Off on the heels of some success and failures I was on the hunt for some ores with a little more markup. This ended up leading me into an area where I’ve found my biggest mining claim to date. It ended up finding quite an insane amount of mining runs that went on for some time well after.
This was like any other day in Entropia Universe. I had been doing decent enough on the amp runs I was not expecting anything decent. There is however my long-term mining and there are some not-so-great runs back in the day. I was however usually going after some ores that had ok markup up to make up for it.
One of the reasons I ended up going out to the area I did is I wanted to see if you could still find Belkar on it. I had taken a look at current market conditions and it was at a decent price point I wanted to expand my own internal data points of where to mine the stuff.
The couple of spots I had for Belkar I felt just were not that great either. I was just not hitting a high enough amount of the overall ore claims in an area to feel satisfied with my other locations. This spot would also not be one I ended up being rather thrilled about for Belkar either.
This area was decent overall. There were some nasty robots off in one direction. Some creatures in the area were not that bad to deal with unless you happened to find a giant claim and needed to spend like 10 hours mining it. Even then a small creature could be an annoying thing to deal with. However I thought that not going to be an issue. Not like I’m going to find something insane.
One of my long-term goals mining-wise was to always find a tower. I still have that on my goals list. What I ended up finding did not even come close to being a tower but more on that in a bit. It was still quite amazing.
Since there were some creatures in the area and I wanted to avoid getting aggression on them even though they were not that bad. I would summon claims away from them when I could to extract them. I mostly wanted to keep from dragging creatures from one side to another. Creating a situation where I would always get aggression on them making them a far more annoying issue than they needed to be.
This area seemed to return quite high hit rates of finding ores. At one point I decided I’m just going to carpet-bomb the entire area. There were also some random perception checks that I wanted to get to the bottom of finding out if they were anything at all. I knew many people AFK at a local outpost not that far away so there was a chance I was getting perception checks off people leaving the area.
On occasion, I’d spawn my Sleipnir if I noticed I was heading into areas with some creatures in it. While many people prefer to fly, land, drop a drop, and repeat. I find some days I just prefer walking around and only using a ship when needed.
I did switch out to using some higher protection gear than I have in past runs. I just did not want any issues when mining up lower-yielding ores. I did keep a little ammo on me to take out anything that I ran into if needed. I however was not looking to make a hunting trip out of this. I do tend to get carried away with the shooting of things in my way.
I also started to notice in some areas I was getting a lot more perception checks than others. So I was starting to focus more on an area over everything else. I thought perhaps I had found it when I hit some Azzurdite stone.
I looked up what the raw stuff unrefined was worth. It was somehow selling for below 100%. Someone more than likely had a price range going and they wanted to ensure someone would buy it. It also looked like it was a tiny amount.
The more important thing despite it being unrefined was the lack of volume. If people are not even buying it to refine it. There is no way we have seen that decent 111% markup that was shown as the decade price that was quite a lot higher even than that.
I thought to myself oh well and kept on mining. This is why I am never that bothered when I find Lysterium. There is a whole lot of other stuff that sells for a lot less. Even more so since there was still some decent buying pressure on that ore.
At one point I was certain I finally found what was causing all the perception checks. It was a size 15 with 152 PED of Lysterium Stone. It was also in quite a heavily populated creature area. So I only jumped out to drop a probe with the intent to jump back in and fly to the next spot.
I ended up having to clear a little bit of the area around me. It took a little while to fully mine up the size 15 claim. I was already rather happy with that find. That more or less ensured this run would be in the green if only slightly unless things go quite far south on the finds front.
I however a few probe drops later was still getting perception checks. At this point, I started to consider there was either a piece of fruit on the ground or perhaps another player mining in the area. As I already had found the interesting finds it could not possibly be anything else left. Right?
I was still however finding quite a decent hit rate of ores in the area so I thought why not extend my normal mining run even further? It’s not like I had mined a whole lot in this area anyways. It was quite massive after all.
At one point I got killed. My inventory was full and so were my cars. I took a moment to catch up on some in-game mail, offload, and get ready to back out to where I got killed. A couple of drops later and my jaw could have been found on the floor.
I found a size 22 of Lysterium Stone with a 2,873 PED value. This stuff at the time was also going for a 106% markup on the auction house. While it would be nice if it was a couple of other ores I was hunting for in the area. It also could be a lot worse.
I switched over to enmatter drop and while I did hit something it was nothing that impressive. I however noticed yet another perception check. I thought “WTF???.” There was no way I could just leave things be. I’ve also heard enough stories of people finding some decent finds near the largest claims like the one I had just found.
So I went around dropping for enmatter in places I had already mined for ore or double dropping to cover both. I ended up finding two size 13 Growth Molecules not that far away. Their markup up sucks but hey a 51 PED and 50 PED find.
I also found some non-global size 10 ores in the area. So I just kept dropping amped probes till I noticed I was no longer getting any perception checks and the area seemed to be a bit done. I then headed back to my size 22 claim.
This thing took forever to mine up. It was also already decently late my time but there was no way I was just going to let it sit there. Granted I’d have a few days to extract it all up before it would vanish. I however was not going to take any chances of something coming up and just not having all the hours this was going to take.
I minded it during the in-game day and far into the night. All the extractors I had on me at one point were broken so I had to go back to an output. I just filled my inventory with further extractors not having any idea how many I was going to need.
At least one of the good things is that there were some creatures in the area. I managed for the most part to pull them and run them off elsewhere. There was one point where I just started to shoot any that spawned in. I was rather happy this was not in a dense spawn like some of my other claims.
Every so often I’d switch out to a new extractor as the old one died and just keep going. In-game night slowly turned into an in-game day. I was not even halfway through this point of getting it all.
At one point it was nearing almost 5 AM my time and I was so tired. My eyes were slowly closing and it was also just getting boring at this point mining this much up with a basic extractor. It was however well worth it.
Final Thoughts
After far too much time I minded up the last of it. It was time to fly off to an outpost with an auction house, refine some up, and start selling a chunk of this find at a time. I ended up needing to repair my refiner a couple of times just to get through all the ore I now had.
It was at this point I realized what I thought was going to be just a few mining runs with D-Class amps was now only just the beginning of a much more grand journey. I was now just getting started.
Other Content
Information
Screenshots were taken and content was written by @Enjar about Entropia Universe.
