Back in the early to the mid-2010s planet Rocktropia was my home away from planet calypso for a while due to my mining operations. While I have not been ignoring Rocktropia as a possible place to go mining nowadays. I have been exploring many other opportunities elsewhere. I however felt it was time to see how mining is these days.
Back in the day, I was quite blessed. The leader of the society I was in at the time was a massive miner on Rocktropia as he lived there. He shared with me a lot of pointers on where to farm back then a high markup ore called Alternative Rock. While the markup has dropped by a lot it is still decent enough to want to check out this place.
I was somewhat torn if I wanted to even talk about or share about my mining on Rocktropia. The information I was given back in the day had quite a lot of value to it. However, since the large passage of time the mining layout of Rocktropia has changed a little bit. It’s also not that much of a secrete anymore.
The screenshot above shows some of my mining activities from back in 2013. As you can see for the most part the area of the map being shown was covered in Alternative Rock. There was also one other ore mixed into the giant fields of this stuff in this select area zinc. Zinc is quite a low-value ore and you won’t believe how I ended up coming into contact with the ore later in my mining trip.
I can say it feels like the mining layout of the planet has changed somewhat. In areas where I had giant fields of just Alternative rock and one other ore, I was finding a lot of other ores mixed in now. It still felt like I was hitting giant pockets of Alternative Rock. I also did notice some areas seem limited in what you would find in the area.
I am somewhat thankful that my mining data from Little Big Mining Log is still around for me to access. While it feels like some of the data might not be as accurate as it would have been back quite a few years ago. It at least gave me a great starting point in areas I should check out to mine during my trip.
For my limited trip, I had 5 D-Class amps I brought with me to Rocktropia. While you can buy these amps on Rocktropia as it is their mining amplifier after all. They cost a little more and the amount on the auction is quite a limited supply to buy from.
If you do decide to come here to do mining. Also, keep in mind you might struggle to sell a lot of the ores you can find on this planet. While there sometimes might be a buy order up for Alternative Rock or the refined version Alternative Ingot. Even that can be a big miss.
This is why so many bring all their mining finds back to Calypso to sell. This sort of thing is not just a Rocktropia thing most other planets you tend to need to haul back your loot to Calypso for the best chance at sales. Thankfully I knew a secure transportation service for a 10 PED fee will come and pick me up and warp me back to Calypso reducing my risk of going through lootable pvp space by myself. Still, though that is something you have to keep in mind regarding costs and turnover rates. There is also still some risk involved in such things.
I lucked out quite early in the first part of my mining run. I had to fund a massive area with high success rates for finding mining claims. With a large chunk of the claims being Alternative Rock. Which I’ll be selling for around 111% markup.
While Rocktropia is not exactly a small planet it is not large either. There is also a lot of variety of creatures and settings. This means people who tend to mind here get creative when needing to get mining claims out of packs of creatures that can one-shot them. That also means getting killed because you are certain there are mining claims to be found in deadly areas. Where else would they hide the good stuff?
One such example I ran into while mining myself was another player who trained perhaps a hundred or so creatures out of an area I assume they were trying to get at a mining claim they had found. While they moved their vehicle at a decent distance from me. That massive train of creatures eventually wandered back and right on top of where I was mining before I finished.
Thankfully I’m used to this sort of thing that happened on Rocktropia in the past. As I have killed several cars moving creatures out of my way to mine a claim. So I had my eyes peeled in the event this was still a tactic many people deployed.
I still had yet to use the summon for that claim so I was able to get to safety first. I then summoned the claim out of the way of the wandering train as it went back to its spawn location. If that had not worked I’d need to train them away myself to finish off what I was mining or wait for them all to pass at some point.
When mining for an ore like this your hope is always to get a global or Hall of Fame on that ore itself. As is often the case you get globals on near worthless ores as I ended up doing during my time here mining. One can only dream of a giant find with a ore that has decent markup and dreaming I’ll have to keep doing.
I was at least thankful to get some globals just for some TT (trade terminal) value added back in. Back in the day, it was quite expected when mining something like Alternative Rock that you would be finding a lower return rate in exchange for getting a higher markup ore.
