XP Curves of different activities

General
1

I tested the xp gains in some activities, below are the times it took me to gain 3k xp. Expand to get a short explanation of the setup, nothing fancy was used, just basic tools.

Surface gatherer 9min (4min on testing)

Axe in other hand, hammer in the other, 1 hit all rock and plants on a T1 world on a flat biome so constant xp flow. Agility 9 and max run speed guild buff so downtime is as low as possible. I even paused my timer when crossing a barren part of the planet.

Miner 4min

Titanium hammer on T2 world so 1-shot all rock and seams. No aoe or other forging. A good lvl 40 mining spec.

Builder 3min

Place 3 blocks, destroy them, repeat.

Hunter 3min

Gold slingbow, T3 world, no meteors, just running from mob to mob. Lvl 35 character with a slingbow spec.

I’d hate to be a new player and spec in to stealth gathering and notice it takes me double the time to level up than a miner or a builder for example. Exploring is even worse and can’t really even be considered a way of gaining xp. Region discovery on a planet should be exponential, the first ones are ok to be low but when you get close to the end the last ones should reward you similar xp to hunting.

The problem is that the miner especially scales up a lot when going to a high tier world with a super forged hammer. Gathering has no such scaling, higher tier planets don’t award more xp, it’s the exact opposite. Resources are harder to break, more dangerous mobs, harder terrain etc. Hunter scales up too with better equipment and meteors and harder mobs. Builder doesn’t normally break all the blocks they place so that’s not optimal either.

One activity I didn’t test is lumberjack or shoveler, I’d assume those are pretty low too with no aoe tools. This suggestion sounded good to balance that Gathering and Logging XP ideas

Imo these need to be fixed before the xp nerf can be implemented. The plot stuff is a different topic. Any ideas how to fix surface resource xp curve? Could higher level planets have an xp multiplier on surface stuff?

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2

whatever happened to the bugged update on this a while ago…

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3

This is hugely inaccurate if we talk max rates and most efficient ways.

4

How do you optimise gathering beans and other plant/surface resources more? I thought I’m doing it as efficient as I can.

5

Did you use teaching pies, did you have max speed skills, mega fast brews etc etc?

Mining does not take 3 minutes to get 3k exp on t6 world with aoe hammer, fast brew, max stats and teaching pie. It takes less than half an energy bar.

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That was kind of the whole point, that even with a hugely constrained, mid-game setup the other activities beat the most optimal surface gathering and especially exploration by a large margin.

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7

Did you try gathering on one of those biitula flower biomes? Could be really good exp

8

that would not make a balanced test. there are always going to be fringe cases with extreme hardcore players and extreme casuals. the comparison is with equally balanced characters/activities.

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This was in Trung I think (right-most portal in Ultima, always confuse the two new planets), it has large flat biomes with full desert sword, rosetta nox and basic boulders all over the place, downtime between gathering is really minimal there.

I welcome you to try it yourself, I’m not claiming it was the most optimal run and there’s of course margin of error, player skill and other variables that would affect it but I don’t think you can double the speed. If you can I want to see :smiley:

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Well, whatever the case is, we don’t even need to argue that some stuff yields MUCH less experience than other things. I mine and build - building… really no experience what so ever since I mostly use rock, wood, stone and ice.

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My builder is actually doing fine, maybe 80% of the xp of my crafter :thinking: The gatherer is the one that I’ve been funneling my rocks to and it’s the lowest character I have :smiley: Interesting.

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I’ve been doing the same to level my gatherer. But with the coming change, I may switch my gatherer to a miner and grab extra xp that way. I like that you did take the time to make the comparisons. Thanks for the info!

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Interesting analysis and feedback! Great approach to lead constructive conversations !!

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Did a run on testing to see how much the changes affect surface gathering. New result is 4min to 3k xp. That’s more in line with the others now, although I can’t explain how a 25% increase in basic boulder and desert sword XP accounts for a 50% difference in my time :smiley: Maybe the planet I did the new test on is better, or I messed up something in my initial test. In any case the new numbers look a lot better.

Can’t say what it looks like on higher tier planets since T4 is the highest the testing planets go. My guesstimate is that the xp rate will now be similar to lower tier worlds (instead of being way worse), resources take more hits to destroy and aren’t as easy to run from one to the next one since the more rare resources aren’t so abundant as desert sword etc. I’ll wait and see when the patch goes live.

Here’s the relevant snippet from the patch notes.

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15

This is key right here.
This is the way I thought it would be (and should be)
There should be incrementally more xp gained on higher tier planets.

I guess having the specific plants that spawn on high tier planets does help but still, I think harvesting a trumpet root on a tier 7 should give you more (even just by 1 or 2) xp than harvesting one on a tier 5 planet.

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