Mining Finders and Returns: What you can do to improve them!

Unfortunately the modifications done to the mining system have destroyed tried and true mining methods. I suspect anyone doing gridline mining will lose their bottom dollar in a hurry. You can no longer just run and drop, turn around and dig up your finds... Simply because mining in such a way won't give you much to dig!!!

This is only one small problem compared to how many new finders there are available.. All of them are L, too. I hope better UL finders are on their way some day. In any event the old tried and true finders are not working as well as they once did in the areas they were great in. Here's how I started fixing this problem:

If you have a bit of a bankroll and want to become a REAL prospector in Entropia (The difference between a prospector and a miner is, a prospector looks for a place good enough to mine and a miner stays in a place that is good enough to mine once it's been found through prospecting) You need to pick a few finders, do a few runs on each in a few of your favorite places.

The result of my doing this has confirmed that indeed some finders work better than others in certain regions. If you regularly suffer heavy losses with one finder, switch to another. Is it better or worse? And keep working your way through finders until you can't find one that gets you any better results.

At present, I am very happy using the F-213 on calypso. It is doing better than my old 105 was after the alterations to the mining profession. I just got tired of bad mining returns and had to do something about it, but the last thing you want to do is buy new finders because you don't know how much ped will be wasted along the way, but I realized I was losing a lot more by not doing what needed done.

You also need to watch the ground. If the ground has the appearance of a certain ore, that ore is probably found there, as I mentioned before. Places that don't look like they would have something probably don't. You can't just keep dropping bombs and expect the system to compensate you.

I suspect results will vary from person to person as to which finder works best due to your play style and skill level... There quite probably is no "one finder fits all" approach. The F-105 USED to be the considered "one finder fits all" but not any more. As soon as someone figures out how to make ends meet, MA moves the ends. It never fails.

I hope this gives you a good starting point in rebooting your successful mining, as it has for me.

Arkadia Key 1: My First Experiences in Aakas

Well... I have ventured back to Ark to finally try the treasurehunting. I am glad to be able to report that my returns are much higher on treasure than doing ores and enmatters, but due to the larger cost per drop, you may need a larger ped roll to be able to absorb the ups and downs of doing treasure only as compared to ore or enmatters. I do not like running combo drops, because like I said before, MA would not have given us the ability to run multiple types on our finders if it didn't add to their profit margin. It is just simple common sense. Also, you have to bear in mind that a finder that is geared for ores in a certain area is not going to be as effective at finding enmats. Every serious miner knows certain tools for certain places to find certain things is what is effective.

But...

I want to say yes, the keys are like the beacons. If you have ANY lag or have to run on reduced settings for normal game play, you probably will NOT be satisfied with your results attempting a key. They are pure bloatware, I mean, I have to shoot in first person with RIGHT CLICKING because frame rate is so low I can't hit anything aiming and shooting, right clicking at least only shoots when a target is lined up!

Do not attempt them with a slow internet connection. Best results, use hard wired. I have less lag on hard wires than with wifi. Also, if your wifi craps out you will lose valuable time.

If your system resources are not sufficient enough to keep up with the key runs, you will crash frequently and often. If this happens, you may attempt compensating by clearing your shader cache in the launcher options. This is what cured the crashing for me.

Last night I attempted doing one of these on dialup at home. BAD idea. Lagged out constantly. Finally it kicked me out and the next morning I log in to find my 20 peds for the key was refunded. NOTE: If you are paying for a higher key, with huge markup, (even though the keys are UL, apparently they are only one time uses, so you do not get them back), and they give you a refund, You better open a support ticket and ask them for the key back due to the high markup. On the ark 1 keys, the +2 peds is nothing really, for the hassle of trying to get them to replace the key and all.

In the ark 1 run, you will have level 2 snakes that I can one or two shot with the herman ark 10. The grasshopper things are pretty much two or three shots, but I am using the CB 13, which one shots everything except for the level 6 Ubos... They are kind of a pain because they hit hard, probably doing acid damage which I am not protected against. You must make it down four levels. Once you reach bottom you go out through the center of the underground complex, and under the big statue, into the other side... You keep going and you will find the treasure room. There will be a bunch of snakes. You must kill 8 of them or 10 of them to spawn the Dahar soldier or whatever it is called. It looks like those same statues standing in the main room with all the doors where you entered the run.

He is very much a pain, I did not have time to defeat him due to about 30 minutes of crashing trying to make it work. And I wasted much unnecessary time... But now I have learned what I must know and will reattempt it. You will find two treasure chests. I am not 100% positive as to whether or not the loot not gotten in the previous run is added to the chests in the next one, but I can only imagine it would be.

