f13.net

Mine Things! (http://www.minethings.com/)

So, I didn't get very far in EVE, but I wanna say this is like a simple browser-based EVE where all the combat is automated so you don't have to actually sit there.  Niche of a niche.

It's essentially an economic MMOG.  The overall goal of the game is to collect different types of items (which you can combine into "melds"; the more melds you have, the more different things you can do and the better you can do them).  Different cities produce different items, and ultimately you want all of them.  Transporting items between cities is slow and opens you up to PvP piracy where people try to steal your shit.  Each player picks a single "profession" (class) that lets them do a certain set of things (you can change your profession at any time, but most professions are only available to players with a certain number of melds). 

From this, you get gameplay where some people make money by producing items and selling them locally, some people make money by transporting goods and selling them for higher prices than they fetch in their cities of origin, some people plunder goods as they're being transported, some people patrol the roads and plunder the plunderers, some people run banks, some people run factories.

It's verrrry slow-paced, but also requires almost no real-time investment -- you set a few things in motion (list some stuff on the market, dispatch some vehicles along a trade route, etc) and then wait a day to see how it pans out.  All player interaction is asynchronous and/or automated; there doesn't seem to be any point where you're rewarded for being online and reacting to stuff in real time.

As you'd expect, it's free to play, but you can get a boost by buying things with real money and/or Bitcoins.    :drill:

I'll try anything once...Luckton

Xanthippe's recruitment link. (http://www.minethings.com/miners/index/+103160)

(Samwise, I wish you'd put yours in there so you'd get credit for recruiting me!).

That tutorial took less than 5 minutes. Then I read this in welcome message:


So there's more to do later but nothing now? Seems a little thin but I'm game to find out.

It remains pretty slow-playing for a while.  Getting a full set of yellow equipment is roughly a 20% boost to your mining rate, so it's not going to radically alter anything; it's just a good start.

Mine gold from your starter mine instead of things.  I mined things for a while before realizing that just about anything I could get from my starter mine, I could buy on the market instead for 1 gold since the market is completely saturated with people mining that stuff and having nothing to do with it but give it away.

Which server?

I'm on Calbuco, but I don't remember seeing an option to pick when I set up my account.

It looks like you automatically get a character on each server; you can freely switch servers under the "Cities" menu.

Calbuco it is.

Logged in, created a chap, did the tutorial, started the game.

"How about you check back in a couple of hours."

Uh.

No.

Signed up with Xan's referral link; here's mine (http://www.minethings.com/miners/index/+103215) so we can get a chain going.

I'm glad I didn't try to farm a ton of stuff during the tutorial; I wasn't really expecting a reset but it makes sense. Going to let it do it's thing while I'm at work tonight, then futz around with it some more afterwards and see if it's sticky.

Yeah, it's like opposite motivation.

I've launched my first trade voyage, shipping a package of explosives across the continent to see if I can make a few gold.  Because I am impatient, I didn't load my vehicle up on any sort of defenses before attempting this, so there's a decent chance I'll just lose my investment to bandits.   :why_so_serious:

How long did it take you to get to where you could do that?

I found 9g overnight.

I guess I started playing around this time last week?  I haven't been particularly focused; I think if you just want to give trading a shot you can buy a mule for 1gp, buy a few other things for 1gp (with the expectation that they'll fetch more money elsewhere), and send the mule off in a random direction.

I'm afraid to switch back to check to see if I have anything on the first server I was on, lest I lose what I have on Calbuco. Have you verified this?

I'm on Calbuco, I think. (Home city is Alyssa?). I didn't click on the referral links. I need to pay more attention, since I sort of forgot about them. :) Still going through the turtorial.

I have so far made juice. Hooray for juice. :)

I can't figure out how to buy this mythical shit for 1g.  I see nowt that's not overpriced and silly.

Clearly, I'm doing something wrong.

So, just to be certain -- I have finished the tutorial. I have no money, no things, no melds. I am a trader (bum seemed to have downsides). Now I just...wait several hours while mining gold so I can afford starter drills and buckets and whatnot? (Or purchase gold).

Yes. It's a verrry slow start.

I think you click on equipment? I can't even buy a mule (vehicles) for less than 10g. I put in a bid on a jalopy but haven't won it yet.

I'm still confused over the mines. How many mines are there? I vaguely recall the tutorial talking about being able to choose between mines, but darned if I can figure out how.

I guess the equipment is only per mine (all I've got is "starter" now, and I'm mining gold so I can buy equipment to mine more gold until I'm fully equipped).

Apparently the rate of finding gold is highly random; over the course of a night:
5g
4g
3g
1g
114g !!!
4g
3g
2g
3g
4g
So I bought a bunch of low-tier equipment and made a few more melds. I'm still not sure what the point of the game is though, or how a lot of the shit works. Is there a wiki somewhere?

Was that just mining gold in the starter mine? Pity I can't play this at work too. Crazy bosses and their "We pay you to work not game" rules.

Oh, I just found the 1g mules (in the Starter section). I was looking in the Vehicle Mine.

So confused.

I'm working a mine with 40/buckets an hour for "gold" and it hasn't found anything in two hours. Nothing.

Map of Calbuco that seems accurate: http://www.minethings.com/app/webroot/forums/viewtopic.php?f=61&t=8867 (http://www.minethings.com/app/webroot/forums/viewtopic.php?f=61&t=8867)
For Morat: http://wiki.minethings.com/index.php?title=Category:Items (http://wiki.minethings.com/index.php?title=Category:Items)

The Mule is in the starter section because otherwise it would've been impossible for the people at the creation of the server to get anywhere. You only get vehicles from the vehicle mine, which isn't in the starter city.

You won't be buying a second mine for a while. You're stuck with the starter until you can round up around 3000g for a second starter mine, or more if you want a different type. Alssa only has Starter/Music/Avatar, but if you trek over to Franco Thistle, that city has Equipment/Vehicle/Ship mines for purchase, and Danchesser would have mines of different types as well. Of course, those mines go for about 15000g. The servers all have different maps, so this only applies to Calbuco.

It takes a few days but eventually the game forces you to curb your impulses to refresh the findings page every 5 minutes. There's really no point in checking more than twice a day.

According to the help page all mines produce gold at the same rate. So I imagine it's a good idea for the starter mine, not so much for any of the others.

Switching servers definitely lets you run three characters in parallel.

Wow. Since yesterday at 2:00 PM, my mine has produced....6 gold. 2 gold and 4 gold, respectively. Oh, and a pair of shorts.

I bought a pickaxe and a hardhat, and will check again later. I suppose I should lanquish in Alyssa for now, or buy a mule and move?

I'm in the same boat Morat; overnight I found a whopping 5 gold (1, 1, 3). I wonder if they nerfed gold production in the last few days; I switched over to mining for things this morning to see if that goes any faster.

If this game had a graphical interface it'd likely be the best browsergame out there right now.

There's no point in moving to a city you don't own a mine in, since you get a major mining bonus in your home city.  My plan is to buy 3 starter mines in Alssa so I can maximize my gold mining rate ASAP, then buy a mine somewhere else and move there.  Explosives seem extremely lucrative based on my wheelings and dealings so far, but I bet there's good money in ships and vehicles too since they tend to get wrecked during combat.

Being a yellow trader seems pretty safe; I haven't had a single highwayman encounter yet.  Apparently this is because it's really easy to outfit a yellow guard vehicle that will whomp any yellow highwayman, so it's not cost-effective to try to steal yellows.  The trading strategy I've started to settle on is to ship bolts from Alssa to Danchesser, explosives from Danchesser to Franco Thistle, and equipment from Franco Thistle to Alssa.  As a general rule I'm able to get double the purchase price of stuff by moving it from its city of origin to somewhere else.

If you haven't amassed a fleet of vehicles for trading yet, there's no downside to being a bum.  The benefit of the bum profession is that if another player exceeds their inventory limit, the overflow goes to the bums.

Anyone have 10 melds yet? Mining income seems low and trading is hard so I'm curious about becoming a Worker.

Oh, and are there any perks to being social? I'm ezrast.

Going rate for a 10-meld worker in Alssa is 1 gp per week.  I don't think you're getting rich quick that way.   :awesome_for_real:

http://calbuco.minethings.com/marketables/market/804 (http://calbuco.minethings.com/marketables/market/804)

If you move to another city (where there are more factories and fewer unskilled workers to man them), rates are much better, but you still wouldn't make more gold than you can pull out of your starter mine right now.  Getting up to 20 melds so you're a 2cph worker would also boost your income a lot, but getting that many melds in itself isn't that cheap.