In my first two amps, I ended up finding such a high amount of claims I was about slightly ahead. My concern going into this was if the 111% markup or so on the Alternative Rock I found would be enough to cover whatever I end up being short on TT return-wise.
What ended up bringing me into profit was getting a global. It was naturally on a lower valued ore such as Niksarium with this 56 PED claim I got. This stuff tends to go for 101% to 103% markup if you find a buyer at all. Otherwise, you are stuck selling it for the base value to the vendor.
Once that area dried up I went to another to try my luck. That is where things went south quickly. The next entire amp I had I only found 72 PED worth of ore of the 206 PED I needed to be about breakeven not including extracting, refining, and selling costs.
That was the kind of dry spell I was used to seeing on Rocktropia back in the day. That was also the reason I never amp mined here with the expectation of one time and I thought I’d never be doing it again. I was usually using mining to supplement some of my costs of playing this game and doing things like hunting.
This usually meant if I was here mining I was getting low on PED. Having a couple of bad amps runs like that back to back then would require me to deposit more funds in to keep playing. So I stuck to the good old-fashioned non-amp mining.
With mining being the way it was I ended up changing locations quite a few times trying to find somewhere to try and stabilize the bleeding of losses I was suffering. Thankfully by the third amp, I had found a few more claims mostly of Alternative Rock which would go a long way to help claw back some losses.
By the end of the third amp and into the fourth amp I had found what appeared to be an amazing place. I was sometimes finding three to five claims in a row. While it was not all Alternative Rock I was just thankful this mining trip was not going to be a total disaster.
There came a point where I settled on the fact this trip was going to be a loss without getting some more globals or having one heck of a high success rate of finding claims. Once again the area I was in started to dry up and I ran into a lot of no claims found when dropping probes.
I then got a daily Hall of Fame (HOF). I knew there was a high chance of any global I would find at the time of day would be a HOF as the daily board was starting to empty out. No one was finding anything of decent size of anything.
The first thing my eyes caught was Zinc Stone. Needless to say, I swore a bit. Zinc I’ll be lucky to be selling it for 101-102% markup. If this would have been a better ore that would have made a huge difference.
I was however still quite grateful that it was 149 PED even if it was zinc. At this point in the run, I needed anything I could get if I was going to be anywhere near breakeven. I had also been having a lot of bad mining runs as of late from all the mining I was doing on Calypso (which I’ve not talked much about yet).
Trying to escape that bad mining I was getting is a reason I came back to Rocktropia to do a bit of mining run. That HOF still did not get me out of the woods yet. I was however closing in the gap in the number of returns I needed to at least break even after my costs for this trip.
I was down to my final amp. For the final amp, I was keeping track of just how I was going on that. I was maybe going to be ahead after markup if this last amp did not go that bad.
I ended up having 7 no-claims in a row at one point. This was cutting things close. I then found another area that had a pocket around of mostly Alternative Rock it that I was finding. Along with some zinc which at this point I was willing to take anything I could find.
Then it came down to my last drop. I looked up at my little big mining log map and there were two spots I had an “ok” feeling I might find something with how my finds were shaping up. I had a slightly better feeling over one spot than the other.
So I dropped in the spot I felt better about and found my last claim. It was a size nine of Alternative Rock. While nothing crazy that ended up putting me ahead by 5 PED before markup on my last 3 amps including the one I had very few claims found on.
Out of pure wonder, I ended up dropping an un-amped probe in the other location I was considering. No claim was found. It looks like I had picked the perfect spot for my final amped drop after all.
Final Thoughts
After that run of 5 D-class mining amps I should if everything sells for around the markup I’m expecting to it have made a small profit after including all my costs. That amount will be around a 10-11% profit. This was quite a fun mining trip and who knows if I’ll find myself back on Rocktropia at some point to do it again.
An added benefit of now having a bunch of ores with enough markup to warrant paying for transportation back to Calypso was I got to take all the hunting loot that I did not vender with me as well. It would no longer be sitting around in storage for what I was expecting to be months before I would return and do more hunting to hopefully have enough to make it worth the added costs.
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Information
Screenshots were taken and content was written by @Enjar about Entropia Universe.
