January 2012: Review of the Planets

Well.. I got to thinking about the various planets and how a person might decide just one to start on. Without having already played, who's to know which planet is best for you? So, I thought I would write a general post covering each of the planets and what they have to offer. I am trying to be as objective and unbiased as possible. I have no vested interest in Calypso, Rocktropia, or Arkadia. I am not their investor, or otherwise affiliated with them. I don't even own Calypso Land Deeds. I am however a qualified and experienced Speech and Interview judge, so I am used to judging what I see in a fair manner.

Calypso:
Features: The flagship planet of the Entropia Universe. Has the strongest most developed economy, the largest population. In general, most of the professions do well here. However, I have decided to rank the planets according to what they seem geared best for.
Crafting: 10/10 (Widest access to materials, and markets for your crafted goods.)
Hunting: 9/10 (Largest variety of mobs, from noob to uber, but item drop rates suck)
Mining: 8/10 (Could be better, could be worse, but is perhaps the most balanced, and has best market for selling your ores and enmatters.)
Quests: 2/10 (Unless you do the 10K Bronze, the quest rewards suck)
Noob Friendly: 5/10 (It is hard to start as a noob here, you can't own the oil rig, sweat prices are depressed, the quests don't give you anything but nova and blazar fragments unless you spend a lot doing them. In short, deposit, or die of boredom.)

ROCKtropia:
Features: Rock and Roll themed planet. Large variety of easy mobs for beginners. Large variety of uber mobs for ubers. Ores and Enmatters that are specific only to this planet. Large array of rewarding and fairly easy quests. Is home to HELL and Artic.
Crafting: 5/10 (Many materials hard to come by for doing larger runs. Poor market for reselling your crafted goods unless you own a shop or stand in lagoon advertising all day, seems a lot of people here don't know how to use the Auction house.)
Hunting: 9/10 (Noob mobs are SUPER easy, some of the tough mobs are super easy too, but some of the tough mobs are uber tough. Why I give it 9/10 is hunting loot markups, large variety of super easy to super tough mobs, and in general, I get literally 5 to 10 times the items I've ever looted on Calypso.)
Mining: 8/10 (I only give it 8 because of lack of sustainable demand for mined resources. It can be quite a challenge selling your ores fast. I wanted to give it a 10 because deposits are shallow and easily hit with shallow finders, and THERE IS NO COST TO GO TO HELL unlike trying to get to F.O.M.A.)
Quests: 10/10 (Some of the mission chains are still in their infancy, however, of the ones in existence, there is actually TT value on the rewards! You don't get novas and blazars... You get high markup goodies! The Thing gives you 50 pec TT helicopter and 50 pec TT truck, and couple peds in weapons faps and ammo! RT quests give you gold coin worth 5K% to 25K% MU (5 peds to 25 peds per K), Rocktropia Records (10 to the pec) And items that help you gain other quests, like police badge and radio which together are worth like 20 peds mu. When I first arrived, it took me a week to do all the beginner quests to familiarize myself with the place before I even really did any ped spending!)
Noob Friendly: 10/10 (The people here are VERY friendly and helpful. The quests are SUPER easy for non depositing noobs especially the Artic The Thing quest, and a lot of the beginning mobs drop good loot for being one shot opalo mobs. Sweating might be tougher, but sweat is about a ped or two per K higher than on Caly)

