What is and isnt enabled for 2.0 merit grind

BelExandor

B
I spent yesterday laser mining platinum in a LYR stronghold system. After selling about 1100 tons, I went from rank 26 to rank 55. EASILY the most lucrative activity I've found for merit gains so far.
I tried exploration, exo-bio, bounty hunting, commodity trading and the limited number of power CZs that I could get to work. All of those activities combined fell short of selling mined goods.

It is possible to go from a low rank to rank 100 with 10000 tons of silver or gold, If you buy it at less than 5k/t and sell it for average market prices. The catch is that you would need to sell it 1 ton at a time to get the max merits and I don't know anyone who would willingly do that. It IS possible though.

PSA for all LYR agents: If core mining is your thing, go to Kehperagwe. If laser mining; Wargis.
 
Last edited:

Darrack

Darrack
BelExandor said:
I spent yesterday laser mining platinum in a LYR stronghold system. After selling about 1100 tons, I went from rank 26 to rank 55. EASILY the most lucrative activity I've found for merit gains so far.
I tried exploration, exo-bio, bounty hunting, commodity trading and the limited number of power CZs that I could get to work. All of those activities combined fell short of selling mined goods.
Click to expand...
This is the best method currently i am using, laser mining plat and selling in the same system (if merits is what your after).

O7
 

BelExandor

B
Neilski said:
Sounds good!
Is it better to use a stronghold or would any exploited system be the same?
And is LYR any different from other Powers in the rewards for mining?
Click to expand...
I'm not sure about either of those. Wargis (a stronghold) is the only system I've tried mining and selling in so far. The rewards from other powers should be the same as the trade dividend from LYR doesn't seem to affect the merits gained from selling. The dividend is just more money after the fact. The real benefit to mining for merits is that there is no penalty or diminishing returns for selling all your tonnage at once. With bought commodities, the diminishing returns (as far as merits) are severe.
 

Darrack

Darrack
Neilski said:
Sounds good!
Is it better to use a stronghold or would any exploited system be the same?
And is LYR any different from other Powers in the rewards for mining?
Click to expand...
I currently mine in a stronghold system, HIP 118213 (Pranav Antal).
It has a large port which is good for my T10 and refitting, you can sell anything for merits even if its not listed in the stations Buy section so i hoover up everything from the rocks even stuff like Silver/Gold etc.
In the past i have mined in some local Reinforced systems but here in Utopia we are restricted for decent spots.

O7
 

Dragsham

Dragsham
Rares are still 'down' ie not tradeable for merits. With almost 6000 of em on my carrier i wish they'd sort this out.
Can't speak for laser mining.
Per 10 ore hand in, but for me with core mining monazite, granditerite, rhodplumsite, etc I was getting over 2000 merits per 10 (to avoid bulk tax if demand was low to zero) ores.
I chose various systems so as not to go over the same routes/rings which would obviously become depleted.
Criteria was Boom, refinery/industrial, allied.
Reached 100 in 3 days. Not flogging it to death neither.
Now playing PP chess getting 3000 merits per 500 points.

o7
 

Neilski

Neilski
OK, am slightly puzzled by the outcome of my quick test mining run, because firstly the "1 at a time" route is apparently yielding fewer merits than "all at once" for me, and more interestingly the return rates weren't behaving consistently for different commodities so maybe something else is going on.

I came back with 31 Tritium, 1 Bromellite, and 14 LTDs. This was in a Fortified system btw.

I sold 1 Tritium first, getting 40 merits for 57585 CR, thus 1439.6 CR/merit, and then the other 30 together, getting 1296 merits for 1727550 CR, i.e 1333.0 CR/merit - i.e. a significantly better rate (by massively more than the round-off error associated with the 40 merits).

The single Bromellite went for 72767 CR and gave 52 merits - so 1399.4 CR/merit there. This is also not consistent with it being the same CR/merit return rate barring round-off error: even if I had received an extra merit (53) that would still have been a worse rate than for the batch of Tritium, at 1373.0 CR/merit. So, is there some kind of offset or threshold, or a commodity-dependent ratio...?

Finally, the first LTD sold for 201106 CR and gave 148 merits, thus 1358.9 CR/merit, with the final 13 going for 2614378 and giving 1964 merits, thus 1331.1 CR/merit. This is for sure very nearly the same rate as for the batch of Tritium, but yet I still can't find a single "master" CR/merit ratio which would round up/down/nearest to the precise number of merits I actually got for the Tritium and LTD batch sales. I guess I have to interpret this as meaning that something else is going on, but it's early days and some of you may already understand this stuff well enough to fill in the blanks.
 

Inscydeus

Inscydeus
Bounty hunting in reinforcement systems seems pretty good to me - especially when paired with scanning/defending megaships and blowing up enemy power ships when they happen by.
 

