Gems (a bit of my personal feedback)

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So, for the first time ever today, I found (and mined!) some Topaz, the first gem I ever got. :grin:

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I found these thanks to the info available around the forums on what worlds and altitudes gems can be found. However, I find it a bit awkward to have to travel so many worlds just to find a few gems, mostly because my latency is best on the EU worlds… :thinking: If that info didn’t exist I wouldn’t ever have found any at all.

I did try to look around in Munteen, as it a much better location for me, but gave up because it was so awkward, even with high jump and a grapple, to get to the altitude that Amethyst supposedly occurs at. Maybe it was right under my nose but I did mine there for a while and couldn’t find any; the disparity on where gems occur and the lack of clues in-game for where it can be encountered make it quite a frustrating experience to even go look for any… I have looked in Vulpto a little bit in the past, but don’t remember seeing any in the caves there.

In the end, I did get 15 Topaz ore, which is more than 0, but I think I was really lucky because I found it all in quick succession and then continued mining the mountain for (I think?) hours and didn’t have any more turn up. I did mine almost every seam of any other material I found as well.

I made about 100 Iron and 300 Copper, as well as 400 Soft and 200 Medium coals - and an assortment of Tech stuff.

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Does this proportion seem right to others? What are your experiences with looking for gems? I’m especially interested in knowing what other people who have very few gems have gone through to get them!

Finally, one thing I’ve been curious about but not really asked anyone, is how anyone has enough gems of any kind to use for building? :scream:

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All gem things you see around come from times when gems were easy to get. We have scarcity of them recently and probably will see some balancing etc. but the idea is to make them rare. I like that to be true. I don’t really want to see all players running around with gem tools and weapons. It’s supposed to be something that costs you money or time and work to get.
At the same time stone, copper and iron tools have become way better so they usage is already becoming common.

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Thank you for the clarification. I did think that was the case but I wasn’t sure, since I’d never had an explicit answer.

For me a tool isn’t worth using if the tool breaks faster than I can replace it (on a moderate/longterm timeline), but maybe I’m picky.

That said, I do agree they should be somewhat rare, but I also hope they won’t ever be so rare that I won’t ever feel like using them just because I can’t hoard enough of them. :sweat_smile: At the moment I can’t make the tools anyway, and I’m not sure that I want to spend skill points on that, so likely I’d just sell the raw gems until I could afford the finished tools sold by someone else.

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What I’m seeing with the different material types is that they all have different properties. Just to go into the very basics, you have copper and iron, your “base metals” Copper tools are very quick to swing and swing again from what I see, but don’t even hit as hard as stone ones based on how many hits it takes to take out a particular type of block. Iron on the other hand, is much slower, but also more powerful as a trade off.

For copper versus iron grapples for instance, copper has a range of what, 11 meters? But it fires fast and reels in fast. Iron on the other hand has a range of 25 meters (O.o) but fires a bit slower and reels in so slowly you might wonder if you’re actually moving while using it. (Just kidding, but seriously…)

Gold has weak hits, but 50% crits and can mine any material…

I don’t know about titanium because it’s inefficiently expensive to produce and not needed to mine anything that exists yet…

Silver hits about as hard as iron, but is a bit slower than copper. Kind of an upgrade of both of them, but it can mine hard coal (and they can’t)!

The same goes for the grapples. Some have long "flight duration"s, (meaning large horizontal range), some have a fast flight speed and high max range (long vertical range), some reel in incredibly quickly to the point you can catapult with them! Then there are a couple that reel in automatically (perfect for dual-wield grapple spider-manning for sure).

As far as gems go, they are in/under mountains. For sapphires/amethysts (Nasharil/Munteen VIII) that means you pretty much REQUIRE a very good grapple and good grapple masters (possibly two grapples) or will be spending aeons building structures to get up to them… as they are located in “floating” mountains high in the air. For rubies/diamonds (Vulpto/Andoweem) they are right around the same height as the lava… so dangerous to get for a whole different reason (but there are tons of rubies under the mountains in Vulpto, good first gem to go for, also the ruby grapples are fantastic all-rounders).

Honestly, I don’t know much about topaz rarity, I just know rubies are easy-peasy to get if you can get to Vulpto and know where to look, and sapphires/amethysts are a royal pain in the butt almost no matte how much you know and how well you are equipped.

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Thank you for this reply; it is incredibly informative. I had noticed the swing times and how hard each hit was with some of the hammers already, but I had no idea about the crits with the gold and the difference of grapples.

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So I’d like to update my feedback here a little bit;

I’m not sure how much mastery and power I had when I was mining the topazes in the OP, but right now my mining stats are: Max power, max hammer mastery, max all stat bonus, max durability bonus and max swing speed.

I’m not sure why now, but I went for diamonds, I thought, give it a try see what it’s like… And even I was only using copper hammers to mine for them, I was actually being able to find some with strip mining. I ended up “struggling” to get to at least 80, but fine, that was going to have to be enough…

So eventually @Kawwak made me some Diamond Hammers with the resources I did manage to get, and I thought, well, I can’t use these on building because they won’t pay for themselves, so I used them for mining diamonds again.