Another option to bootstrap yourself could be taking out a loan to buy another mine.  Not sure how the long-term math works out on that one.  Standard lending rate seems to be in the neighborhood of 20% if you don't have a credit history.

I don't understand the economy at all. How is equipment produced? I see the prices going up and down.

Almost everything is produced at a mine.  (A very few things are produced at factories, using stuff that's produced at mines.)  Mines randomly produce things of a certain type, with most findings being yellows, a fraction being greens, and increasingly smaller fractions being things of rarer and rarer quality.

So equipment comes from an equipment mine.  If you're in Alssa, all the equipment you see on the market was mined in Franco Thistle (by a player who owns an equipment mine there) and then shipped to Alssa by a trader.  Prices fluctuate based on supply of a particular item type, whether any traders have brought it in, how much people want that type, etc.  I've noticed that flimsy carts tend to have a higher market value than other yellow equipment, for example, and I hypothesize that although they're probably produced at the same rate as other items, more of them are needed for melds, so the demand is always going to be greater.

It's definitely cheaper to get yourself a vehicle and do your shopping in Franco Thistle directly, but it takes time, and you need to set your profession to Trader to do it (which doesn't cost anything, but you can't do any other profession stuff, like work in a factory or whatever, for as long as you're a Trader).  In theory you also run the risk of your vehicle getting robbed along the way, but I haven't had this happen once yet with yellow items.

Protip: just copy/paste whatever Samwise does with most any webgame like this and you win

Yellow vehicles can only carry yellow items but consequently they can only be attacked by yellow vehicles. Anyone who is a highwayman (the vehicle robbing profession) has to have 30 melds to even have the option, and if you've got 30 melds you've got better things to rob than yellow vehicles. Thus, until you move up to trading green or better items your chances of being robbed are virtually nil.

I'm at 10 melds now.  Thinking about switching from trader to merchant so I can get at that city across the ocean.   :drill:

So I sent out a rickshaw and it landed in a mysterious city with no inhabitants and nothing for sale.  Kinda weird.  Are cities somewhat random???

edit:  ok, it's jct. butte.  I guess it's kind of a 'weigh station' city with no market.  Might be an interesting place to move to being centralized, but there's no market here at all.


Turning into a pirate down the road and pwning the seas is an intriguing proposition.  Wouldn't do it w/o a guild of some kind though.
Btw, I'm "Ghambit" in-game.  Dont shoot me.   :awesome_for_real:

The market-less cities only exist to provide alternate (longer) shipping routes.  

The idea is that since they're a complete waste of time, most traders will avoid them and therefore most highwaymen will as well, which means that if you're shipping something really valuable you might want to ship it the long way to reduce exposure.  Of course, if all the really valuable stuff gets shipped the long way then you're better off pillaging that route than the direct one...

(http://blog.lib.umn.edu/snackeru/greet/images/vizzini.jpg)

How is it longer when on the map it's smack dab in the center of everything?  I can trade with 3 cities equidistant from there.

(edit) I had a diagram all drawn up, but no, I refuse to explain basic math to you.  You'll work it out.   :grin:

(edit edit) Okay, I'll give you a hint.  Where are you going to get the stuff you're trading from your equidistant stronghold?

Observation: it's possible to make money through trading without actually moving goods around.  

There's always a gap between the highest bid and the lowest listing for an item.  Place a bid for an item, wait for someone who's impatient to sell to accept your bid, then place a listing at a higher price, and wait for someone who's impatient to buy to accept your listing.

Mind you, it might take a day or two for someone to accept your listing.  As with long-distance trading, it essentially boils down to renting your time and inventory space to people who are short on either or both.  The main difference with long-distance trading is that you're able to make more per transaction because people are willing to pay more to save the time and hassle it takes to ship things between cities.

I thought about trying to figure out what sort of living I could make just flipping goods as a bum but then I realized if I wanted to do that I would just play City of Heroes. I bet it could be pretty lucrative though considering how large the inventory is, and that you can have more bids outstanding than you actually have the gold for (they'll automatically get canceled if your gold drops too low to honor them).

Wow. Gold mining is slow. My miner is fully equipped though, with all crap gear. So 47 whole buckets an hour, and exactly 6 gold to show for the last 12.

Hooray. Did they nerf mining? :) Maybe I should start digging for items now in the starter mine. I think it's clothes or something.

Mining is both random and slow.  Every now and then you'll get a big strike, but overall you won't make money very quickly from a starter mine.  The way mining works in a nutshell is that you get a "find" every 200 "buckets" or so, which means that at 47 buckets an hour you'll get a find roughly every four hours.  It breaks down to something like 80% "yellow" finds, 17% "green" finds, and increasingly tiny chances of better stuff.

The average yellow-equivalent gold find seems to be about 3g; when you see those bigger strikes like 20g that was the equivalent of a green, the rarer 100g finds are like blues, etc.  With most mine types you'll be able to get maybe 5-10g on the market for a yellow thing you find, so mining things makes more sense than mining gold in those cases.  The problem with mining things at a starter mine is that the market is saturated with those items, so you'll have a hard time selling your yellow finds for more than 1g, if anything. 

The exception is bolts, which sell pretty good at non-noob towns because you need them to install mods onto non-noob vehicles, but it still makes more sense to mine gold at your starter mine, buy the bolts on the local market for 1g each from some sucker who doesn't know better, and then sell them at a 400% markup in another town.

Spamwise, I see you trying to bolster the bolt market in Franco.   :awesome_for_real:   Methinks that market will be saturated soon though.
Anyways, how do you make your mine NOT a "starter mine."

You don't.  You buy a new mine.  Click "SHOP", you'll see the mines for sale.  Each type of mine can only be purchased in one particular city; if you click "show all mine markets" you'll see mines that can be purchased in other cities (at least the cities you have access to by virtue of having explored them with a vehicle).

You can use up to three mines at once, in any location (items are always produced in the location of the mine, of course).  Hence my plan to buy two more starter mines before I do anything else; right now I'm wasting 50 buckets per hour worth of free mining because I only own one mine.  The problem is that even starter mines, which are the cheapest, are expensive as hell.  I've only got about 100g banked so far, and a starter mine goes for about 2700g.

This thread makes me feel what non-gamers must feel when I talk to them about games.

That's pretty much how I feel when I read about EVE, but this is much more accessible to me for whatever reason.  I think being web-based and not requiring any real-time commitment makes a huge difference.

Why not take up writing a novel, or learning something? Passing the time? Have a cup of tea or something!

See, the beauty of web games is that I can play them on my phone while I'm plowing your mom.

I need melds anyways to be anything other than a trader or bum, so is it worth it to start mining "things" in the starter mine, or keep hacking at gold until I'm at least equipped with green mining gear?

And should I keep the yellows? I can use them at another mine, right?

My theory on this is that you can get the things for starter melds faster by mining gold and buying them than by mining them yourself.  For one thing, you won't waste time getting duplicate items, and for another, again, you can probably buy all those things for 1g each.

The music melds are also pretty cheap to buy in Alssa, and once you get a vehicle, it's not TOO expensive to buy yellow equipment in Franco and ship it home to Alssa to make those melds.


Or use them in melds, yeah.  But if you start trading or doing anything else where inventory space gets tight, you'll find quickly that if something in your inventory isn't making you money, you're better off selling it and buying another one later when you actually need it.

That's a keeper.

 :awesome_for_real:

I've made the switch (for now) to Merchant and have sent my first couple of ships off into the great blue unknown.  Once I can see the city on the other side of the water (I think it's Massau?) I can start comparing market prices and figure out whether there's lots of money to be made shipping yellows between there and the mainland.  My hunch is that markups should be much higher than they are for ground shipping.

Unfortunately, since I've forsaken the Trader profession, all my land vehicles are now cooling their heels for at least a few days while I wait to see how this whole "water" thing pans out.

Just to be clear -- to even see the other cities names and markets, I have to pony up for a donkey or unicycle and send it off to "?", right? Don't even have to send goods? (And be a trader).

Correct.  If you're in a hurry, use a rickshaw, since that's the fastest yellow option.  Even those take a day or two to cross the continent.  For best results, get three and send one to each available destination so you can explore everything at once.

