Okie dokie, let’s see what magic I can work tonight lol, challenge accepted
The rank 5 3x3 is utterly useless you cannot go through that without a second hammer and you have a chance of losing what you have mined because you just cant get to it or dont see it.
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You’re right. If it’s not clear I’m just participating in the conversation, and pointing out specifics regarding what makes these hammers less than worthless.
I mean literally less than worthless because for most mining styles you’ve spent forging time and mats to craft a hammer that will require more care to use than an unforged, single shot hammer.
And a crazy time cost going over and over the same area producing progressively more swiss cheese that you can’t see or move through over time.
Over forging and getting AoE 5 is a huge burn. Getting the damage loss back in no way makes up for it. IMO decon is solid advice.
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Without the experimental data to back me up, my gut is with @Nightstar in the sense that per tool, AOE 4, dura, dmg, persisting pie and speed brew is the way to go. If recovery brews lasted a bit longer there might have been a closer match up there.
I can also say that per hit, AOE 5 will fall woefully short of AOE 4 not only in terms of blocks broken, but also the ability to navigate the maze you have made.
However, I have to say I’m intrigued to see what can happen with the boon slot that AOE5 frees up - if one were to get your hands on a masterfully forged disaster of a tool with good dura and speed, couple that with a persisting pie and a mega fast brew - you might be able to rip off more rock with it than with the above AOE 4 combo. As long as the time frame in question is kept to less than the lifespan of either hammer, say, 15 or 30mins.
I am firmly in the camp of using dura tools, because I’m a clumsy slowpoke and I’m okay with that. But I’m still curious as to what can be done when one loses a mind.
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So here is a thought. Can you think of any way that you could mine with this effectively. Since I made those screenshots I am playing around with some outside of the box ideas to see. You can get some interesting results but it either takes a painstaking amount of time or effort. I feel like i may be missing some special way to mine with it.
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Bomb a hole above your target, grapple the roof and swing it like it’s 1999.
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I think I might be able to, but I wont know for sure until I can log on and experiment.
I’ll have to get my patterning down.
Since I mine in a sphere, I’m not worried about a stable floor
No worries I feel like this thread is gonna continue for a while. Long enough to get a developers attention I hope.
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Either way I’ll report my success or failure
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This is what I did. Grapple the ceiling, go nuts with the random hammer, let it all drop to the floor. Max control range and light epic. Make a spherical crater. Lower yourself down, switch item preset to a magnet item, loot up, rinse repeat.
there is nothing ‘efficient’ about this but it’s fun and niche, depending on your idea of fun 
My rule is there’s never a bad forge, just niche uses and such. Any forge is still going to provide you with better gathering than the base tool, it’s just in our minds we have to have it be ‘the best it can be’. If you can get past that mental barrier and just enjoy the game it’s easy, but if you’re going at it from a business perspective it makes absolutely no sense to do anything I am talking about.
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I agree. I usually work around what I forge with brews and bombs and stuff. This seems like it might be a fun thing to do for a bit. I guess you could give it to a new person that has no hammer but a grapple and then tell them to go nuts. If you were going to sell that tool however you would have to discount it because that is a very specific way you have to mine to get results even near the previous rank.
Still the idea of watching someone do that is hilarious.
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100% agree. You can certainly recoup the cost of the hammer/mats used to craft it, and someone who has to be cheap for progression purposes can get a good deal on an item that is still better than what they probably had. and this kind of thing works with a simple unforged iron grapple. It’s not like it requires a bunch of bells and whistles to accomplish. It’s been a long time but I remember being stupidly creative to inch my first few thousands out. It was still better than the cross hammers I had been buying at the time. and it cost 1/3 the price those hammers were sold for, nevermind what 3x3 tools were going for.
As we become vets, it’s often hard to remember the crazy stuff we did to progress as newbies. We is spoiled 
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Yeah I’m interested in your thoughts, but unless you come up with some novel meta/tactic I think you’re going to find it just as frustrating as anyone. Strip mining or sphere mining or whatever, you’re going to have to hit 2-4 times as often and move around more to see the same space.
It will save you the time/accuracy concerns that a dedicated strip miner would have. I have burned axes in my trunk farm, it doesn’t change the time/accuracy since I do that vertically. But it does still drop productivity in terms of blocks over time by 50+ percent which is why I wouldn’t even use them for that on a regular basis.
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Tactical brain initiated, complex calculations computing.
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Sounds like an joke hammer lol
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Alright guys, this is my data.
I used 3 different hammers and tried 3 different methods. 1 provided by @Prome3us and 2 provided by @Combustive. First method was circular rotation of my mouse about 3-5 blocks in width as i turned around. Second method was random - a little bit of everything. Third method was vertical slicing - up and down from above to below me and then moving slightly to the side and repeating until i created a sphere around me.
Hammer 1
Method circular rotation of the mouse
Hammer lasted 32.9 minutes
Netted:
882 sapphires
47 topaz
170 large fossil
156 medium fossil
583 iron
349 tech components
62 tech devices
259 soft coal
3 hard coal
Hammer 2
Method - random movement of the mouse
Lasted 33.9 minutes
Netted:
528 sapphires
46 topaz
116 large fossil
136 medium fossil
1041 iron
310 tech components
82 tech devices
298 soft coal
0 hard coal
Hammer 3
Method - Vertical Slicing “The chain saw”
Lasted 48.9 minutes
1024 sapphires
6 topaz
209 large fossil
143 medium fossil
704 iron
377 tech components
66 tech devices
300 soft coal
12 hard coal
A total of 2434 sapphires in 1.92 hours.
It took me about 4 times as long to get the same amount of sapphires as I did with a AOE 4, speed, dmg hammer (~30 mins). It was slower than a top performer or late gamer might see with an optimal hammer, but for someone who cannot afford a top tier or perfect hammer, this isnt bad. It’s actually viable in my eyes, even though not ideal.
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Also three times as many hammers, right?
The one with 2000 durability would have moved twice the rock (and thus loot) of the hammer you described above, if it had AoE 4. It still would have taken longer, but not for 1/3 to 1/2 the loot.
It should be making sense now why nobody would forge this on purpose though, even with the “extra boon”.
You’re not wrong, in i a general sense. I did use a bunch of these and I haven’t forgotten. But even when I was a noob, i wouldn’t have paid for it unless it was less than the cost of a nice, clean hammer.
Of course there wasn’t even a minter then, and clean gem hammers were 5k +. Any forger who had to set this was happy with any recoup. You could find them for 2 - 2.5k coins when you found them at all.
With the hammers beng worth more like 1k now, it’s no surprise how many people say “just mint it” when this comes up. It’s the same deal, about half the tool cost and whatever ingredients you spent are gone with the wind.
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I am super excited by this data, it shows what methods can be used and how well they work! Well done! Thanks much for your dedication to this.
My initial impression is summed up by the fact that summarize by saying it took you four times as long as a AOE 4 hammer. While I do agree that it is a fine hammer for someone with small amounts of money or in a tight spot it really goes to show that this boon should still be UNDER rank 4 and not above it. It still seems very out of place in the forging process. As a rank 5 boon it should be for the “top performer or late gamer” but it is not.
Thank you again for your methods to try to get this second rate boon to perform with AOE 4.
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The chainsaw method is the one I used to get the best results also in my micro testing. I figured that might be the one to be the best to try to make it work. Glad to see it came through on the full scale testing.
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Yeah this is also how I used the last axes I got with this boon. I got them for free, though 