With the diamond hammers, I am now at an average where I spend about 1 hammer per 60-80 raw diamond; that means the ratio of hammer spent to hammer made can be worked out near 1:3.

Now, this feels like a pretty good standard to me, and let me add that for me to get the 360 I try to get, it still takes many hours. I feel like their rarity could be a tiny bit smaller because not everyone will have as much time to waste as me to look for a gem, but generally it feels like it’s common, but not that common. The large cleave effect from the diamond hammers themselves makes finding more ore quicker anyway.

I don’t know if anyone else has noticed this, but when you’re striping mining in Andoweem for diamonds, you’ll mostly be breaking metamorphic rock all the time if you’re between 6-15 height levels. But there are “blobs” of igneous and sedimentary rock; if you mine these out it’s like an imperfect spherical intrusion in the metamorphic rock.

I don’t know if it’s luck or some intuitive sense, because it seems to happen consistently, but I find the most diamonds when going around these blobs, like making a tunnel frame around them - the blobs themselves often have concentrations of other ore, and can have diamonds, but most of the times, I’ll find the diamonds on metamorphic rock, not the other two.

In summary, my points are at the moment:

  • Diamond rarity is pretty decent, and the type of rock formations make it “easy” to strip mine for it. I like this.

  • I feel like I can have extra hammers to use when I’m building or clearing room for building and that sort of thing. I really like this; I would hate making gem hammers and feeling “forced” to not use them for building just because they didn’t pay for themselves.

  • While diamond rarity is pretty decent, titanium and gold and silver do not seem to be. I find 0 silver, and on average I find less than half of the amount of raw diamonds as raw titanium. Gold is equally as rare, but doesn’t occurr as low as diamond, so that may be why I’m not getting as much of it.

My expectation here is that titanium and the other alloying materials should be more common than gem, if they are supposed to be lower tier. Copper and Iron feel like they are at the perfect spot in terms of rarity and so on, but coal could be more common (just in general, but I like that hard coal is rare, pretty block)

  • Finally, my last point is that I wish I didn’t have to somehow find my way to the back of the Australian worlds just to look for a gem, considering I’m from the Europe region. The latency is handled really well by the game, but it’s still there. And again, I still rely on the fact that other people have portals here, but if they didn’t I could still make my way here, but I would still waste hours and coin just getting to the place for getting diamonds (at which point I would just live there instead)

I know this is something that likely won’t be the case on release, having to go to a different region for a basic gem, but at the moment it’s difficult to imagine it differently, of course. It’s difficult to quantify something like this.

Edit: And I have been recording the amounts I’m getting exactly. I will be posting some of this data too.

Edit2: I know that I’m not taking into account market economics for acquiring any of these items, but inevitably, some people will want and will try very hard to be self-sufficient.

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At other spots (e.g. Septerfon & Vulpto caves) gold and silver are abundant. I like the idea of having to farm multiple places to get a good balance of ore - it encourages some variety or trading.

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I’m having a hell of a time finding any gems outside of combat. In fact, its intensely frustrating how I’ve not been able to find a single gem besides from creatures. I want to be self sufficient, but it feels like either I’m missing how to find the things (even matching alt and formations in the forum guides has yet to do me any good) or they’re so rare they’re not worth my time. Exploring and gathering should be a challenge, not an aggravation.

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I don’t have a full history or understanding because I won’t waste time looking for gems when it’s too much work and I can’t sell them easily.

From what I understand this is a result of extremely low player counts and the inability to mine enough of a planet to cause a better regen rate compared to the ones that are still there in the rock and not been found.

The animal drops were to help with that and probably should not have been added. It makes no sense why an animal would have a gem on them. We should be fixing the primary cause around regen issues not be putting in other fixes.

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I’m not quite sure what point is being made here. The number of players in the game has nothing to do with the regen.

The main issue is that resources are not evenly distribution across a world and between worlds. Each world has it’s own resource configuration. Some resources are more abundant on some works. The purpose of this was to encourage players to travel between worlds to gather resources. Then on each world resources are distribution unevenly again. Some surface types have a higher ratio of certain resources. The purpose of this was to encourage players to travel between biomes to gather resources. The overall idea was that it was more satisfying to learn about the worlds and discover their unique riches. Once you know where to find a particular resource them you can gather it quickly. This knowledge gives you an advantage in the economy. If all resources were normally distributed across all worlds then the economy would become simply about who mined for longest, rather than smartest.

So if you’re struggling to find a particular resource then:

  1. You’re likely looking on the wrong world, and / or
  2. You’re likely looking in the wrong place / biome.

We want to improve the information provided per world and per resource to give players more guidance on where to look.

See the following post and images to see how resource distribution can vary:

IMPORTANT: Resource distribution has been iterated since this devlog post.

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Well I don’t have all the exact details on regeneration and the amount of resources per planet since there is not clear technical documentation showing it and the forums can be hard to search for specifics. But from what I know there is a set number of resources that are then generated once mined at a lower percentage rate. Once that percentage of resources in the planet is at a low value then more show on regen. Basically something trying to keep things balanced.

