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Is mining always this bad?

Socrates|Mindark said:
Assuming you are moving around sufficiently, there is no need to switch areas or wait "15mins", this is not a thing.
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Don't mind him he's just trolling, we could use your assistance in the mining bot thread tho if you could be so kind my good sir. Or just look into banning the main bots at least to scare off the rest. If you need any additional video evidence etc let me know I already have some but can get some more too + the website they downloaded it from. Look into who they are trading all the ped to it should be pretty easy to see on your end I would think. Or if youre still struggling to detect for some reason then could download the program on a safe computer and test for yourself to figure an easy way to detect? Thanks much appreciated.

@Socrates|Mindark
 
morey said:
Very interesting confirmation.

We need a new mining guide :D
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I've been thinking it's time for a new guide too (partly instead of trying to cram testing threads in my sig). I've got a few of those to contribute:

Other players mining before you affects your hit rate

We just wrapped up the testing described here. Thanks to Leroy Casper Hunter and Leeloo Leeloo Mountain for helping out. There have been competing ideas out there on how other miners affect your hit rate, so I figured we'd try to some formal science on it. To sum it up, this was designed like I...
www.planetcalypsoforum.com www.planetcalypsoforum.com

Hit rate testing round 2: Claim respawn rates

I'm going to keep these requests for miners and results threads together from now on and add to this thread when the testing is done. After our first round of testing, we found that previous miners recently in the area can affect your hit rate. The next question is how long does that effect...
www.planetcalypsoforum.com www.planetcalypsoforum.com

Finder decay is returned in claims

Background So a few years back I did some testing between different decay finders (F-211 (L) and Ziplex Z15 (L)) with a 1.25 PEC difference per drop to see if finder decay was returned in loot or not. This was started because there were claims that finder decay was returned in claims, but there...
www.planetcalypsoforum.com www.planetcalypsoforum.com

Mining excavator speed enhancer mechanics

Now that mining speed enhancers have been fixed, I wanted to post some results after running some numbers to confirm it, and show a little bit about how "efficiency" works in excavators. As a reminder, speed enhancers add 10% per slot of an excavator’s base efficiency, or amount per pull. In...
www.planetcalypsoforum.com www.planetcalypsoforum.com

For those who haven't been keeping up on the background, the 15 minute thing as suggested in this thread before Socrates addressed it wasn't ever based in any data where if you wait 15 minutes, your hit rate / mining overall will be better if it's currently seeming poor. That's different than what's actually been tested. The confirmation from Socrates shouldn't really change much though (aside from hopefully convincing R4tt3xx to drop constantly bringing it up).

What is known related to 15 minutes is that that's how long it roughly takes for hit rates to return to whatever the "norm" or previous baseline is in that area (i.e., hit rate when mining before anyone else has mined recently) if someone else mines that exact same area down to the exact coordinates, same finder radius, etc.. That's in my signature and establishes two things:

  • Someone else mining recently (~15 minutes) where you are mining affects your hit rates. That data hits the proof of concept, but didn't look at how much it might change if you only partially overlap (likely not as much of a reduction). Some people only partially overlapping with others or their previous drops may not notice much of a reduction, especially given basic math on how area of a circle works.
  • There is an "in the ground" aspect to claims where at least when it comes to finding claims , you are sharing that space with other avatars rather than it being independent for each avatar. That means if you had a bunch of avatars running in a circle auto-dropping, you're all going to trend towards a low hit rate of around 5% outdoors. That makes sense too considering MA's statements on there not being personal loot pools.

That's it for what the actual data covered on hit rates. There's nothing about sitting in one spot dropping every 15 minutes being a supposed strategy (where did that even come from?) or if you think mining is bad, wait / change areas every 15 minutes or alt-f4 for that time. That was based in a bunch of extrapolations and misunderstandings of both the tests and underlying mechanics that myself and a bunch of others have mentioned plenty already.

That instead really gets to the separate question of how at times you might see swings in mining returns / hit rates and if you can time things to avoid bad periods or target good ones. No one has presented data on that. I have some personal data on that and all I'll say is that it's extremely messy at best in terms of trends, so I'm pretty skeptical of anyone saying they've "cracked the code" on predicting when to mine.

So when someone like the OP asks what do when it seems like mining TT is bad related to this broader question, I think what I mentioned in my last comment is about as much as we can say because there's usually no concrete reason to give people asking about why their TT returns are different outside of a few things. Most are more nebulous, not as satisfying of an answer, and not extremely in our control. Do you quit mining an area when you get something extreme like 20-30 NRFs in a row though? Personally I do. What I've managed to track on that is not structured for formal statistical analysis (super correlational), but when I've kept mining in such areas, I've usually had still poor hit rates, and when I've changed servers, I've usually had better success. That's only for those extreme examples though and not a more typical case where someone is still getting a small amount of claims that's giving you maybe just a subpar TT. You won't really notice a difference beyond what you could call typical variation in mining loot changing things up in that latter case.