A team of noobs should easily handle this run. It is soloable if you just make a team put someone on it that doesn't want to go, and go by yourself, if you have decent weapons, fap, armor and high frame rate. You do respawn fairly close to the boss mob at least, which is good because you can keep running in... But I am not sure also on the mob boss's regeneration or anything, so I may need to do some research at this point.

Those of you that do not have Aakas... You must head towards the southwest of the desert area, but the exact spot can be found on entropedia.info.

Good luck and happy treasure hunting!

Arkadia Gold Rush!

I am thinking about heading to Arkadia for their gold rush that is supposed to go live with the next update. There are Arkoins that will be able to be found worth 1 pec each. There will be some alienware PC's that can be found, and some very rare golden keys and their blueprints that will start to drop, and it is advertised you can either use the keys to go treasure hunting or turn them in for 10K peds worth of Arkoins.

So...

Maybe, maybe this is the day that we as treasure hunters have waited for. I very much am anxious to see what turns out to happen on Arkadia during this event. Have they actually succeeded in an idea that will make it worthwhile for us to go there and give treasure hunting a try? I should hope so and it certainly appears to be true.

Treasure Hunting Arkadia: Will It Ever Be Released?

I am GREATLY frustrated. The KEY element ensuring the success and driving the anticipation behind Arkadia was TREASURE HUNTING. I remember last year the release date was expected to be August. Obviously that didn't happen. But guess what?! I just read on the forums that the new expected date of arrival is JUNE OF THIS YEAR! Well... Multiply it by a few more years and it MIGHT be out by then.

You can't advertise something that isn't true. Arkadia is NOT a treasure hunting MMO. It WILL be if they ever get off their a$$e$ and make it happen. If they are having trouble figuring out what items to make as treasure, and what can be done with them, well, just listen to everyone's suggestions!

I think it would be great, especially with gold at $1,750 an ounce, to slip a few 1 gram, or 1/10th ounce bars of gold into the loot pool to be found while treasure hunting, and ship them out. This would be a great way to kickstart the treasure hunting. And the cost of a one ounce bar of silver to slip in the loot pool would only be about $35 right now... So you give a few hundred peds in real treasure to your prospectors... Do you know how popular this would make Arkadia? Virtual treasure is fine, but it seems to me, if you have a real cash economy, you might as well throw in some real treasures as well.. I mean, they throw in laptops to the mining pool... SERIOUSLY!

There are so many great things that can be done... IF THEY DON'T SCREW IT UP. Please voice your ideas to their development team... If you like any of mine, the more of you passing them on the more likely they will listen to popular demand. The old adage in business is, the customer is always right. Customer choices and habits, also desires dictate what directions companies will take their products. Otherwise, if you run your company the same way a government operates, you might put snorkels on airplanes!!! It is ridiculous and an inefficient waste of resources. But that's what happens when companies don't listen to their customers.

I am sorry to ramble. I see a lot of hits coming in from people wanting to know about Arkadia and the treasure hunting. It is very irritating to me that it is not here. I went to Arkadia because I thought that next vu it would be out and I wanted to be there the first day and see what could be found. But it never happened. And I lost too many peds waiting to see. I also had a bad experience with eBay and a customer, you may check my eBay blog to read about that if you are curious.

But... Now that I have vented... Let's get back to business as usual, shall we?

Also, I want to thank all of you for making this blog a big success. The traffic I generate on a daily basis here is mind blowing for me. Never in a hundred years did I expect to start a blog or site that would bring in upwards of 200 hits on a good day most of them unique. If you have a website you would like to advertise, I am willing to negotiate terms to give you your own placement for your ad on this blog for a month, or a year at a time. It will cost, but where else do you have such a niche of targeted traffic? Otherwise I will just keep running the current ads.

I plan to streamline the look of this blog soon, but I am currently authoring several books that will be released on Kindle, hence you may have noticed my poll. I expect to upload my first finished book to Amazon today. It is about real life gold prospecting, and no doubt a post on it will soon follow on my prospecting blog.

Just as our environment has random variables, and certain laws of physics... The fact that Entropia is a computer program does not negate the fact that it too is an environment much like our own, with certain rules and laws that govern how it operates. This leads to peculiar and unique patterns in prospecting there too. It is not as scientific as real life prospecting is, but somehow, I can't help but feel my vast knowledge and love of prospecting has translated into my success where prospecting in Entropia is concerned.

It is further sad to note... That after running my sluice box for an hour, the dollar amount present in the cleanup even from poor gravel, is anywhere from 50 to 200 peds worth, and my best day of prospecting in todays value yielded what would have been around 3800 peds in game if I were to have sold and deposited my gold.