Once you've discovered Franco Thistle, you'll probably find you can buy vehicles a bit cheaper there (that's where the Vehicle mines are).

Looks like it's about 24 hours for a war canoe to get from Franco to Massua.  Tomorrow I'll be able to see if it's worth it to load up on exotic spices and return to the mainland.   :drill:  Looks like there's huge demand for them in Alssa, and nobody selling in Franco.  If they're cheap in their city of origin, I see an opportunity there.

Picked up a half a boatload of celery and mustard seed for 1g each in Massua.  Looks like they'll fetch at least 5g each in Franco, so I can expect to make about 50g off this trip.   :drill:

I'll be pretty pissed the first time an asshole with a canoe full of cannons sinks one of my ships, but for now this seems like a sweet gig.

I sent a stagecoach down to the city that starts with a D (forgot the name) and it was attacked 3 times. Good thing it was empty!

I guess yellow stuff gets left alone more than green stuff?

Eep!  Good to know, I haven't sent out any green+ vehicles yet, and I've been curious how much more dangerous it gets.

The way it works is that yellow can only target yellow, but anything else can target anything else.  So if you send out a stagecoach(green), there's nothing stopping someone with a tank(purple) from sending it out and having it target green traders so it can stomp them and take their lunch money.

From what I've read, the best defense is what they call "bubbling" -- you send out a big cluster of vehicles of the same type, and put your valuable cargo in the middle.  Any given highwayman vehicle can only attack one trader vehicle per trip (or maybe just one vehicle per trader?), so if he sends out five vehicles from Danchesser and you send ten from Franco, he's going to attack your first five and leave the last five unmolested.  If someone sends vehicles from Franco that are faster than yours, he can potentially catch you from behind, hence the bubble on both sides.

The thing that stops highwaymen from just sending out even MORE vehicles is the inventory limit -- each vehicle AND each weapon on board counts toward your inventory.  The highwayman needs to load all his vehicles up with weapons to make sure they win fights; you can leave your "bubble" vehicles empty since you don't particularly care if they lose.

Anyway, all this is why I'm sticking to trading yellows for a while; it's slower money, but it's much safer and requires very little initial investment.  Once I've got enough cash for a big fleet of vans I'll try my hand at moving the pricier stuff.

Heh, I just sent my first swarm of yellows. Most are unloaded -- got some exploring, but also got some bringing back stuff from the first city I found with a market. Not a whole lot -- didn't have much gold, but enough to get a feel for things.

First bonus to the web design -- switching cities doesn't change whatever you're looking at, so if you're looking at equipment prices in one city and switch to the other, it's still looking at equipment prices.

I was pricing additional mines -- am I correct in assuming that purchasing additional mines requires real cash, whereas renting them for two weeks can just be done with gold?

Inverse, I think.  Real money is "credits".  You can rent mines for credits, but not gold.  You can buy mines with credits OR gold.

Anything you buy with credits is materialized by the game; anything you buy with gold, you're buying from another player at whatever price the market currently supports.  So every mine in the game was originally purchased by someone with real money, and then they get exchanged around for game money (which ultimately is mostly produced by noobs like us with shitty starter mines).

My first load of mainland cargo has hit Massua (I loaded a canoe with all the crap I was trying to sell in Franco).  Market rate for bolts is 15g.  I have eight that I bought in Alssa for 1g each.  Hot damn.

(edit) Also, one of the M-80s that I bought for 10g in Danchesser sold for 28g within minutes of being listed.  There may be some direct Danchesser-Massua runs in my future.

My first trader attempt with cargo:

 :ye_gods:

You must have a "rob me" sign on your back.  I've literally never been attacked.  (knock on wood)

Maybe it was you!

Especially lame: if I'm reading that report right, you got robbed by a vehicle that didn't have enough room to actually steal any of your cargo, so it all just got trashed.  So it was just a pure griefer.  Or maybe the outer part of a bubble, meant to trip up lone guards.

Well, it's working to sap my desire to get back in there and try again.

So maybe next time I'll send a herd of donkeys!

Rickshaws are dirt cheap in Franco right now, and they're the fastest yellow vehicle -- so not only does stuff get where it's going a bit faster, but the only thing that can catch you to attack you is another rickshaw.

I've got a fleet of rickshaws and donkeys moving. :)

I'm hoping to get into the vehicle business when I can afford another mine. And the ship business. :)

Need some melds before I can ply the ocean, though...

Dammit! It sold the items I was using! I had multiples, and someone bought my spares AND the drill I had equipped. WTF?

You must've placed as many listings as you had drills.  Luckily it's easy enough to buy another.

On the page for the thing, if it says something like:


it means that all 3 of the item are listed on the market, and can be bought.  If you want to keep one, make sure you only have 2 listings, so it looks like:

Thanks. Somehow I must have accidentally listed them all or something.

I keep finding my miner half naked. :) I'm not sure at this point I'm making much money, but my miner is now half in greens, I've got a lot of stuff moving around, and I'm up to 5 melds. (Which is how I found out that adds time to your miner's clock too).

More melds gives you all sorts of other little boosts depending on your profession.

A problem I'm encountering with my grand merchant strategy is that goods are too slow to move -- when they do sell, they sell for a lot, but the demand is very sporadic.  That means I'm spending a lot of time just waiting around for my stuff to sell; I can't buy and ship more because my inventory is full.

Once my current batch of voyages is done, I'm going to switch back to Trader and start shipping my cargo around the land routes to try to sell it higher/faster.  The price jump on listings for goods between Massua and Alssa is pretty nuts, but again, the question is whether the stuff will actually move...

(x5)

 :drill:

Dammit, I'm horsing around yellows on land -- which means I have tons of inventory space tied up in sales that'll take days to clear.

I really want a vehicle and a ship mine.

I'm up to 30 melds now but I'm still just bouncing between trader and merchant. Spices/bugs from Massua to Alssa is the main enterprise but while I'm stuck as one profession or the other I send out other vehicles too. I'm almost well off enough to start shipping green items using the previously mentioned bubbling method.

God dammit, one of my canoes got pillaged for the first time.  (Like Xan's donkey, nothing got stolen, just trashed -- the pirate must have been loaded to the brim with weapons or other pillaged goods.)  Luckily it was the one carrying 7 bugs that I paid 1gp each for, not the one carrying a load of M-80s that I paid 12gp for.

I have a dinghy... need to do the math on what I'd need to outfit it with to make it capable of outright sinking any pirate canoe that it crosses paths with.  Probably not worth the gold or the ongoing inventory space consumption, but it'd be funny.

I'd be able to afford my second mine now if not for all the inflation between when I started playing and now.  :awesome_for_real:

I'm still plugging away at the starter mine. Trading was fun, but I didn't want to break out of yellows yet. :)

I'm doing a yellow merchant/trader combo, moving spices from Massua to Alssa.  On a good day I can buy stuff at 1gp and sell it for 35gp.

Fun trick I figured out: buy rickshaws in Franco, drive em to Alssa, and sell/trash em.  For 1-2gp a pop, it's not worth the time to drive them back if it delays me pulling in my next spice shipment from the island.

I also figured out a little too late that I could've hedged against gold inflation by buying chests.  Once I get my second starter mine that's where my profits will start going.

Not sure if this has been mentioned, but if you use the code "starter" in the Shop, (sans quotations) you get a second starter mine for 1 week

Edit: Clarification

boo, "for new miners only".  Neat feature though.  I assume it's part of some ad or promo.

I have two mines!   :drill:

I've gotten efficient enough at moving yellows across the world that I've saturated the market.  This seems like a good time to transition to greens.  :why_so_serious:

In case anyone is wondering, I've just run some numbers on the mine and storage markets to figure out the gold:credit ratio.  Looks like the current exchange is roughly 50 gold per credit, which makes it 500 gold per $1.

An interesting thing about comparing those numbers is that some mines have lower gold:credit ratios in terms of market prices, suggesting that they aren't worth the number of credits they cost.  Avatars and mods both were more like 38 gold:credit (based on high bid). 

Morat.  I stay out of the Franco spice market, because I can see that's your turf, and I don't wanna show any disrespect.

Now I see that you have attempted to outbid me for a storage chest.