Arkadia:
Features: Well... In my opinion, they are a LONG ways from reaching my satisfaction. They have FAILED thus far to bring out Treasure Hunting. They had claimed I believe last August to have it implemented, but NOPE. And this is what everyone was waiting for!
Crafting: 7/10 (I only put it at 7 because many of the prints require a huge number of different ingredients making it a nightmare to try and click them, However the Auction seems to be a slight bit stronger here for selling crafted items than on Rocktropia.)
Hunting: 5/10 (Well... I figure 5 was low enough, it is a failing grade. You have to be pretty uber to hunt even the low level mobs any more... And the loot is astonishingly crappy. It's not just my own experience, but failing treasure hunting, I know several people who refuse to go back to Arkadia until everything is as promised. I have no idea what they expect you to hunt here as a total noob. The Tiarak are about the only mob I can kill.)
Mining: 6/10 (It started out great mining here to be quite honest. But hit rates are way down now, if I wanted 1 in 10 bombs to hit, I'd go to Hell where sure, 1 in 10 is a very good ratio when you are talking X's and higher! Also, there isn't the best market for trying to sell your ores either, and I havn't seen enough traders when I've needed them.)
Quests: ?/10 (I don't think I have even found a mission broker here but I haven't looked for them either, so I can't really comment on this part of it.)
Noob Friendly: 5/10 (I just don't see the great opportunities that Rocktropia, or even Calypso have to offer. Lacking totally noob mobs for the noobs, I have no choice but to give it a low rating. I may be wrong, I am not an Ark expert, but this is what I see.)

Next Island:
I have only been to Next Island once, and never returned. It is definitely more noob friendly than Arkadia and maybe even Calypso, but there's nothing really spectacular here as far as I am concerned. I really am not in a position to make any comments regarding the game play here since for me it's nearly a year since I was there. I like to think it's came a long ways since they began. I am told though that Ancient Greece is good for cheap Melee skills! At the time I was there, loots were on par with Calypso for Mining, Hunting, wasn't maybe as good, but I am sure that's all changed.

As things improve or get worse over time, I will come back from time to time and update this listing for your benefit. This is mainly intended as a quick guide for you to look at your needs and wants, and possibly help you decide where you want to concentrate your energies. I mean, it's obvious. If all you want to do is craft, start on Calypso. This is just made as a tool that offers a second opinion where one is desired.  If the management of these properties that I have reviewed do not like my scores, then they should read and take heed... If Ark will ever introduce Treasure Hunting, I will probably give them 10/10! I mean seriously folks! Treasure hunting! A new concept, yet they are dragging their feet... It just doesn't make sense to me. They have a veritable gold mine within their grasp, but slowly the golden goose is dying and wasting away. Soon, Ark might be a ghost town. Rocktropia has a lot of work left to be done, but at least they are putting quality into it. Calypso, is booming and needs room to expand,  but this is why we need to get the other planets economies roaring to life, so that people have viable alternatives to go to. 

I wish you all luck, and if you are choosing which planet to begin on, give it some careful thought :-) And you don't have to just take my advice for it.
 

MINING: Enmatters Finders VS Average Depths On Calypso

Here is the second part to my average depths and finders post, covering enmatters on Calypso. Please see the first post regarding ores and finders here! http://entropiauniverseguide.blogspot.com/2011/09/mining-ore-finders-vs-average-search.html

The reason I think it best to focus on the AVERAGE depths is logical since you have a large number of claims that have been recorded by various players with various equipment as provided by www.mininglog.com... This means that most claims for these resources are found at these depths the most. The minimum or maximum depths don't really mean a lot, because regardless of what finders you use, you will find something. But if you want to target specific resources, you should aim for those depths they are found at on average. In my own experience, it indeed increases the likelihood of hitting what you are after. I found my first deposit of Redulite following my own advice!

So... Enmatters are for the most part in the 500's and 600's... Only a couple are in the 800's. This means either an un enhanced F-105 or unenhanced eMine finder for most of these, and depth enhancers to about three tiers to hit the deeper stuff.

So... Here we go!

Untiered eMine or F-105 With 0 or 1 tiers of depth
---------------------------------
Acid Root ~657m
Alicenies Gel ~559
Angelic Grit ~599
Ares Head ~506
Azur Pearls ~616
Blood Moss ~441
Cave Sap ~621
Crude Oil ~556
Devils Tail ~693
Dianthus Liquid ~718
Dunkel Particle ~594
Fire Root ~670
Force Nexus ~607
Garcen Grease ~572
Growth Molecules ~607
Henren Stems ~696
Lumis Leach ~623
Lytairian Dust ~616
Magerian Mist ~648
Melchi Water ~535
Solis Beans ~570
Sweetstuff ~561
Typonolic Steam ~606
Vegetation Spores ~697
eMine Finder + 3 tiers of depth, or F-105 with about 4 tiers of depth:
-------------------------------------
Binary Fluid ~879
Ferrum Nuts ~886
Energized Crystal ~817

Would you like to have a Mentor?

The new mentoring system seems to have a competitive edge to it now, so let me put my qualifications out to those of you reading my blog, and see if I can't drum up some disciples for myself. No sense letting the uber ubers get all the goodies when all they really care about is what fancy gift MA has in store for them. How would you like a mentor that really cares about your success?

As of now, I am level 24.5 in Prospecting, and nearly level 20 in BLP, and I think level 18 in Laser. Not uber by many standards, true...

But if you want someone that is there when you are, I am online at least 12 hours a day usually. I have learned the hard way where to mine and with what equipment to get best results. I know many of the details of crafting, to help you be successful going that route as well. Hunting, well... All one can do for hunting is wish in one hand and hope MA doesn't give you dung in the other.

I will always help you with anything you could ever need help with, except don't ask me for free peds lol... Though from time to time I will be happy to craft some armor for you or maybe a weapon.

If you like what you see in my blog, consider choosing me as your mentor. All you have to do is right click to get the menu in Entropia, and I think it is under System, where you can find the mentor directory. Just search for goldbaron357, I will most likely be the only result, but goldbaron goldbaron357 maximus is my full Entropia name.

Mining: Ore Finders Vs. Average Search Depth for CALYPSO ORES

I just compared the average depths as logged by www.mininglog.com... This is data taken from their members mining results, and they average it out... And I know that it is possible to be mining past the depth for certain ores and enmatters, so it pays to pick the one finder that can find what you are looking for and try to keep from going past the depth too far that it is usually found at. Sure, you may still hit it at a much deeper depth, but it could just be a fluke, the system correcting for your losses for example.

As I understand it though, the higher the level the finder is, the more shallow of deposits will turn up. The lower the finder, the closer your finds will be to the average depth. So if you are using a Tk or VRX, I wouldn't worry much about this, and if you are using those then you already know what you are doing!

F-105 Untiered (Avg Depth 522m)

Alferix ~569
Belkar ~507
Blausariam ~514
Caldorite ~553
Cobalt ~484 (Perhaps a F-104 work best for Cobalt, but I hit it good with the 105)
Copper ~586
Erdorium ~614 (Untiered E Mine should work great here)
Frigulite ~549
Gazzurdite ~574
Ignisium ~604 (Untiered E Mine should work great too)
Iron ~568
Lysterium ~519
Narcanisum ~550
Niksarium ~572
Zinc ~592
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

E-Mine (No Depth Enhancer) (Average 676m)

Adomasite ~677
Dianum ~598
Durulium ~651
Erdorium (See under 105)
Eironite ~697
Himi ~652
Ignisium ~604
Kanerium ~641
Megan ~666
Quantium ~624
Zinc (See under 105)
--------------------------------------------

E-Mine +Tier 1 Depth (Average 727m)

Azzurdite ~716m
Petonium ~700
Pyrite ~ 745

--------------------------------------------

E-Mine + Tiers 1-3 Depth (Average 827m)
(Another tier of depth might not hurt for some of these deeper ones)

Ganganite ~845
Gold ~ 821
Iolite ~828
Kirtz ~ 935
Langotz ~ 831
Maganite ~ 827
Morpheus ~ 996
Platinum ~ 904
Redulite ~ 1042
Ruga ~ 839
Tridenite ~ 874
Terrudite ~ 870
Valurite ~ 913
Versperdite ~ 1006
Xeremite ~ 892
Zanderium ~ 932
---------------------------------------

Coming up on the next post: The same chart for Calypso EXCEPT I will do a list of enmatters!

