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)
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I’m not even bothered to spend the time and the clicks canceling 400 mass crafts one by one.
@DKPuncherello also as regards time, the new meta shifts some of this into coin in order to spread it across multiple players. However it’s worth considering the time costs, for the full factory run we’re discussing.
In the most optimal gear, harvesting 514k raw gleam is going to be 4+ man hours.
With the most optimal buff and machines, this requires harvesting over 12 million spark, I’m not even sure how many man-hours that is. If you’re not max buffed and coiled you need up to 33 million spark, harvested and on tap, the time to harvest and convert this is massive.
Then after all of that, you’re looking at a minimum of 4, up to 6 hours just for handling the processing.
So minimally there are 10 man hours invested into gleam acquisition and processing time, let’s say up to 12. If any miner who pays attention would like to share their thoughts on mining 12m spark worth of coal, we could add that to the total. Then there’s a 35 hour waiting time to collect the experience “Reward”.
Considering that even with the coils if you’re not optimally buffed and turning to the market for your acquisitions the coin profit calculated above is roughly a 3.6% profit margin, you can see that it’s a huge loss on your time since you personally have to do at least the 5-ish hours of processing and cleanup.
There’s a lot of info here. As far as I can tell there’s nothing wildly out of balance here, it’s just something different to do for a minute.
It is somewhat exploitable for those that are able/willing to bot the harvesting and some of the processing time. But I certainly hope that @james and whoever else is involved in the balancing process take a thorough look at this before they decide that this needs a heavy-handed rebalance.
One does not “just process gleam”. That’s what @Nightstar tried to say.
12 million spark is 800 compact hard coal or 5907 uncompacted hard coal, which you would have to compact on fully coiled compactors first. (That’s about 50 hours of compacting time)
Or 20000 medium coal. Try buying 20000 medium coal or 5907 hard coal every day.
190628 peat, or 212 smart stacks of peat. That requires 21180 hits with a 3x3 shovel, which requires about 10 forged shovels. You should, with speed brews and topaz shovels easily be able to farm that in under 12 hours, neglecting drop off time.
Also I don’t meant to sound discouraging. The real problem here is sourcing the gleam/spark. I’m having to mine for 90% of my spark, and the only solid source of gleam I’ve found appears to be a bot farm, which I’m not entirely happy to pay for.
It’s been two days since anyone delivered to my factory, not sure how @Nexton is doing maybe he would like to share?
I would use it to supplement not replace my existing xp farms: galan topaz / refinery coils; exotic yam farm; melting lots of metals; mining and compacting coal.