(edit) I got it for 440.  Woo 100 inventory spaces!   :drill:

lol. :) I don't even bother looking. I'm just that pure capitalist. I destroy all! Besides, I low-bid that chest entirely because I didn't need it now and might pick it up sooner or later for cheaper than instant gratification. And I'm never planning on getting out of trading yellows, so if you want to mvoe up to the green market -- more power to you. I doubt I'll even dip my toes in.

Plan to eventually move to vehicle and equipment mines, actually.

I've got a small fleet of green vehicles now, stagecoaches and scooters, and am attempting to move my first modest load of green equipment from Franco to Alssa.  Stagecoaches are cheap and move at the same speed as scooters (which hold a little more), so I use the stagecoaches as the "bubble".  We'll see how it goes.  The markups look to be way higher, AND the travel times are lower, so I'm hoping this gives my income a boost over moving yellow spices.

I too am planning to move into the equipment/vehicle mining racket at some point, but until I can save up enough I'm sinking my gold into starter mines so I can stay on top of inflation and mine a little extra in the meantime.

Moving my first blue.   :ye_gods:  400g investment (most of what I had in the bank) but I should make about 300g profit if I pull it off.  Hope the bubble is big enough.

5-7 vehicles in a bubble has been enough for me to not get robbed. It helps if you send it at non-peak hours.

I put six on each side of the cargo (total fleet of about fifteen).  Stagecoaches are cheap and I like playing it safe.

Huh. I just realized sending back empty ships was a bad idea. :) Still, up to 1200 gold which is...better. :) Have a bid on another chest too.

Up to 3 (starter) mines now!  It's still a pretty low trickle of income, but at least now I don't have any mining bots sitting completely idle.

I think my next big investment is going to be more storage (a shelf, about 2000g for +50 inventory), and then I start saving for a vehicle mine.

I'm probably the only one around here still playing this, but I wanted to brag that I just now traded up one of my starter mines to a weapons mine.   :drill: 

Only took 5 months!  Of course for $15 I could have bought enough credits to have a weapons mine on day 1, but where's the fun in that?

I still "play" the game, in as much as I log in every few days, and see what crap I've dredged up that I've set to auto-trash.  I'm pretty sure I'm playing the game wrong, though.

If you're a Worker, Banker, or Manufacturer, you're not missing out on much by logging in only once a week or so.

I've been messing around with Merchant, Bounty Hunter, and Fisherman, but those are still "log in once a day" professions since that's about how long it takes for a voyage to finish.

I keep forgetting I'm playing. :) I've got two starter mines going and I'm saving up for a third. I really need a shelf, but the prices on those have gone fucking crazy. Currently sitting on about 4.6k, with a great deal of spices out. Market there has dried up, though. :(

Anyone active want to toss out a referral link (assuming you get something worth the referral)

http://www.minethings.com/miners/index/+102638

Sitting at 62 melds and consider myself King of the Blue Traders at this point.   :drill:  Have one weapons mine and two music mines active, and storing my cash in the form of starter mines until I can save up enough for my next big purchase (either a bug or a vehicle mine).

Anyone who was getting frustrated by trying to make the move from yellow to green should give it another go.  The recent change to have three tiers (yellow/green-blue/red-orange) as opposed to two (yellow/green-orange) has made a huge difference since now I can move my midsize fleet of greens around without getting curbstomped by one of the really big players who has twenty reds and a hundred blues to throw around.  My cheapass junks and stagecoaches can actually hold their own against most blues between being loaded up with weapons (which I have in abundance now that I'm mining them) and my meld bonus.  I've been using them to move blue equipment around, with a profit margin of at least 100g per item, and haven't lost a shipment yet.

Yup, I'm still playing this.  Got a vehicle mine and a mod mine so I'm having fun experimenting with different mod loadouts.  Hoping to eventually assemble a small fleet of fast defensive blues that I can replace my massive green bubble with and free up some inventory space.

Been working on clearing the "won a yellow land fight" stone for a while by sending a fully modded out camel (optimized for defensive combat as best as I could figure out how to do that) back and forth.  Finally got a couple of highwaymen today.  If they read their combat reports they're probably wondering what the hell they ran into -- my dodge mods completely negated their offense and my attack mods tore through them like tissue paper.


 :grin:

(edit) Also, if anyone is still operating a starter mine, prease to mine things, especially bolts, and sell them in Franco Thistle.  They're selling for 10g a pop easily right now.

Recent update added an interesting new mechanic -- sort of a PvP puzzle game.

(http://i.imgur.com/SzVsuVE.jpg)

Different people place different types of machines on the tiles to mine and collect oil -- some machines pull the oil out of the ground, some transport it, some collect it, and some exist only to sabotage other peoples' machines.  Looks like you can hook up a transport machine to somebody else's extraction machine and thereby siphon off some of their oil, hence the value of the offensive machines to mess with other peoples' stuff.  Machines have a limited lifespan, so territory is never claimed permanently.

The oil is an all-purpose buff -- you can apply it to your mining bots to make them mine faster, put it in your vehicles to make them faster/stronger, etc.

Piloting my first helicopter.  Only took two years of play.   :drill:

Christ man, you're still playin this?  I seriously admire your focus.

Don't even.  Sam is a worry.

I don't think "focus" is the right word to describe this game since it actually requires you to wander off and not think about it for long periods.  Sometimes I forget about it for a couple of weeks and then come back to it and pick up all the stuff I mined, arrange some market listings and send off some vehicles, and then forget about it for a while more. 

Thus have I built my empire.   :drill:

The oil mining thing is fun, now that I'm getting to actively play with it.  Very smart use of the "random drop" mechanic that's at the game's core, since you have to figure out how to best make use of the "pieces" you've mined given the current "board" configuration.  In particular managing all the different pipe shapes feels a lot like Pipe Mania (minus the time pressure but with a strong element of resource management).

I'm curious to see if Japhet goes anywhere else with it -- right now it's largely decoupled from the game's other systems, since the pieces are mined at the same location as the board.  If the different types of piece were mined at different cities then the transportation/trade game systems would come into play much more heavily and that'd be... interesting.

Oil mining is fantastic now that I'm getting my head around the more competitive aspects of it.  There's a douchepickle who sabotages my mining operations at every opportunity, so I've started responding in kind, and that's a very fun game to play -- need to deploy everything with an eye toward what the other guy could deploy that would mess it up, and in an ideal world you can set things up so that a piece does something good for you and bad for him at the same time.

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40386/Screenshots/Minethings/machines2.jpg)

Red machines are mine, green machines belong to other people.  My inventory of machines I haven't used yet is up at the top.  I've deployed my machines such that if douchepickle decides he wants to mess with my oil pipeline, he'll need to invest a lot in doing so; the only parts that he could place adjacent to are the ones that he can't siphon oil directly out of.

This is basically what I've always wanted crafting in an MMO to be like -- assembling available components in clever ways to produce a desired outcome, with enough shifting parameters in the problem that the ability to adapt is more important than looking up static recipes in a strategy guide.

I really wish a few more folks from here were playing and at my level.  Cooperative play is currently nonexistent and I think with two or three people working together you could form a very effective cartel.

This just happened.

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40386/Screenshots/Minethings/ping.jpg)

(http://i0.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/000/131/896/gaijin4koma2_peersblog_1200684608.jpg?1307579749)

That is certainly a thing you mined.

It's PURRRRRRPLEEEEEE.

And now I am using it to mine OTHER things at a slightly increased rate.  But I've decided I'm going to sell it (I think I can get 20k gold for it, that's how rare purple finds are) and use the proceeds to finance the construction of a factory (about 10k each in materials and labor).  So that I can build my own aircraft, and upgraded mining bots, and other amazing things.

In two years I have found 6 things.

I'm really not sure 'Miners will work even when you're not logged on' is hugely accurate.

 :drill:

The mining bots have a "battery life" that's meld-dependent.  Mine is about four days, so if I don't check in a couple of times a week my bots stop going.  A lot of stuff in the game is designed around the idea that you're playing a little bit each day (e.g. a lot of vehicles take a full day to get anywhere).

Ah, this explains it.  This game still has the most amazingly fucked UI ever.

I have no idea how you manage to play it.  I can't find anything and the non important bits look exactly like the important bits.

Seriously, do us a youtube or something as to HOW THE FUCK YOU PLAY.  I'd watch that.

A radicalthon of this game would be the most amazingly boring thing ever.  I'll start working on it.