Dragsham

Dragsham
@Neilski

Demand?
cos your selling where you mine them your subject to that local economy.
I found after selling about 10 or so 320T loads that the weirdness kicks in when demand is low to zero. Bulk tax rears it's ugly head too although that's just credits affected not sure if it affects merits, I didn't wanna risk It so sold em in batches of 10. Or 20 if demand was present.
What I did find was say I'd had a 320T load made up of 200 monazite, 70 granditerite, and the rest ltds, void opals etc, after selling the lesser ones, coming to the monazite which l knew per 10 was 2k+ merits, after say 160 of em sold the next 10 wouldn't give any merits at all! So id have 30 left and sell em for as good a price as possible elsewhere.
So naturally I sold the high value ores on the next loads first.
No idea why this is so.. and it's not always happening. I guess demand has a say?
But overall I'd say that if demand is very high then yes sell the whole 200 monazite for example all at once. But l didn't do that I just didn't wanna risk it
 

Neilski

Neilski
Dragsham said:
Demand?
Click to expand...
Well, demand doesn't seem to be playing a role for me so far.
Just did another quick run with limited time and mined a combination of Bromellite, Grandidierite, LTD and Void Opal. The demand was zero for all but the LTD, and yet the Grandidierite - which had the highest total sale price - gave me the best CR/merit rate. This time I sold 2 of each mineral, one at a time, and then all the rest in one go, and I got precisely the same price and merit count as for the post above for Brom and LTD. A 1-hour run was still enough to give me over 10k merits.
 

BelExandor

B
I can confirm that (in my case) demand had zero impact. The station I sold 1100 tons to (two separate loads) had 0 demand for platinum. Made no difference at all. They still paid me 194K per ton without penalty to either credits or merits.
 

Darrack

Darrack
Neilski said:
OK, am slightly puzzled by the outcome of my quick test mining run, because firstly the "1 at a time" route is apparently yielding fewer merits than "all at once" for me, and more interestingly the return rates weren't behaving consistently for different commodities so maybe something else is going on.

I came back with 31 Tritium, 1 Bromellite, and 14 LTDs. This was in a Fortified system btw.

I sold 1 Tritium first, getting 40 merits for 57585 CR, thus 1439.6 CR/merit, and then the other 30 together, getting 1296 merits for 1727550 CR, i.e 1333.0 CR/merit - i.e. a significantly better rate (by massively more than the round-off error associated with the 40 merits).

The single Bromellite went for 72767 CR and gave 52 merits - so 1399.4 CR/merit there. This is also not consistent with it being the same CR/merit return rate barring round-off error: even if I had received an extra merit (53) that would still have been a worse rate than for the batch of Tritium, at 1373.0 CR/merit. So, is there some kind of offset or threshold, or a commodity-dependent ratio...?

Finally, the first LTD sold for 201106 CR and gave 148 merits, thus 1358.9 CR/merit, with the final 13 going for 2614378 and giving 1964 merits, thus 1331.1 CR/merit. This is for sure very nearly the same rate as for the batch of Tritium, but yet I still can't find a single "master" CR/merit ratio which would round up/down/nearest to the precise number of merits I actually got for the Tritium and LTD batch sales. I guess I have to interpret this as meaning that something else is going on, but it's early days and some of you may already understand this stuff well enough to fill in the blanks.
Click to expand...
Sell all at once then repeat, waste of time selling 1 at a time
BelExandor said:
I can confirm that (in my case) demand had zero impact. The station I sold 1100 tons to (two separate loads) had 0 demand for platinum. Made no difference at all. They still paid me 194K per ton without penalty to either credits or merits.
Click to expand...
I have found that system demand really makes no difference, yes some places give slightly more but im still getting decent returns at stations with no demand.

Ive been treating this as a gentle plod, do some of the missions and then a bit of mining (which i normally do anyway), im at Rank 81 atm, there's no rush, plenty of work to do for the Simguru.

O7
 

Shurimal

Shurimal
Vraska Venge said:
Its been a month and I'm curious what the best methods are.

I'm aware of this - https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet...5v5r6WEa3tONLBOBQolhZodhlJFyUsiY3cpc/pubhtml#

but not sure how up to date that is. More so curious what the best ways to get gains are besides rares trading, which I believe is still disabled
Click to expand...
Seems to be very out-of-date. Eg, in an acquisition system I get 92 merits per stolen Powerplay goods from settlements; 360 merits from stolen Powerplay data and 248 merits per Powerplay malware upload; and in reinforcing systems I get 20 merits per ship scan. Which scales quite well with the difficulty/risk of said tasks.
 

Hanerib

Hanerib
So how do you do this mining, are there like guides or something? I never seem to find anything and not get much credits or merits anyway. This morning I got so frustrated I started shooting system security ships instead and ended up with some notoriety.
 

Darrack

Darrack
Hanerib said:
So how do you do this mining, are there like guides or something? I never seem to find anything and not get much credits or merits anyway. This morning I got so frustrated I started shooting system security ships instead and ended up with some notoriety.
Click to expand...
Who are you pledged to? Maybe i can have a look and give you an idea.

O7
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom