There are several nice places I’ve 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 I’m 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. Doesn’t 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 don’t 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 don’t think you can match that with shadow orbs but I haven’t 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. I’m 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 that’s why I disagreed because I value my time differently than you did.
Thanks for discussing this! It’s 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 can’t find these things.
Foraging and gathering are my favorite activities and I’m not sure I’ve ever seen 100 glowcaps in the wild.
Your analyses are always interesting to me, and usually quite scientific in nature.
I think that’s 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 don’t think decon 1 really has any use. Here’s a thread with some tips on where to farm pulsating orbs if somebody’s interested Lost a planet with a swamp biome - #19 by Mayumichi