Okay, I'm just gonna use this thread, because it'll be easier to explain shit if I'm not trying to also maintain some kind of narrative flow across weeks of gameplay.

Here's where you see the stuff you've mined:

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40386/Screenshots/Minethings/radical/findings.jpg)

You get here by clicking on where it says "FINDINGS" on the left.  When you aren't actively looking at the findings screen, there'll be an arrow pointing at it to let you know it's the fun one.  You don't actually have to do much of anything on this page, but it tells you all about how your mines are running, and gives you handy links to other things.

Over on the right you see your new findings (stuff you've found since you last looked at this page) and also a history of your previous findings.  You'll see that some of my findings say "(trashed)" -- that's because these are things that are not worth my time to try to sell, and I've designated them to automatically be trashed when I find them. 

Up top in the header bar where it says "batteries" is my battery life.  This gets recharged to full each time I check my findings.  If the batteries run down (either because I'm not logging in for a few days or because I let my inventory fill up and can't claim new findings), my bots stop mining.

I have two mines in this city -- one is for equipment, one is for vehicles.  In the findings list you see that some of my findings are equipment (boot icon) and some are vehicles (wheel icon).  My two mining bots mine at different rates; my "top" mine in my home city (I get to pick which this is) automatically uses the best equipment I have and gets a special bonus that's dependent on achievements ("stones").  I get a random find roughly every 200 "buckets" (of dirt) my mining bots sift through, which means I get a piece of equipment every 3 hours and a vehicle every 4 hours.  This happens automatically as long as my batteries are active.  Mining can be accelerated by using oil (which boosts your bots' mining rates temporarily) or explosives (which effectively give you a bunch of buckets instantaneously).  Getting better equipment and unlocking achievements will permanent boost the mining rate by a small amount.

I don't think I need to explain this screen too much:

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40386/Screenshots/Minethings/radical/messages.jpg)

When certain stuff happens, you get a message, and here's where it goes.  Most of the messages I get are because a market transaction completed or because a vehicle reached its destination.  Click message to read.

Time to introduce the world.  Different servers have different maps, so your mileage here may vary, but this is the lay of the land on the Calbuco server:

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40386/Screenshots/Minethings/radical/map.jpg)

Clicking "CITIES" gives me a dropdown list of the cities.  (When you first start playing, you don't see cities until you've physically traveled to them.  I'll get to that later.)  Clicking on a city switches my view to show me stuff that is available in that city.  This affects just about every screen in the game because "things" are not fungible between cities (but "gold", the game's currency, is).

So right now I'm viewing Franco Thistle, which happens to be my "home" city -- there are some things that you can only do in your home city, like use your achievement mining bonus, or work in a factory, or create melds.  Everyone starts in the same home city (on my server it's Alssa) but can move elsewhere if they want.  If I click a different city, I switch my view to see what's in that city:

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40386/Screenshots/Minethings/radical/findings-danchesser.jpg)

Here I am looking at my Danchesser findings.  I only have one mine in Danchesser (it mines machines, which are used for mining oil).  If I were to switch to any of the other cities, this screen would be basically blank, because I don't have any mines in those cities.

If I click around to other screens (which I guess I'll be getting to next), it'll continue to show me information in the context of Danchesser -- market pages will show me the Danchesser market, and my inventory page will show me the things I have in Danchesser.  To switch back to seeing what's in Franco Thistle, I'd go back to that CITIES dropdown and pick Franco Thistle.

Okay, let's look at the THINGS!  Clicking "THINGS" shows you your inventory in the currently viewed city. 

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40386/Screenshots/Minethings/radical/things-franco.jpg)

So this screen is showing me all the things I have in Franco Thistle.  "Franco Thistle Inventory - 45   Global - 155" means I have 45 things in Franco and 155 things in total across (and between) all the cities in Calbuco.  (The inventory limit is global, not local; it can also be increased by doing certain things.)

My "findings" go into my inventory (in the same city as the mine), as do my market purchases (in the same city as the market purchase -- each city has its own market).  If I click on a thing, I will see more information about it, including the local market for that item:

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40386/Screenshots/Minethings/radical/rickshaw-franco.jpg)

Note that this isn't showing me information about a specific individual rickshaw, it's showing me information about rickshaws in general.  Any place I click on a "Rickshaw" link it's going to bring me to this exact screen.

Vehicles have stats which determine how fast they move and how they behave in combat.  I'll ignore those for now, but this screen is how you'd look up the stats for a given vehicle type.

This screen shows that I have 10 rickshaws in Franco Thistle (matching up with the listing on my "THINGS" page).  There are also 8 rickshaws elsewhere; we'll see those in a sec.  Down lower are the market controls where I can buy, sell, or trash my rickshaws within Franco.  If I wanted to buy more rickshaws, I could click the "Buy" link; I'd have the option of instantly buying a listed rickshaw (at 2 gold) or placing a bid (presumably at 1 gold).  If I place a bid, it sits there until someone comes along who wants to sell.  If I wanted to sell one of my 10 rickshaws in Franco, I'd click the "Sell" link.  Since there are no bids, I wouldn't have the option of instantly selling to someone; I'd have to place a listing and wait for someone to buy.  If I wanted to just get rid of a rickshaw rather than trying to sell it, I'd click "Trash"... you can figure out where that goes.

Okay, now let's change cities.  From this screen, I'm going to click "CITIES" and then pick "Alssa".  Here's the resultant change in view:

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40386/Screenshots/Minethings/radical/rickshaw-alssa.jpg)

Some of the information (the basic information about what rickshaws are) stays the same.  But now we see that I have 5 rickshaws in Alssa.  We can also see that the rickshaw market in Alssa is different -- I have them listed for sale at 15g each and nobody has underbid me.  Of course to be able to sell my rickshaws in Alssa I need to get them there from Franco (where I find them in my vehicles mine).  How do I do that?  And where are the 3 rickshaws that aren't in either Franco or Alssa?

Clicking "VEHICLES" on the left hand side shows me all my vehicles, in and between all cities.

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40386/Screenshots/Minethings/radical/vehicles.jpg)

You can't see them because they're way down the list, but those three rickshaws that don't show up in any inventory are en route from Franco Thistle to Alssa right now.  It's a long trip (500 km).

You can see I've also got some vehicles moving from Danchesser to Franco.  This vehicle screen is how you get things (including vehicles themselves) from one city to another along land routes.  (There are also sea routes -- for those you use ships, which work similarly but are mined at a different mine and work differently with respect to combat.)

Clicking the link under the "status" column shows information about that specific vehicle, like any combats it's been in, mods it has installed, cargo it's carrying, etc.  If a vehicle isn't currently moving, clicking "send" opens up a screen where you can choose where to send it and what it should carry with it.  Once a vehicle is sent, it can't be recalled, and you can't change your profession while you have any vehicles en route.

To send a vehicle at all, you need to have a vehicle-using profession: Trader, Highwayman, or Guard.  You change your profession by clicking PROFESSION on the left.

Traders may send vehicles and load them with any cargo.  Their vehicles are not aggressive.
Highwaymen may send vehicles but may only load them with weapons.  Their vehicles may be aggressive to (and attempt to pillage) Trader vehicles.
Guards may send vehicles but may only load them with weapons.  Their vehicles may be aggressive to (and attempt to extort) Highwayman vehicles.

Deathmobile the milk truck ?

 :drill:

Last (and probably the most confusingly named) screen I'll show you is the "MINES" screen.  This is NOT your own mines (that's FINDINGS), it's essentially a reference of all the types of things in the games, organized by mine type.

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40386/Screenshots/Minethings/radical/mines.jpg)

This is how you get to the info page for a type of thing if you don't have that thing -- say, if you want to buy your first set of equipment, or a new rickshaw, or something.  If I click "Equipment" on the list of mines I see all the types of equipment there are, along with local market prices where applicable:

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40386/Screenshots/Minethings/radical/equipment.jpg)

Clicking on any of the thing types gives me the page for that thing, and from there I'd be able to buy it on the market.

Down below that are the "melds" (collections) that can be created out of things that come from this type of mine -- in this case, equipment.  If you gather all of those things in your inventory in your home city, you can click on the name of that meld, and then you have the option to create the meld -- this consumes the things (taking them out of your inventory), and gives you the meld (which is the closest thing the game has to "points").  Having more melds unlocks more advanced professions and gives you stat bonuses (e.g. longer battery time).

