Hi all, I'm completely new to this game and have not yet selected a home planet. I have read great things about EU and am particularly drawn to the mining and taming aspects of the game. I've always loved the mining and pet portions of MMOs but couldn't find a decently in-depth game that provided that. What I plan to achieve in this game is to mine resources and make enough to fund more of my mining/pet activities. Though I want to make plenty of in-game currency, i have no desire to make real-life money out of this game. It's just the fun factor to me. I also would like to avoid combat if possible. So what I want to ask is: 1. Which planets are the best for mining/gathering? 2. Which planets are best for pets? 3. Which planets are more competitive and which are less (for mining/pet taming)? 4. Is it even possible to generate income by mining or must I "swunt"? (I would really prefer a combat-free experience) I understand this is an Arkadia forum, but from what I have read so far, Arkadia would seem to be most suitable for me. What do you guys think in your honest opinion?
The answer to 4. is definitive 'yes'. Long-term tt/tt return in unamped planetside mining is somewhere around 93...95%, and about every planet can offer enough markup to bring it over 100%. However, mining requires serious bankroll. If you have less than 1000 PED on card (after storage cleaning), you're pretty much limited to Calypso as other planets have slow auctions and virtually no street markets. To be able to weather loot swings and periodically take resources to Calypso to sell, it's better a bankroll of 2000+ PED (that just a guesstimate though). Every planet has its advantages and downsides, there's no single best. I personally prefer Cyrene over Calypso over Arkadia over Rocktropia but then many people would say I'm just a weird rodent.
A key question is how much bankroll you want to start out with. If you dont want to deposit at all then you really have to sweat, gather stones and fruit, harvest wood to get the ped together to fund your desired activity of mining. And you will be doing it for a long time. The good news is that with a rookie finder, its relatively cheap to mine. Personally I would recommend doing a small deposit, getting a mentor and and completing the discipleship, to get some freebies as well as practical experience and good advice. Then think about how much you are prepared to deposit to give yourself sufficient bankroll to withstand the very dynamic range of mining returns. It can be challenging selling your loot on Arkadia at times (so you need a bigger bankroll) but the community is mostly very helpful and friendly. Caly has the bigger economy but is not so friendly.
True about Calypso, often not fun to trade but it usually works. Cyrene at least is since recently served by a mothership going direcly to Calyso several times a week. Before that there was only one the other way around, you had to make the whole round trip if you were hauling stuff. Much better now. On Rocktropia there is a very friendly person who almost single-handedly keeps the market going and buys stuff from miners and hunters directly. Once or twice a week you get a message in chat with a link to a spreadsheet and then you get to queue up. You can even dump some stackables in the pawn shop, but for lower markup. I fail to understand why it isn't working on this planet, which has the second biggest market, or at least player base. Crafters could get better margins and provide security for gatherers if they just offered an easy discovery option for their needs and cut out auction fees. Yes, they made it convenient with the new crafting interface. But someone has to gather up enough for auctioning and take the risk of losing the fee first. Usually you just have endlessly fragmented tiny stacks that never make the threshold, unless you are seriously grinding something. In trade chat both buyers and sellers get maximum a few minutes exposure. The forum here also doesn't seem to get the ball rolling. It is mostly just frustrating. There are obviously better ways, but they aren't used.
This is the reason I've had to go back to caly, I was getting good results mining on Arkadia but there was very few opportunities to sell. I was getting to the point of having around 2-300ped of different resouces and thinking seriously about tt'ing the lot just to keep mining. I ended up putting money in ( a rarity for me) and shipping out to Caly only to hit a 300 ped global. So now I've got enough funds in game to come back to Ark.