All that goes to say that when someone attempts to ultra-optimize their mining, it can be easy to hit the pitfall of running on assumption when we really just have some data on mechanics, not loot pools. You can do everything from having a super eco excavator, not overlapping drops, etc. that we do know about. That may improve your TT compared to what is would have been otherwise, but that doesn't perclude you from having a 80% TT run either. It just means you could have done worse. That isn't the greatest news to hear in OP's position, but the key thing for folks just starting out like that is to remind them that it takes time even once they know they're not doing anything crazy that's wasting PED.
 
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kingofaces said:
So when someone like the OP asks what do when it seems like mining TT is bad related to this broader question, I think what I mentioned in my last comment is about as much as we can say because there's usually no concrete reason to give people. That isn't the greatest news to hear in OP's position, but the key thing for folks just starting out like that is to remind them that it takes time even once they know they're not doing anything crazy that's wasting PED.
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For what it’s worth to others, I was at ~82% TT on a 3k cycle (which felt disgusting on my budget) but I’m at 100.69% TT after a cumulative 6917 PED cycle.

Even at 95% TT (or maybe a little lower), I’m pretty sure I could make a small profit.
 
Wait, Kingofaces, you only move on 30 misses ? I change zones on 2 misses and if it continues, I come back tomorrow.

I plan the coordinates of each probe and adjust the mining sheet based on my return, if I do not like what I see, I scale down to a cheap finder and experiment or log off and come back later.

I would also agree with you regarding loot pools,

Either the pool is too low so that you cannot withdraw from it, or you hit a pool withdrawal limit and have to deposit back into the pool or wait for it to reset.

[Moderated: Removed rule violation]

I looked at spiral math and discovered one hell of an exploit. Drop a bomb, move 500m away from where you are, drop another bomb and drop bombs all the way back to your first drop, you will find a long line of claims. This does not work now and should not be attempted.


Eventually I had the sheet so finely tuned that not only could I predict what type of resource I could hit but it was always size 5 ores or size 3 entmatter or above.

In that sheet I had to flip the sign of my cos and sin functions every 15 minutes in order for the advanced version to keep working. One extra caveat with this system was that if anyone mined within the same 1km cell as my avatar, I would miss.
 
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I run Argus for a test.
One of the busiest zones in the game. Always people around. Nothing close to 15 mins till someone drops again on the same spot.
Usually 100-150 drops/day. Based on my availability.
Never stopped mid run regardless of how good, bad or busy it was. (max would change lanes if someone was runnning directly at me, just to be polite)
11k drops. 96% TT return.

P.S. Shout-out to everyone who chased my ass to kill thinking that it will change something in their returns. Fun times.
 
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The Mind said:
I run Argus for a test.
One of the busiest zones in the game. Always people around. Nothing close to 15 mins till someone drops again on the same spot.
Usually 100-150 drops/day. Based on my availability.
Never stopped mid run regardless of how good, bad or busy it was. (max would change lanes if someone was runnning directly at me, just to be polite)
11k drops. 96% TT return.

P.S. Shout-out to everyone who chased my ass to kill thinking that it will change something in their returns. Fun times.
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Perfect, you do you. I don't have the budget to do what you do, so I have to be smart with my peds.
 
Hallmark Original said:
New player trying my hand at mining after reading a lot and thinking I could at least break even and gain skills with a 92-95% return and reasonable auction technique. Deposited about $350, downloaded LBML, and went to town.

Chipped in enough skill to max the F-101. In 2,000 drops of ore + enmatter with the F-101, I've only gotten a return of ~84.23%, which feels like robbery. Is it always this bad?
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As someone experienced in mining (not as long or much experience compared to very old players) I can tell you it does take a lot of drops to get an average. What I mean by that is there are swings in mining just like anything else. Don’t go in with an expectation of hitting the average 95% when your sample is very small. Long-term you will swing back to average. This isn’t a get rich quick scheme. What pays off is persistence and resilience. There aren’t any short cuts on learning the profession and becoming good at it. Again I’m not as experienced as some but I am experienced enough to stand by this (10+ years in game). Push through the lows and you’ll start seeing more highs 🤙
 
Hallmark Original said:
For what it’s worth to others, I was at ~82% TT on a 3k cycle (which felt disgusting on my budget) but I’m at 100.69% TT after a cumulative 6917 PED cycle.

Even at 95% TT (or maybe a little lower), I’m pretty sure I could make a small profit.
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That's kind of getting to what I was going to ask. Where these amped drops? Generally you don't want to focus on PED cycled for that reason, but the number of drops. What you're describing about TT evening out later on though is part of just how variable mining returns are, so after getting in to the 90s for % TT, hopefully that's letting you gauge a little better what may work for you.
 
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