I think that concludes this Minethings tutorial.  I will begin taking questions at this time.

Yes.   :grin:  It's my most valuable/badass vehicle (which isn't saying much unfortunately, there are players who have entire fleets of vehicles that could trounce it).  Here's the "status" page (accessed by clicking where it says "stopped" on that VEHICLES page) that shows its stats and mods:

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40386/Screenshots/Minethings/radical/deathmobile.jpg)

The five mods I've bolted onto this particular milk truck modify its base stats -- an unmodded milk truck has a higher capacity, very low Attack, and zero Dodge.  The three guns I've got on this thing buff its Attack way up (which lets it do significant damage to highwaymen), the drive shaft buffs its Dodge way up (which negates the effect of weapons carried by highwaymen), and the door panel buffs its armor (hit points) for good measure.

On the rare occasion I feel like taking the risk of transporting something really valuable (i.e. a red thing, or an ore crate), I use the Deathmobile and hope I don't meet a highwayman that's even better outfitted.

Right.

Right, I think I'm getting some of this new (also, I'm on your server, killing your doodz).

Gooooood.

You probably remember this from playing earlier, but it's hard to make money mining things out of your starter mine unless you strike it really lucky with a rare find.  Better to mine gold and use the slow but steady income to invest in vehicles so you can start making money as a trader.

Yes, but I also remember that it's hard to make money from your mine also.

 :why_so_serious:

 To some extent it remains true that it's hard to make money directly from your mine.  I almost never just sell things I mined in the place I mined them; I either use them myself or ship them elsewhere to sell for a better price.

You'll never guess what I found, Sam !

NOTHING.

 :awesome_for_real:

I found a rock!

I've got three starter mines mining gold and about 13k in the bank. I've got a bunch of bids out trying to increase my number of melds, and dropped merchant (which is, even with yellows, surprisingly lucrative) to try my hand at guard.

I'm trying to find a fun profession, really.

You've got enough saved up at this point that you could sell one of the starter mines and move up to a music mine.  That'd give you a steady source of stuff that's worth shipping around.

Guard is hit and miss -- it's really fun to catch a highwayman and shake him down for a bribe, but most highwaymen are smart enough to either avoid you or outgun you.  When I was running a weapons mine (the next cheapest mine after music, not counting avatars, which I wouldn't recommend investing in) I'd use the Guard profession to ship weapons around; hitting a highwayman was a very occasional bonus.

I recently picked up Manufacturer and am having trouble finding cheap labor in Franco.  A man of your talents could easily make 200g a week toiling in my sweatshop.  Regrettably I can't offer to pay your moving costs.   :awesome_for_real:

I sent this to IW in-game, but really, this is a valuable "Minethings noob strategy guide" so I'm going to paste it here.  I'm not positive whether this general strategy is still good on Cal (since everything is dependent on the state of the in-game economy) but this is roughly how I made money as a yellow-tier noob.

=================

Ya, the way you make money as a trader (which is the easiest profession to start with) is buying low in one place and selling high in another. The rub is that:

a) it takes time to move stuff
b) bandits can steal your stuff en route

Best ways of dealing with (b) are:

1) Use a vehicle that's hard to catch
2) Use a lot of them
3) Outfit them for combat

Rickshaws are the fastest in the yellow tier, hence their popularity (1). If you send a bunch at once (2) with empties going first, the "bubble" in the front of your convoy will tank the highwaymen, hopefully allowing your cargo to slip by in the confusion.

If you want to outfit your vehicles for combat (3), one way is to buy weapons, but my preference is to load up on mods -- send your rickshaws down to Danchesser (you can probably buy any yellow mod for 1g there), buy yellow mods that don't penalize offense/defense (since penalties need to be offset by weapons -- I use a gun turret, quick shift, and door panel on each of my rickshaws, the mod holy trinity), and go to the vehicle's "status" screen to equip. Equipped mods decrease cargo capacity but they don't count toward your inventory limit like weapons do.

Once you're ready to start trading, my suggestion would be shipping bolts (starter mine item) from Alssa to Danchesser -- they're cheap in Alssa since they're a starter mine find, and vehicle owners in Danchesser need them to install higher level mods, so demand is high. Equipment from Franco to Alssa can also be lucrative, as can explosives from Danchesser to Franco, so there's potentially a nice little triangle there. Expect to lose a shipment once in a while regardless of precautions taken; hopefully your successful voyages net enough profit to make up for it.

If all goes well you'll eventually reach a point where you've amassed enough wealth and gotten efficient enough at moving stuff around that your inventory is full of yellow stuff that you're having a hard time selling, at which point you'll make the exciting leap to the green/blue tier since that has a higher value:inventory density...

Here's the bugfuck crazy alternative to slowly and conservatively upgrading your mines -- get yourself to 40 melds (not hard if you've gotten good at moving yellows around, there are a lot of yellow melds and you can probably top yourself up on cheap green melds in your home city), buy a helicopter (around 11k gold), then start placing bids on yellow machines in Danchesser and go into the oil business as a pilot.

Bugfuck crazy because you'd be dependent on purchasing machines rather than mining them, and the market is very volatile, as is the process of mining oil -- but in theory a few yellow machines placed right will net you a barrel or two of oil, which will easily sell for around 100g each.

How do I see the listings (Market) in another City ?

Do I need a mine there ?

Like with everything else, click "Cities" and then the name of the city.  Every page you look at is now specific to that city where applicable.  Your currently viewed city is remembered until you explicitly switch it.

So if you want to compare (for example) the prices of bolts in Alssa and Danchesser, click Mines > Starter > Bolt to see the market listings for bolts; it's showing you the listings for your current city, which is whatever's in the upper left corner of the page at the moment.  Cities > Alssa to see the Alssa market, and Cities > Danchesser to see the Danchesser market.

Right, gotcha. That works.

But there's no FULL listing, er, list so that you can see what's in demand and what might be a good comparison ?  You have to select shit one at a time ?

IT BEGINS.

Correct, unless you get one of these things (http://calbuco.minethings.com/items/view/261):

(http://calbuco.minethings.com/img/thing261.jpg)

I sold a skirt.

A skirt Gandalf !!!

I have now built a flourishing Bolt Selling Enterprise.

I have made 70 gold.

I am content.

Those bolts are great money at the low levels.  It helps that they're consumable -- every time you install a green+ mod, you need at least one bolt, sometimes more, and you don't get the bolt back if you uninstall the mod.  I went through a lot of them outfitting my vehicle fleet.

Anything else consumable ?  It seems really, really difficult to find a market.

Gadgets are consumable -- you could check the markets for them between Franco and Alssa.  They're mined in Massua but there might be some pure merchants who just ship them from Massua to Franco, so you could potentially buy them there and then squeeze out some of your own profit by moving them inland.

Technically almost everything is consumable to some extent (except maybe avatars) because you use them up to form melds, or you lose them in combat, or you decide they aren't worth hanging on to or selling and you just trash them, etc.  But a lot of yellows get mined faster than they get removed from the world so the market ends up getting saturated with them.

I have run out of inventory space.

THIS IS INTOLERABLE.

Just found Deathmobile Mk 2 (http://calbuco.minethings.com/items/view/142).   :drill:

That tank is fast !

I'm getting shafted here though.  Just not enough cash floating around.  The market for low level items is piss poor.

Give us a complete rundown of outfitting vehicles for combat ?

To look at a specific vehicle, click its "status" on the VEHICLES screen:

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40386/Screenshots/Minethings/radical/vehicles-click.jpg)

This shows you all about the vehicle.  Equipping it with weapons is just a matter of sending the weapons with it as cargo; nothing special there.  Mods work differently; they don't do anything unless you "install" them.  On the vehicle status screen you see the currently installed mods; click [mods] to reconfigure them:

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40386/Screenshots/Minethings/radical/vehicle-status.jpg)

That brings you to a screen that shows you all the mods in your inventory in that city (I don't have any, but here's where I'd see them) as well as the installed mods.  Installed mods will be highlighted.  On this screen you can basically select and deselect the mods to be installed, and it'll show you the stats for the vehicle based on your new selection.

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40386/Screenshots/Minethings/radical/vehicle-mods.jpg)

Click "install" once you're happy with the setup.  For yellows you can install and uninstall for free; higher level mods cost bolts to install.

As far as what the stats mean.... combat in MT is kind of nonsensical but not TOO complicated.  The help does a bad job of explaining it so I'll try using my words.

Armor: the vehicle's hit points.
Attack: the vehicle inflicts this much damage every round.
Offense: the aggressor inflicts this much damage MINUS the defender's Dodge every round.
Defense: the defender reduces the aggressor's Attack by this much MINUS the aggressor's Dodge every round.
Dodge: this gets subtracted from your opponents Offense/Defense.

If you're a trader, you're the defender, and a highwayman is the aggressor.

There's a bit of rock-paper-scissors here.  Your Dodge negates his Offense but not his Attack.  Your Defense negates his Attack, but only if he doesn't match it with Dodge.  He has no way of negating your Attack, but he can easily have more Offense than you have Attack.  Etc.  Each mod or weapon counts against your vehicle's cargo capacity, so you're limited on how many you can use.  My strategy is always to go all in on Attack/Dodge; that way I don't need to take up inventory space with weapons.  I just hope that my Dodge completely negates his Offense, and that my Attack beats his.

Well poop, I just learned that you can't switch professions away from manufacturer while you have a job in progress, even if you don't have anyone working on it.  So I need to stay a manufacturer until I'm finished building this factory or I lose all the labor I've already put into it.  Good to know.

Oh!  The very basic thing I neglected to mention is the combat tiers.  There are three: yellow, green/blue, and red/purple/orange.  Combat only happens within the same tier.  Cargo is also limited by tier; yellows can only carry yellows, and only yellows can carry yellows.

Mods and weapons of a lower tier than the vehicle can be used, though, as evidenced by my red vehicle having blue mods installed.  (The reverse is not true; you can't mount a (blue) iron missile turret on a (yellow) rickshaw.)

Actually, I think you missed more than that.  I just played around with outfitting my vans to find that one of them can no longer move due to negative numbers.

GODDAMN IT.  My bad.

What would be your suggestions for outfitting combat vans ?   :why_so_serious:

Yeah, you can't have any negative numbers.  That's the bit I mentioned about needing weapons to offset Offense/Defense penalties (which is why I try to just avoid those mods -- not worth losing all that cargo space IMO).  My Deathmobile needs to carry 2 defense worth of weaponry before I can send it anywhere; I tolerate the penalty there because the bonuses on that mod (titanium drive shaft, red tier) are otherwise fantastic.

For greens, same advice as for yellow, except the green mod tier doesn't have nice simple single-stat bonuses like yellow and blue do, and blues are too expensive to waste on a green vehicle.  You can stack mods whose bonuses offset each other's penalties, though.

I used mostly stagecoaches for my green trading FWIW; they have a naturally high attack that makes them pretty dangerous even when not outfitted.  Improperly equipped highwaymen will actually wreck themselves on your empty bubble vehicles sometimes, it's awesome.

If you enjoy haggling with truculent laborers and very infrequent logins, Manufacturer is your dream profession.

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40386/Screenshots/Minethings/radical/factories.jpg)

Six days until I can swap back to Trader and ship off all the stuff I've been mining while trying to get this goddamn factory built.  Franco Thistle needs more workers.

You should probably stop telling them that you oiling them up is a perk ....

It increases their output.   :why_so_serious:

Switched back to mining 'things' and found.... a yellow skirt.

Flicked back to mining Gold.

This game is far, far, far, far, far too glacial and the market is not available for newbs.

Yeah, yeah, plowing your mom, etc....

All the gold that's in the game comes from newbs mining gold with their starter mines.  You're an essential part of the ecosystem.   :awesome_for_real:

Once you save up enough for your second mine, your mining output will nearly double, so there's that to look forward to.  If you can swing 8g profit on each bolt you ship from Alssa to Danchesser that's only 1k bolts you gotta move.   :grin:

You're not helping.   :oh_i_see:

I been playing this thing for a couple years, remember.  It's all about the slow buildup so you can look back and marvel at how you built an empire from nothing.

Basically, you gotta think about the game on the scale of weeks instead of minutes.

Clash of Clans is actually similar in that respect (been playing that one for a couple years now too).  I like games that are like gardening.   :drill:

It's all right for you;  you've got that fucking picture in your attic.

I may DIE before I even get to the next level of this shit.

I'm sure Elena will be more than capable of taking over the family business when you're gone.

I WANT MORE FOR MY DAUGHTER IN LIFE THAN SELLING YOU BOLTS UNTIL SHE CAN GET OUT OF YOUR OIL LADEN SWEATSHOP, YOU MONSTER.


 :grin:

Wait till I try on the Banker profession and start selling you all adjustable rate loans.

I did switch to worker for a brief five minutes before reading the terms and conditions and thinking 'hey, fuck that'.

Also, Banking really, really seems like a no win, since you're under no obligation to pay back ever.  I mean, how the hell does that even work ???

I'm a little baffled by that one too tbh.  You do have a "credit report" that follows you, so if you default on a loan, ain't nobody ever lending to you again, and given how long it takes to build up your character in this game, reputation might be more valuable than it is in most games.  But you could still take out one big loan after establishing good credit, default on it, and just never touch banking again.  If you were a colossal dick.

I don't "get" borrowing and lending in real life either, though.

Worker is a great profession if you want to basically take a vacation from the game for a week and get paid cold hard gold for it.  You'll get paid much better if you move out of Alssa, which is basically the Home Depot parking lot of Calbuco.

Speaking of which ;  buy my shit.

What the fuck, some dwarf stowed away and made my shipments a prime target, so I lost the whole fucking ship.

FUCK DWARVES.

(http://i.imgur.com/3Q4Fxxd.gif)

Just checked your listings -- good luck selling those mods.  After having listings out at 1g each for weeks at a time I gave up on that racket and set all the mods I didn't plan to use myself to auto-trash.  And then sold my mod mine.  The market for them is just crap.

I wasn't actually planning on 'selling' them, I just wanted fucking rid of them.  But yeah, I'll trash that shit after a set amount of time.

Oddly, I'm having a TON more success on the other server where I'm a merchant and I picked up a really cheap spreadsheet and found some real fucking deals that I'm just finishing off.

That's the issue really where we are ;  there doesn't seem to be a market anywhere that you can dabble in and, frankly, it's far, far too cutthroat for some reason.  The other servers been more fun somehow because there's much more sense of achievement.  Sure, it might only be 50 gold here and there, but it makes you feel as if you're time is not being entirely wasted.

I ship shit left right and centre on our server only to have to tumble prices because I'm competing with someone who either doesn't care about margins or is just getting rid of shit.

Hey ho, it'll all work out.

I am kind of tempted to check out the newest servers for comparison, but once I start running multiple accounts on a game like this madness soon follows.  OTOH if there was one game that would be safe to play on many servers at once without being a huge time suck, this would be the one.  Is your other dude on E-whatever?

I have one on A, B and C.

D and E I've avoided, because, you know, that'd be silly.

B is doing the 'best', but some cunt just stole 3 xylophones, so you know.  Swings and Roundabouts.

CONFIRMED FOR BROMO

wtb tutorial orange

Oh wow, this map is fuckin weird.  I'm going to try not to spoil it for myself by looking up which mines are where.  Time to mine some gold and build a business.

Cool, we can form a consortium of shiteness !!

I'm boating around.  I have tons of boats sending tons of stuff.  I'll probably be bankrupt soon.  Let me know if you want some starting scratch...

Nobody is selling rickshaws in Fort Lynn at anything resembling a reasonable price.  I am stranded.

I suspect if you uncover more of the map, you'll realise why.

This is pretty much a Waterworld.

That said, I'll see if I can source you some tonight.

Got some.  Throw up some 1g bids and you can have a fleet of five.  That'll make it easy for you to purchase a shiteload at Icebirch.

Well, that confirms my suspicion that you have to ship the vehicles around by water.  But I would have figured the vehicle mine would be on the same continent as newbtown.  Iiiinteresting.

Guess I have to go ahead and get 10 melds so I can merchant.  Oy.

Yeah, but it says you have to damage your vehicles to ship them around on boats.

How the fuck do you do that ??

Whoa, really?  That's weiiiird.  Things get damaged through combat, or they get found that way as bonuses when using an upgraded mining robot (an MR finds damaged items in addition to the normal item finds).

