Topic
Mining question: Sparkly rocks
Why is everyone always mauling the sparkly rocks and nothing else? it it just because of the vendor price? or favor? i have about 400 sparkly rocks in my pocket, i'd just like to know if there's anything i can do with them besides selling them.
Replies
- They are also valued for their shiny element content, an element crucial to many powders and certain ingots important for tool making.
- Would it be beneficial for me to make that out of the ore rather than selling it?
- It depends on what you're after (favor or currants) and what skills you have :)
- working on mining 3 now, got tinkering 1 just cause, i'll probably end up selling the element on the auction board, what do i need to make it?
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"What do I need to make it?"
Refining I and a Grinder - Grind those suckers down, Xenu!
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Thanks fellas, working on EH now, def accidentally aborted mining 3 halfway through T^T
but i'll just go with it, work on refining. :D - I was wondering that as well, because beryl actually sells for more at the vendors. But I haven't learned how to make powders yet...so this is good to know.
- Beryl doesn't sell for more at the vendors. Doesn't Beryl sell for 4c and Sparklies for 6c?
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Sparkly sells for 6/ore at the vendors (which is the highest of the ores without further refining).
Beryl sells for 4-5/ore at the vendors. - Oh....I must have gotten confused. Sorry about that.
- Shiny elements can't be sold at auction, btw. No elements can be sold (to vendor or at auction). You can donate them, though.
- Cool, i'll probably use them for favor then! kinda thing i'm working towards fuelmaking, but not sure yet
- Sparkly rocks are a component of No-No Powder. Say no more.
- Favor, favor, favor. In my case, at the present moment.
- When I'm after currants I'll mine every beryl I can find -- 5 currants/ore chunk and most people pass them by. If I'm looking to make powders, well then i need sparkly.
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Beryl, despite a slightly lower price, is more readily available - people chase sparkly and leave the beryl alone.
(That doesn't mean I won't mine sparkly if one just happens to be sitting there.) - When people are chasing sparkle, you want to join them. Mining alone is spending needless energy to get less minerals. If you see 3 people mining a sparkle rock, join in, and you'll get a bonus. If you're by yourself mining Beryl, you're basically spending more energy getting less worth for your mining.
- In terms of time, energy, and storage space Shiny is 150% as profitable as Beryl. If you only have enough energy/bagspace to get 100 units of ore, that's either 600 currants of Shiny or 400 of Beryl. If you don't mind inefficiency, grabbing beryl while you hunt Shiny isn't a bad idea, it's worth some cash...just not as much as you could get with the same resources faster elsewhere.
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I mine Sparkly for favor. Since the Sparkly ore is 33% more valuable than Beryl, it can be a pretty big difference in favor when my 6+ bags are full. Since mining ore takes the same amount of time and energy regardless of the type, I just stick to Sparkly. Then again, I'm thinking of about 5 AM when nobody's on. When it gets to be the afternoon/primetime, there are tons of guys going around looking for Sparkly Ore and suddenly Beryl looks a lot more attractive.
In any case, it sounds like the other ore types might be able to use a buff or some sort. But that might just be ignorance talking, since I'm not sure of the potential that Beryl, Iron, and Dullite have in regards to recipes.
"Mining alone is spending needless energy to get less minerals."
I thought that too, but then I realized that getting 1-3 extra ore per tick (rarely more) isn't really worth it. Sure, you'll get more ore per energy spent, but any advantage you get from that is gonna be lost because you have to spend more time walking around looking for ore veins.
Plus, the game doesn't seem to properly notice how many people are mining the same vein of ore. Typically, less than half of the people mining the ore vein are counted in the "helping" bonus, which means I usually don't get very much. For example, the last Sparkly vein I mined involved 6 people all on the same vein. Two of those people counted for the ore bonus, and I got 3 extra chunks.
Edit: On the other hand, there are times when you'll want to mine with somebody, such as when there's two ores in a room and there are people mining on one of them. They're all going to go over to the other one anyway, so there's no advantage to going to the other one. Or if you're looking for ore and you come across one with people on it, obviously you're going to want to mine there anyway. I just mean that it doesn't make sense to go out of your way to mine with people when you can have ores all to yourself.
Edit:... And speaking of going out of your way to mine with people, I keep seeing certain people going around mining with 2-4 people following them. They walk to the middle of the ore, and then jump a few times, which makes the people following them get close enough to mine, and then they all start mining. I don't understand, because it looks like when the leader mines, all the rest of the people mine too.
But that can't be true, because that would be only a short leap from legalized botting. Especially if the followers can mimic eating commands too so they don't die (but even if they do die, death isn't exactly a huge punishment). I thought that maybe they're all at their keyboards inputting the commands when the leader got close enough, but then what would be the point in following them at all? I dunno, maybe there's something going on here that I don't understand. All I know, is it looks and acts like a traditional MMO bot train, except with an actual person as the conductor. - The 'follow' command will create that on-screen behavior. Each characters still has to start mining and each character still has to keep up their own energy. Even if two characters are following a 3rd, those two characters have to be controlled separately to mine.
- Mr. Glenn, only the people who start mining after you give you a bonus. The first person gets the most, and the last person contributes bonuses to everyone else but doesn't get one themselves that particular time.
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@WindBorn Okay, that's good to know. I see them individually mining occasionally, but most of the time they're in 4-5 man follows going around Pollokoo and Callopee mining Sparkly Ore. After reading Julep's info, I'm going to assume that they're just a smart group that's gaming the help system to get more ore. I wonder how worthwhile it is.
@Julep Thanks for the info. That explains things a lot. It seems like an unfortunate system that everybody isn't rewarded equally, but I guess any other system would either be exploitable or wouldn't work well due to the huge variations in mining speeds between the skill levels. -
I sell all my sparkly and use that money to buy shrine powder and gems from the auctions. I get way more favour that way instead of donating my sparkly, with a large portion of currants to spare.
I've been spending most of my time in Ajaya Bliss and the bonuses make it far more efficient than mining by myself. You definitely won't tap every rock, but I can spend an entire evening mining and max out my inventory without eating a single piece of food, whereas mining by myself requires me to eat stacks of food and force me to go get more before my inventory is full. -
I NEED SPARKLY FOR EHSP.
But I do sell it sometimes.
Also, it's pretty.