So if there are X number of resources on a planet and the resources require a person to remove them before they are regenerated then the amount of people doing mining of that resource will affect how it shows after the initial generation. The amount of people help cause regeneration of a resource and nothing else does. They are static and do not change unless people interact with them. Less people = less interaction. More people = more interaction.

That was the basic point I was trying to make.

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In my experience I have found it takes me a very long time to find a very few gems mining and it is not worth it. I believe I can find as many or more from creatures. I will probably keep trying mining but mostly mining for coal and metals.

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This will help you with how to efficiently hunt down specific gems.

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@james the truth is, after playing the game for 1 and a half year, i never mined a sapphire or an emerald whatever the release and i mined Nasharil and munteen quite a lot. I found a tiny bit of topaz and amethyst and fair amount of diamonds and rubies by mining. The point is, right now, mining is not a reliable source of gems if you take time vs amount found. I found it rather strange that the main source of gems is hunting since i guess mobs should have less in their pockets than in raw natural form.
Moreover, i think posts aboiut where to find gems are based on a theoritical and not practical approach and is not representative in game. I remember talking with @Karokendo who played the game for longer than me and was telling me that he never found an emerald or sapphire in the wild either. I know gems are supposed to be rare, but a player should be able to get about 25 of them when mining for an hour or two by my reasoning witch is the case only for diamonds and rubies right now.
If somebody can prove me wrong with a practical exemple and proof, i will be glad

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Understood. And I agree - hunting shouldn’t be more effective than mining.

Agree’d again. Sometimes the idea doesn’t translate well into reality.

But my point is that there are ultimately only a few issues:

  1. Do we want variable distribution of resources per planet?
  2. Do we want variable distribution of resources per biome?
  3. If yes, then are players able to find resources? Do they need more guidance?
  4. If no, then what is the alternative?

The images and data I shared are from the game worlds, so do reflect reality.

If players are mining in the right place - then the issue is density of resources.
If players are mining in the wrong place - then the issue is that they’re mining in the wrong place.

Additional: I’m not particularly defending the current setup, but rather attempting to communicate what it actually is. We obviously don’t want players to mine for resources, get disheartened or annoyed, and quite the game. We want players to feel smart that they knew where to look and feel smart that they’re being efficient.

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I think a good way to approach this goal to look at the number of gems in a node, per region. This could be applied to all resources, actually, but especially gems.

The difference between a region that is good for mining gems and a region that is not should not be so polarized in that you either do or you don’t find gems. You should have the nearly the same frequency of gem nodes across the majority of biomes on a gem bearing planet. What should vary from biome to biome is the average number of gems per node. So, a gem node in an typically poor biome for sapphires should yield 1-1.5 gems per node. An ideal biome should have the same or slightly better frequency of nodes, but with 6-8 gems per node. This way, you’re likely still hitting a node of gems every 30 minutes or so, but the reward is far greater when in the proper biome.

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I have read the mega gems posts, and keep that and the map and chart on a browser tab. But I haven’t had what I would consider a lot of success. I probably mine slower than most people.
A scanning device that tells you when there are gems nearby, or that you are in the right kind of area, or points you towards gems with increased signal as you get closer, would be nice.

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My personal experience.
Today I went to Andoween to find some diamonds. I followed the various charts I had found and dug down in an area that was sand on the surface. I mined for about 2 hours using a combination of iron and gold hammers. I was not successful in finding any diamonds. Not to say it was not a good trip. I did mine 222 soft coal, 90 medium coal and 13 hard coal. With hard coal being rarer than diamonds, I was surprised. I also mined 102 copper, 310 iron, 31 gold, 6 silver, 30 small fossils, 2 medium fossils and 11 large fossils. On Andoween large fossils are twice as rare as diamonds and I found 11 of those. There was also about 1000 various rocks. I stayed between 5 and 30 in altitude and was near lava most of the time. I followed seams of various resources and mined the blocks around them looking for diamonds. While it was a good mining trip, I have about given up looking for gems by mining. I have tried to follow the advice I have found in the forums and I am still missing something.

I agree with others that hunting has been a better more reliable source of gems than mining.

I do believe this to be true, I am just either not understanding it, or missing some other key piece of advice on where to look.

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I’ve spent couple of hours today on Andoween and dug out 105 diamonds. Also about 50 titanium. But I used amethyst tunneler hammer+shovel. I don’t bother to look for right type of biome. I dig in one direction until I hit diamond and than do strip mining on several level in area. Started on level 18, than got to 16, mined strips about 100 blocks long about 20 of them in total. This was one of successful trips. I also had couple-of-hours-of-nothing kind of trips :smiley:

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How far do you scoot over between tunnels? 2 blocks? Also are you doing this in a cave system or just mine down to level 18 from the surface?

Lastly, have you tried this on the other planets to find emeralds or sapphires, etc., to see if you can get them versus the issues some others have had?

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