Use Decon 3 always.
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Why? If youāre rolling the first boon, decon 2 is more cost effective. At least according to my calculations 
Letās assume rolling the first boon takes you
- 2 gums, most often special or effect
- 1.2x boon point generator, like pbc 3 or corrupted 2
The more expensive ones are
- 6.2c each effect gum
- 54c each corrupted 2
Decon resins have a price difference of 20c
With decon 2, on average youāll return 6.2c + 27c = 33.2c worth of items
With decon 3 the numbers are 9.3c + 40.5c = 49.8c, difference is 16.6c, less than the value difference.
If youāre simply farming the stuff yourself and donāt care about the coin values, Iād argue shimmering and shadow orbs are some of the harder items to collect when comparing to pulsating orbs required for decon 2. Iāve been happy with decon 2 in my deck, but thatās just my 2c. Curious what other people feel is better 
At least in my forges I rarely have to decon after Iāve got the boon setup I wanted, maybe thereās a place for it if you decon often at a different point.
(Reasonable prices taken from Boundless Trade Network - Now Automated and calculated with Shopkeeper's Price Calculator / Recipe Browser if somebody wants I can provide the numbers I used and more logic behind some of the numbers above)
500% disagree in difficulty farming shimmering and shadow orbs. 1 pie at each farm yields 300-500 orbs
I have a great appreciation for analysisā¦ and also for your analyses. I actually hadnāt caught this one, thank you!
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Decon 3 is best if you might accidentally get aoe 5.
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Ouch yeah. At that point in the forge you would definitely want to recover as much as possible.
I farm glowcaps, that makes shimmerings harder for me. But letās not go down that rabbit hole, the material difficulty is subjective so there isnāt a single correct answer.
@CorVeritas Didnāt think about that, so true! My analysis is pretty situational then, so everyone should decide on their own which one to use depending on their deck and what theyāre forging
So true. Location, skills, and preferences. I forage for shadow orbs, a few hundred per hour. I tried once to farm them in corruption and didnāt last 15 minutes.
I donāt understand, what rabbit hole? Youāre farming for glow caps, not for shimmering. Of course shimmering will be an issue if you rely on glowcaps for your shimmers. If you farmed for shimmering in the best manner to acquire it, you wouldnāt have an issue? I understand it being an issue if limited time is the reason. There are things I pay a premium for because I like gathering them less, and would rather do activities in game I enjoy doing then gathering said items I place a premium on.
Youāre making a choice, and thatās fine, but t does not negate the ease in which acquiring shimmering orbs comes at if you have 45 mins to dedicate to one specific activity which makes how you value shimmering flawed.
There have been many of threads derailed with shimmering orb farming tips/complaints/arguments, thatās the rabbit hole I was talking about. Growth farming requires more setup than glowcaps, to be effective you need to do it correctly, in the correct place, with the correct items youāve had to either make, or buy beforehand. Itās not something you can jump in and out, youāre locked in to doing it while the pie lasts if you care about cost efficiency.
Iām only saying that the materials for decon 3 are harder to acquire than decon 2.
I got that, and as I said in my original post I disagree. My original post saying I disagree was formed based off this train of thought.
Neither are difficult to acquire, where as gathering pulsating orbs is lower yielding ime. A mid lvl can do it if they can specialize for a very minimal build and take a 3-5k shovel and a str brew and go farm for it. Regen bombs are like 500c. The spec isnāt too critical.
Now if youāre saying that tedium and monotony is difficult then I can understand that. I have a busy life and spend a 45 min pie over the 3-4 hours so itās not like Iām sitting there doing it for 45 mins straight. I could certainly understand that being difficult.
Perhaps that is why I put farming for shimmer and shadows at such a low value. I can get 2-4 regens in and then Iām afk again for a little while in sanctum with an ongoing pie. Not possible to do hunts and farm oort to just pay for things with that type of play style.
That .5c growth, though. Oort is such slow money. Orb farming was faster money before the chrysominter.
,5c growth used to be worth nothing. The fact you can sale growth for pennyworms is a nice side benefit we have now.
If I do get the time to spend an hour on an oort farm I get about 300~ oort, which Iām fine selling at 150. And then buying lots of glue because farming sap stinks.
There are several nice places Iāve found to farm the mushrooms that drop shadow orbs. I can farm between 120-200 of them in 20min and I typically get some Bitter beans at the same time since Iām farming on ice. I usually spend 30min get 6 or so roadrunners, 160 bitter beans, and almost 300 shadow orbs. I do run max luck, and gatherer epic, but movement skills are negligible since its on ice. Doesnāt require near the setup of regen bomb farming, plus I get to loot dormant metors and occasionally find a road runner to one or two shot for loot as well.
Its still kinda boring to just wander fields of ice hitting hundreds of mushrooms and flowers, but I donāt find it near as awful for my attention span as aoe shovel farming things (which remains the primary way I have to find shimmering orbs since I have yet to find a resource farm that even comes close to competing with it).
Pulsatings can be farmed at ~1200+/h (1800/h in 10min bursts but since you have to run a bit when you run out of them in an area, it goes down). I donāt think you can match that with shadow orbs but I havenāt actually calculated the foraging rate for them. And then on top of that you need the shimmerings. Then you need double the sand, silty, sap, ancient vital and volatile blood. Iām curious how is that easier :o
The stuff I mentioned were just all the facts I could come up with that make glowcaps preferable to growth for me, people care about different things and find different things easier/harder.
I agree 100%, I suppose thatās why I disagreed because I value my time differently than you did.
Thanks for discussing this! Itās always interesting to see how we value the time we spend on our entertainment.
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I was literally just posting about standing in the middle of a bunch of hotspots, I canāt find these things.
Foraging and gathering are my favorite activities and Iām not sure Iāve ever seen 100 glowcaps in the wild.
Your analyses are always interesting to me, and usually quite scientific in nature.
I think thatās what I enjoy about the forge though. It has some changes that makes different things more important. Is there ever a time for decon 1?
Thank you for the kind words 
Always nice to know other people appreciate data and analysis on it too.
Decon 1 vs 2 is a 5c difference, and pulsating orbs are abundant even on low tier planets so I donāt think decon 1 really has any use. Hereās a thread with some tips on where to farm pulsating orbs if somebodyās interested Lost a planet with a swamp biome - #19 by Mayumichi
Shhh dont tell anyone.