But still... There is a unique excitement in seeing those large roman numerals showing up on your finder. It isn't the same as seeing a nugget in your pan... But unfortunately may be the closest thing you will ever experience to hitting the motherlode.

Arkadia: Crafting Contest, and Treasure Coming Soon Hopefully

It would appear that there is currently a crafting contest going on at Arkadia, crafting globals on arkadian blueprints over 100 peds are eligible for one of a series of blueprints. I don't know what kind of prints, but I would assume that they are primarily going to be issued to the winners of the competition. I havn't had a crafting global in so long I am probably not even going to bother!!! But those of you who think you have what it takes might look into it further and give it a shot.

Yes, the auction house is a bit volatile... The crafters aren't around because it's hard for them to procure enough resources to craft with, and without crafters, there is no market for the miners to sell to. Me being on Arkadia right now trying to mine, I end up TTing all my ores becuase I can't wait a week for all my peds worth of stuff to sell. So most of what I have lost up there is due to the fact I can't get markup since there isn't a lot of demand because there isn't a lot of supply.. It is really a vicious cycle.

HOWEVER... All you gotta do is place your orders up there. Most resources HAVE no orders. If you give orders, you will get miners wanting to sell their resources now. And traders, traders of all people should be jumping on this opportunity.

My biggest complaint is there is very little narc, alice, and iron to be found on Ark.. It's not a bad thing to have common stuff on other planets be rare here and vice versa... It creates opportunity, but what we need are people to jump on that opportunity. I would do it myself, and maybe I will... But I am so short on funds at present that I can't even begin to try.

SO with all of that said.. I take that back, that is not my biggest complaint. My biggest complaint is we've been waiting so long for treasure hunting to get here that I hope it is actually going to be in this next update. I can't imagine how much business Arkadia is losing because of this not having been released on time.

Those of you who have suggestions, you need to make sure and let support know what your suggestions are. You might think they don't listen to what you have to say, but if you send them reasonable ideas that are plausible and even beneficial, they do listen. I see many things that I and others have suggested come into play finally. The squeaky wheel gets the grease and the customer is always right... Unless Mindark is wrong, in which case they won't admit it :P That's why if you ever have a support case, MAKE SURE TO SEND THEM A SCREENSHOT OR THEY WILL DENY ANYTHING WENT WRONG!

I will be on Arkadia for quite a while maybe, and any crafters needing materials, feel free to get ahold of me and I can arrange to meet with you to supply you with anything you are needing for crafting. Otherwise, place orders on the auction house and I will look for them and fill them as I always do.

Question of the Day:
If you spend say 300 Peds on an amp or something and use it up, do you think of it as a loss of $30, or do you just think of it as a loss of 300 Peds?

You might ask what importance this has to me, but it does have some. There is a psychological element to the Entropia Universe... Personally, I tend to think of it in terms of Peds.. Spending $30 in a casino and losing it is far more devestating to me than losing 300 Peds in Entropia, but why? Just wondering if it is similar to you guys is all.

I do not believe Entropia Universe is a casino... In fact, to avoid that legality, everything is "skill based", and "skill based" gaming is not gambling... Though you are still risking a stake to try and win a profit... Just a thought... And I highly suspect the reason banks are in fact pawnshops in the game, is because for them to actually allow actual bank type banks, being a real cash economy, it would violate a ton of banking regulations around the world... Just my observations, maybe I am wrong...

Part of what I am trying to do here is to get you guys thinking. If you aren't thinking about things, then your mind becomes dull, and if we keep it sharp, your losses will be much less. If you don't use it, you lose it.

MINING CHANGES EXPLAINED

I just wanted to clarify some of the changes you will see in mining...

Your OF 105 has become F-105... Your eMine OFS has become the eMineFS... All of your finders seem to have been converted, but they could have appeared as anything, who knows... I am still a bit confused and somehow feel we didn't get fully compensated for the values of the converted finders...

But in any case, you can now mine for Ores AND EnMatters AND Treasure (if on Arkadia), or any of the three... I have dropped for both Ores and EnMatters with one drop and hit BOTH DEPOSITS ON THE SAME DROP. So... Guess what? Probes have become like Ammunition.

A probe costs 5 pecs. It still costs a ped to drop for ore, 20 probes, and 50 pecs to drop for enmatters, or 10 probes. Or you can do both for 30 probes, or 1.50 ped.

Amps still work the same way, just don't let their new names confuse you.

I really do like the changes despite the confusing nature of them. Hope this helps you! Thanks for reading! More great posts coming soon!!!