy, and one that I can mine all year round in regardless of the weather, though it is nothing like actually being out there and finding real gold! My gold prospecting blog if it interests you is located at http://goldbaron.blogspot.com/.

I plan to post anywhere from two to four times a week, depending on what material I have to bring to your attention. I don't want to go for quantity, I just want to have quality. Information that you can depend on.

As for hunting on Planet Calypso, my advice is, DONT. I have several thousand peds worth of crafting and mining globals and hofs, but despite hitting levels in the 20's for weaponry from hunting, I have but one global hunting and it was only a 50 some pedder. As compared to a level XX gazzurdite on TI North a couple years ago, which gave me 904 peds in TT value. That is my biggest hit to date. Don't let my small numbers fool you though. I would rather hit constant profits than to hit a few big finds in between big losses.

Over the next couple days expect new posts from me, in an effort to get this blog underway, and attract some readers.