Cool 
I think you’re linked to Nexton’s right? He has a portal to my eresho tree
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Yes we’re linked.
What are you making with all that gleam…
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I make a small amount of refined as well. My shop stand in the mall sold out of refined gleam again yesterday.
That’s like, not even 1 percent though. Plain gleam doors are the main point.
OK so I’ve seen a lot of variously negative comments about the gleam farming boom over the last couple of days, and I’m getting a number of questions about what’s going on at the back end.
From my perspective, I decided to see a couple weeks ago if I could pay gleam farmers a decent price, churn out some solid experience while I was building, and not go negative in the coin department.
Here’s a rambling jumble of info for you all 
Last night I managed to fully queue the entire refinery I’ve built at Serpensarindustries. This is 120 machines. I did some checking to verify that the cost/spark reduction for coils on a zero-power craft tops out at 16 coils, so each of these machines has 16 coils.
I could have packed them a bit tighter, but this makes the place a little more pleasant to be in, IMO, and also makes experience collection a little more controllable. It also has the negative of adding time to every part of the process, and we’re talking about hours and hours of time.
Last night I was using that portal you can see in the left of the screenshot to collect gleam from an offsite farm and load machines directly. Pushing them all to full queue this way was roughly two hours of work. There will be repairs to be done, and then gathering and minting the doors.
Based on last week’s work in my main factory, minting roughly 180k doors took me approximately 26 minutes alone, that’s after collecting them all, repairing the machines, and moving them to a single location for continuous minting. You can mint 2 stacks of doors before repairing the minter.
On the matter of coin
Loading all of these machines required 518,400 gleam. That’s 4,320 gleam per machine for a total of 3600 mass crafts. Processing time with coils maxed is 1 hour and ten minutes per mass craft for a wait time of exactly 35 hours.
Without level 3 spark and wear buff I would literally not be able to do this with the single set of spark generators currently installed here. The Super Spark and Wear guild buff costs 80k coins and roughly 5 character-weeks of endeavour per week.
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9350 spark per mass craft with no buff
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3600 batches would require 33,660,000 spark
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3350 spark per mass craft with the level 3 buff.
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3600 batches required 12,060,000 spark
This is the largest variable in the process
I’m going to pull some numbers out of @Mayumichi’s BUTT and say that based on soft coal prices, spark is currently marketing at about 2c per 100 spark.
- 673,200c spark cost unbuffed
- 241,200c spark cost with the maximum buff
These numbers together with the 518,400c for the gleam give us the following figures:
- 1.191.600c expenses for an unbuffed run
- 759,600c expenses for a buffed run
The output of 3600 mass crafts will be 180,000 plain gleam doors. These doors mint into a fully coiled chrysominter for 7c per door. This gives us a return of 1,260,000c for minting the doors.
- 68,400c net profit, before repair costs, unbuffed.
- 500,400c net profit, before repair costs, with the buff
A single topaz spanner should cover repair costs for the machines and the generators. Forged with additional damage removed it would cover a couple of runs.
I estimate it’s going to take me 4+ hours of time on task to finish this run. I’m hoping that when I do it with all of the gleam on site, it will take me closer to 3 hours. Time spent includes loading the machines, repairing and collecting the doors, and minting the doors.
For those who are doing this solo end to end it would also require time to harvest 518k raw gleam, and time to harvest/convert up to 33.6m spark depending on buffs.
On the matter of experience
This work is a lot more like rock/stone experience than cooking/smelting experience.
Plain gleam doors provide 1200xp, unbuffed, per mass craft. I ran the factory floor this morning, after having accidentally collected 98k earlier. This is the collection, using teaching pies, 12 hours into this 35 hour crafting process:
With max zeal and being careful not to collect a few refiners between pies, I intend to collect nearly 8,640,000 EXP from this run. That’s with roughly 4 hours of grind, 35 hours of processing time, and another expense of 15,400c for teaching pies at 350c per pie.
In conclusion
This process is tedious. Farming the gleam is more fun. And that gets boring fast.
It works as a semi-passive method of experience gathering, with effort requirements somewhere in between rock/stone/refined rock and mass smelting. Perhaps somebody with numbers on hand could help with a comparison.
If you are harvesting gleam and mining spark, making your own doors is a solid way to convert your efforts into coin. It won’t leave time for much else though, and it gets old rather quickly IMO, which is why I’ve never done much of it myself.
With buyers paying you 1c per raw gleam, however, harvesting raw gleam and dumping it into a buy basket is ‘the fun part of the process’ and also a decent way for a player to spend a couple of hours and grab a nice chunk of coin.
TBH a gleam farmer selling gleam into baskets at this price could be making more coins per minute (ignoring the processing time) than a buyer making doors out of the gleam.
For now, Serpensarindustries will stay in business. Some people have expressed concerns about nerfing. Some people are botting farms. This is the information I can provide regarding my personal setup, efficiency, and process here.
If this info helps lead to a rebalance it will be, I assume, for the devs’ perceived health of the game and I’m fine with that. If it helps other players reach decisions regarding time/value management, that’s great and it’s why I publish this stuff.
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^ This
Gleam farming is currently a fad hitting the market but it is not by ANY means the best way to make coin. It is mindless (the gathering part) and tedious (the crafting part).