Seems like that can't be right though, because then there wouldn't be ANY yellow vehicles on the other side of the water.  You can't repair yellows or greens.  I think.  And repairing is expensive -- it costs 1 ore plus labor.

Dude you're the expert, I'm just reading the forums.

There doesn't seem to be any way to get these vehicles on these boats, so I'll wait till I've shipped and then quickly switch Profession to get em to you.

Okay, I researched on the wiki -- I'd thought the vehicle mine was on the other island, but it's not.  Now it makes more sense.

I'd imagine if you check the vehicle markets on the other side of the water, you'll find no yellows or greens.  But if there are yellows and greens over there then I have no idea how this thing works.

I have bought you rickshaws.  They're coming.

 :heart:

Back on Calbuco, I have finally finished constructing my sweatshop.   :drill:  Going to spend a little time as trader and then pilot to use up all the stuff I've mined in the past two weeks, then back to manufacturer so I can start making stuff.

And you're the talk of the town because you found a crane ?

I see them all the time in town.

My first orange find ever!  I think the machines mines produce "rare" finds much more frequently; I've had several red finds, a purple, and now an orange in the time I've had one.  That crane is a fucking asshole, too -- it steals completed oil barrels off other peoples' pads within a certain radius.  I'm gonna save that one for next time my archnemesis deploys a really expensive pad setup.   :why_so_serious:

I just now switched back to pilot and dropped I don't know how many machines.  All the ones in red.

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40386/Screenshots/Minethings/machines3.jpg)

My workers are going to be exceedingly well-lubricated.

About 2 hours from now the rickshaw convey should hit.  It took fucking ages for my boats to offload the remote controls.

Right, they should see you rollin now.  Be warned, there may be hatin.

 :drill:

Looks like bolts/music in one direction and equipment in the other is the thing to do as a yellow-level trader.  Simpler than on Cal since the vehicle/mod mines are in the same place.  Let's see how long it takes me to squeeze those markets dry.

So for reference, most of those machines were yellows (so it's not like I was burning a bunch of rare finds) and I've gotten around 60 barrels of oil in a few days of piloting work (the handful of greens I dropped are just about to expire now). The oil is easy to move (barrels can be carried by any profession AND they grant a speed buff when carried) and they'll sell for 100g+ easily.

Piloting is lucrative.   :drill:

Well, sure, but I would guess by the time you get there, you're already rich, so what the fuck, right ?

It's just like real life!  I'm not so rich that 6k gold is nothing, though, let me tell you.  Creating jobs ain't cheap.

Oshit:


At least there wasn't anything too valuable on that shipment.  I expect GloryX will be along to fuck me in the ear soon.

saw that.  you're fucked.

Ha, you got away with it.

Green dwarfs are less exciting, I guess.  And roadsters are hard to catch.

Didn't do me any good though, the dwarf only stays and mines for you if you stole him fair and square.

I've got my sweatshop churning away at a new mining bot now...

(ed) And on Bromo I've gotten my 10th meld and have sent a pair of rafts off to explore the world.

Douchebag is attacking my chopper.  I think I'm about to lose 200g.

Cunts.

Okay, not a lot of money to be made on Bromo moving yellows around on noob island.  Just aren't enough people in need of yellow gear/melds.  Bolts do a little bit of business but that's it.  My new plan is to move yellow explosives from Ore Valley to Icebirch now that I have enough melds to row a canoe.

Got me a red AND a purple equipment find on Cal in the same day.  The new mining bot I'm making (less than a day to go now) is going to be very sharply dressed.

Look at that dapper as fuck MR-07.

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40386/Screenshots/Minethings/bot.jpg)

I think he's a lemon, though.  Not a single bonus find yet in two days.

You interested in a couple of Ore Crates ?  I snapped them up at a low, low price only to realize I can't ship them anywhere, thereby rendering me incompo-fucked.

Let me know.

If they're in Massua I can't ship 'em either.  Haven't gotten to the point yet where I can afford to buy red ships and risk having them sunk every time they move.

If they're in Franco, though, gimme gimme gimme.

Aha.  They're on the Bromo Server.

Guess we're both fucked.

 :grin:

I'll trade you some pet snakes for them!

I'd take that deal.  Can't believe I can't ship them anywhere.

Ore is big business.  Even on Cal and even on land I'm hesitant to try moving it myself, since it's at that red+ tier where every time it leaves a town all the pirates are informed via the home page so they can race each other to steal it from you.

So in about two weeks my MR-07 has found me a damaged blue cart (not worth the expense of repairing it) and a damaged red pickaxe (much more worthwhile).  Not bad. 

I have a pretty good incentive now to up my meld count since I can make better MRs if I have more melds -- unfortunately once you've got all the green melds it gets very expensive very quickly to acquire more.   :ye_gods:

Nobody is selling stagecoaches on Bromo.  No listings, no sales in weeks, nothing.  I'm sitting on an inventory full of mods with nothing to bolt them to.   :ye_gods:

I got a compliment on my impressive pipe-laying skills.

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40386/Screenshots/Minethings/machines4.jpg)

 :why_so_serious:

Have discovered that if a caravel (the toughest blue ship) and a pinnace (the fastest blue ship) have a cannon battle and the caravel is fully loaded with cannonballs, the outcome is usually a sunk pinnace.

A merchant's pinnace will outrun a pirate's caravel, so pirates of course tend to use pinnaces... and since targeting is done based on color, a pirate can't target merchant pinnaces without also targeting caravels.

The use I am making of this information: I have a fully loaded caravel that I send ahead of my merchant fleet of pinnaces.  If someone wants to try to pillage my fleet, they're going to tangle with that caravel first, which probably means they're losing a 400g ship plus whatever weapons/oil it had on board.

It cost me a shitton to get that caravel outfitted (11 cannon in the neighborhood of 500g each), but the payoff so far after one merchant voyage is one sunk pirate ship.  

This pleases me greatly.   :grin:

Oh look at this game in here.  This looks really great.  I am building a robot.

My robot has a green hat.

Want to buy an orange lantern to go with it?  I'm only asking 68k for it.  :D

Holy Christ, I just got a recruitment bonus because somebody bought credits.  I assume grebo.   :drill:  Thanks!

That was me. It's a fun little game so I felt like supporting them by purchasing a small credit pack.

It's always the quiet ones.

The real appeal for me is that I can check on it a couple times a day, with no pressure to really be super active. I'm not very far progression wise though, and I made the mistake of moving without reading the entire consequence section for moving, now i have four days before i can move back and redo the melds I had. Other than that it is good for wasting some time.

P2W makes me feel like a dirty dirty cheater who can't play the right way.  Too bad I'm such a minority.

I don't even have all the green yet.  I did make 10 melds today tho.

Yeah, I've resisted the urge to buy mines with credits, preferring to spend years slowly AFK-grinding my way up.  I'm pretty sure the top players all P2W but I don't see what the point of the game is if you have an infinite money spigot.

I thought the point was to buy some currency if you wanted to support the developers.

I'd be much more inclined to buy credits to get cosmetic stuff; I just don't like buying a game advantage.  Although I did cave and buy a storage thing at one point because after months of waiting with the top bid out I still couldn't buy one with gold.  :|

Yea that's what I meant too.. If the game is the grind, why would you skip it?  Why play at all at that point?

I've had this thing on the market for quite a while and didn't think it would ever sell at that price point.


What DO?   :ye_gods:

Whats a good mine to move to beyond the starter?

Depends on the server, but generally, the first one you can afford.  In my case after I had 3 starter mines my first upgrade was a music mine (on Calbuco) since that's the next cheapest.  After that it was weapons.

I think my recent windfall is going to go into a ship mine.   :drill:

Im on calbuco and running three starters pumping out gold. As I understand it you can only work three mines total? So I would have to sell a starter?

Yep.  You can own more than three, but you can't work them all (technically there is a gadget that lets you work a fourth mine temporarily).

What I did when I was moving up was sell a starter mine once I was at the point where the money from that sale would be enough to get me the next mine up.  The sooner you can start mining stuff that'll actually be worth something, the better.

Holy shit, I haven't logged in for a while and just found a stack of these in my messages:


Turns out my small handful of skirmishes as a trader have put me at #6 for red-orange and #8 for green-blue, so until Japhet rethinks this scheme I'll be getting free explosives every day.   :drill: 

I continue to be delighted with the way this game rewards my extremely sporadic attention.