After that, I plan to do lists with all other planets ores and enmatters for your convenience.

This list took quite a while to research and break down, I hope you find it useful, and if you know anyone else that can, feel free to givem a link!

Update On The Economy in Entropia: Major Price Changes Open Up Opportunity

Because I am dedicated to the crafter and miner, though more and more I am hunter friendly, the prices in the market place and auction house affect us all. When Thrusters first came out, they were around 500 peds with markup! A great many were sold and used at those astronomical prices! Gungnirs were 1500 peds without any weapons when they came out!

Well... In the past month or two, prices have changed a LOT.

ON CALYPSO:
Thrusters are going for about 30 to 50 peds now, so what, about 700% markup instead of the 7000% they used to be!

Gungnirs and Sleipnirs are going for 300% or so now. So you can pick one up for about 75 Peds.

However, on Arkadia, thrusters were selling for around 80 peds, meaning there is room to make some money if you want to make the long flight.

Alicenies is rockbottom at very nearly TT food prices. However, it still selling for a nice premium on Arkadia and who knows where all else. This is one resource that might be worth just buying a bunch to wait for prices to go back up. It is used in so many blueprints, and for high demand components like Basic Sheet Metal.

Narcanisum is cheap now as well, at around 125%.

The time hasn't been better for buying things, in general, prices on most things have dropped, so nows the time to hit the market and auction and see if you can turn a buck!

And no, this isn't a promotion for Mind Ark LMAO... Instead, this is your wakeup call. The early bird gets the worm... And the first man gets the oyster and the pearl, the second one the shell! Go show the world what Free Enterprise can do for you! Where there is opportunity, there are profits!

My Hunting Experiment: Why I am succeeding now, and wasn't before.

It has been a while since I have posted in my blog here. I regret the delay in bringing you new information. But I have been doing some research this whole time and thought it would be worthwhile to blog about. There really are no trade secrets here, since you can apply this to your favorite mob, and see how it works out for you.

Out of 300 ped budget...

OLD METHOD:
Buy 50 peds of ammo, 100 peds bombs, 50 peds on repair and maybe another 100 peds on L gun or amps for mining finder.

I'd get maybe a 25% return on my hunting loot and maybe a 50 to 80% return on my mining.

NEW METHOD:
Buy a few hundred peds of ammo. DO NOT SELL ANY LOOT until you have used up all your ammo. I found that there was less wasted and loss peds by holding onto my loot until the very end. You can still mine and craft if you want to. But keep your mining and crafting supplies and budget separate from your hunting.

What you will find is, your chances at globals are much higher... I had not globalled since 2 years ago while hunting. That was my first global which took me 2 years of hunting to get that! Well, my friend explained his method, and that's what I been doing ever since, and after one 200 ped hunt and six 100 ped hunts, I am only down maybe 10 or 20 peds from 300. 100 of that was used to buy an economic L gun and UL amp. The 200 ped hunt lost 100 peds. No surprise there. So I repaired and rearmed. 100 ped hunts then on out.

Well, by the fourth trip or so, I got my 72 ped global. A ton of mini globals, that being anything large but under 50 peds. By the end of that trip, I was back to my original 300 peds.

I had to upgrade some of my armor... NOTE TO NOOBS: DO NOT USE KOBOLD FOR ANYTHING EXCEPT FEFFOIDS. IT IS EXTREMELY BAD TO USE FOR ARGOS! You want Ghost or Shogun instead! 5B plates for most mobs and 6A's for Drones.

But now after every 100 ped hunt, I am having a few more peds than repair costs. So bigger runs mean a bigger chance to get something good.

Bottom line is, you can't just hunt with a few peds and expect to get good loot. You either do really really well on a short hunt, or VERY VERY BAD. It takes time and sheer number of kills for it to balance out.

So I don't recommend hunting with less than 300 peds for ammo after you bought all your weapons and other gear. And then don't recycle it as you go because then it is so much easier to waste it. Wait til you are all done and you will find that you can keep paying for run after run after run!

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.