I have seen people burn out hard from this and make a few million coin then just quit the game. Having coin isn’t handy if you don’t play 
500k profit for 3 - 5 hours of work (including farming it for the sake of this), is not a crazy high profit margin.
4 Hours of hunting (lets say you do nothing and just afk) will net you more coin selling the hunting resources.
The oort alone on a 4 hour hunt (assuming 250 oort per hour hunt) would equal 265,000c and there is NO COST or hours spent at a minter. That leaves 140k to earn from selling your bones/trophies/tallow/blood/mantle/hide…which is easy. There are request baskets for all of those.
The last 1 hour I would say would be going to baskets and collecting your coin with the might of the ‘right click’.
I get that people like the idea of making easy coin. I have been doing profit analysis on different activities so that I can advise people in the PS shop of things to gather that are useful for their time. By far, hunting items are the easiest to sell and make the best return (considering the low cost of entry).
Also, hunts are fun!~ (not for everyone, but more so then clicking a minter!)
I don’t think that gleam farming needs to be balanced, I mean maybe it does…but there are a lot of ways to make easy money in this game. I hope people don’t burn themselves out with this stuff 
I think breaking it up…being a crafter…paying people for gleam is a cool thing. I think it is a neat emergent game play thing.
You should be rewarded for ingenuity. I personally don’t want to spend 3 hours at machines doing crafting…and minting 
so more power to you.
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This is about the worst possible way to create spark. Even farming peat and compacting it results in 63 spark per uncompacted peat, more with your buff.
If you would buy peat for 1c you would get over 126 spark for 2c.
Buying peat for 1c should be easily possible if you’re able to buy gleam for 1c. Peat is easier to farm (level 1 planets require less damage) and you get additional resources from farming peat (earthyams, or waxy earthyams, depending on the level of the planet).
Guess it’s time for a new factory stacked with compactors! 
(But I’m unsure if you can burn peat fast enough to generate the required spark)
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Burning mass amounts of peat in the generator wears it down pretty quickly, but you can scale it by just adding more generators to the factory. But it’s more work fixing them up at the same time 
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I was hoping the snow turns black in the vincinity of your factory if you burn enough peat…
How do you add more than 16 spark generators? Can machines be connected to multiple generator clusters?
Yes, or you can just have a dedicated generator for a set amount of refineries if you don’t want to design the factory in a way that you have space to hook up multiple 16 generator sets to the same spark links.
Yes people, go hunt! Please!!!
Need oortz and most of all creature drops!!!
Without those, prices of the tools you need no matter what will go up…
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Admittedly there are cheaper ways, ultimately ending in just farming the stuff yourself.
I won’t spend over 1c/100 spark if I can’t arrange that I mine for it. If I’m in a hurry I’ll dig peat. It’s only takes a little bit of time to fill up your inventory with soil.
Yes, if you’ld like to check out my home factory where 180 machines share full access to the same pool of 133m spark I can show you in detail how it’s set up. The ring of machines sharing 2 stacks upstairs is a simpler demo with room for significant expansion but I’ve never needed it there.
I’ll invest some time into getting 3 stacks shared across the serp refineries, much more than that and I’d have to redesign the space. I set this up in about 4 days, I wanted it up fast so I just went the easy way and built them around a single stack.
Also our staff scientists assure us that all plant emissions are non-toxic and environmentally friendly.
Plus the hoppers love swimming in this stuff. 
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Thanks for the extremely detailed reports! I want to share my own daily session stats which I have been doing since the very first umbris planet appeared:
For every persisting pie duration of 45 mins I get: 80 gleam stacks (72k amount), fit them all in 14 machines and wait for 35hrs of processing, costs 1 mil 5 sparks, result in 175k coins. I login and spend 45 mins gathering them everyday and try to not burn myself out.
Compare to your factory with 120 machines setup, it will require owner to spend 7.2 runs ( 5 and a half hours ) for every 35hrs - which is absolutly a hell and can even guarantine 100% burnout/quit.
So, keep youself there, money printers.
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Yes! I’ve already determined I couldn’t possibly keep this place running at full capacity, even if I had the gleam and spark I couldn’t deal with trying to keep it maxed all the time.
Looking at numbers from other professions in game, I see this mainly as an excuse for another build, and something to do occasionally. It’s been a fun build but it’s not very entertaining to operate for the long term.
Thanks for sharing your numbers Dat.
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please watch that purple tentacle don’t touch your wast
i don’t need that again 
whoosh 
Spark buff ended over night and I just queued almost 400 batches with no spark and wear buff.
Breaking even on this bunch, and out of spark three times as fast!
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I’m tempted to setup a clone of this setup for xp. That’s a lot more xp than I’m getting by any other method.
The processing costs for this are a lot higher than single batch of most other methods.
At 20k (default) spark per batch, comparing it to something that grinds for zero spark and minimal wear is kind of apples and oranges.
For instance cooking an iron bar defaults to 150 heat and provides 8 XP. 20k spark will cook 133 of them, providing you with 1064 xp vs 1200 from the doors.
With full (16) coils and the max buff, you’re seeing 3350 spark, plus wear, provide 1200 xp crafting doors.
With a titanium furnace and the same guild buff, you’re seeing 15 heat provide 8 XP with no wear. Your 3350 spark will smelt 223 bars, for a total of 1784 XP. And no repair costs.
So as regards processing costs, refining doors is providing 67% experience compared to smelting iron bars, and that’s before repairs.
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