Architect Archive
Thread: Do Architects ever need Miners?
I'm not an architect, but reading your posts I can see that most of you are harvesting your own resources, which makes sense I guess because you are able to make your ownharvester deeds quite easily.
I am working on a character who is a dedicated miner. My goal is to travel the planets (especially the dangerous ones), locate and mine resources, kill critters who get in my way, and just generally have fun exploring. I'm not doing it for the money, although I will need a small stream of credits to survive and I'm hoping the miningcan provide that.
My questions are:
1. Would architects ever want to do business with a character like this or is it just easier and cheaper to harvest your own resources like you've been doing? Perhaps I should stick with water, flora and fiberplast for the other crafters...
2. Would architects be most interested in mass quantities of metals/ores in general, or is there higher interest in the "rares" (a specific type of copper or iron, for example).
3. How would architects prefer to do business witha miner? Purchasing lots of 100-500 units off bazaar? Visiting a miner's store, stocked with various resources? Working personally with the miner, putting in special orders for quantity and type? Buying waypoints to veins that the miner finds, so they can place their own harvesters?
I'm just trying to puzzle out the player economy right now, so please don't take this as a troll for business. And thank you in advance for your responses. I think more players would consider full-time mining if they could see how it fits in with the other professions (as I'm hoping it would fit with architects).
In short:
If you can supply LARGE quantities of minerals, then yes. Somewhere in the region of 2000+ ore or steel.
Rather ironically, you might be interested in some of the architects high level harvesters if you wish to be a dedicated miner (This did exist as a profession once upon a time!)
Inklepod
what i have run into is that people dont seem to understand the quintiies that we need...they want to sell me like 500 or 700...
I need 1000s.....if any amount is under 2K units i am not interested..
Then they want to sell it to you for 7 a unit so like 15K fro 2000 units
Now my market is ruined and the resources cost more than the products
As an architect, it has always been more cost effective to use harvestors...some say that a miner is more efficient in sampling but 4 harvetsors will supply me with more in a day than you could.
If i see 1 more 50 unit rsource conatiner on sale at the Bazaar for 2500 i am just going to puke
The other day I had an excellent idea for the miner profession -
We're always looking for better resources for our equipment. (Especially the weapon smiths) I've got a friend who refuses to use anything but Twiderwhatever copper for his guns.
Wouldn't it be awesome if miners could smealt? They could take two materials and combine them into a better material. The best stat weapons, armor, houses, etc would come from miner only resources. You could of course gather the inferior resources on your own, but they wouldn't be as good as the smelted resources.
Miners could also recieve faster harvesting, lower harvester upkeep, etc.
I think there were plenty of ways that the devs could have made the miner profession interesting (especially with ore smelting!)
1) I would love to do business with a character like yours. Unfortunately at the moment people are selling products for less than I can buy the resources from you. I think 2-4 creds/unit is a reasonable sell price. Most everything should cost 3 creds/unit.
2) We just need ores mainly. Ore consumption is usually 2 to 3 times higher than any other material consumption. When it does ask for metals, it usually just asks for metals or non-ferrous metals. As far as I can tell quality of materials doesn't do anything for a building.
3) If you ever get a shop running I'm sure it would be really popular. I would recommend selling in stacks of 2.5K and 5K though if you're catering for the architect market.
Basically as the situation stands now, it'll be a tough profession for you. However hopefully after the grinding slows down the prices will rise, especially considering people are going to have to constantly move the harvesters around. I think people that are truly becoming architects to sell to other people will be more than happy to buy materials if they're reasonably priced.
If you want to seek out and sell rare materials, I suggest you post on the weaponsmith and possibly the medic boards.
If you want to sell huge amounts of materials where quality of the material is of no concern, then you've come to the right place 
I would be interested in buying ore...but you would have to be able to supply at a minimum 5k at a time.
You'll need harvesters at some point and a plan but once you've got those its a matter of waiting until folks get to the point they can't keep digging their own and do the other things they want to do in the quantity they want. Thats when miners have a market then. Much like UO in many ways.
A bit of note for you though, 2 long range city to city delivery missions taking 16 minutes each will produce more cash for you right now. It takes about 8.1 credits a mined unit to beat it at that pace assuming you're survey iv and sampling 80% area. When you have to support harvesters figure in cost of time dealing with them, more costs surveying multiple locations and such it gets nasty.
So in summary for now if I were you I'd up combat skills (mining in middle of nowhere is dangerous at times) do missions for capital and sample up a couple score-thousand materials and bank them.
xaldin wrote:
A bit of note for you though, 2 long range city to city delivery missions taking 16 minutes each will produce more cash for you right now. It takes about 8.1 credits a mined unit to beat it at that pace assuming you're survey iv and sampling 80% area....
LOL! Dude I cannot even sell a small house for 8.1 creds/unit! That would be 27500 creds. 3 creds/unit is a very fair price for any amount of resources. Harvesters run all the time for about 1 cred/unit, and hand sampling is only if you really are into it. Look at this way. How much are you making from your harvesters while you're doing those delivery missions?
-Leishea
No course you can't, people are skilling up off making them hense the market is flooded. I know that. You're going rate for them honestly should be about 10 per but you may never reach that point, it may be a perpetual loss leader for architects due to its placement on the skill tree.
The mined unit price I worked out is a 'point of reference'. However I will say I get double your credits per unit that you list right now easily on the bazaar market selling in lots of 500 for 3000 (after the 20 credit fee so comes out to just under 6 per unit). I always sell out too. Everything I put to market goes poof, that's tellling me there is a viable market to challenge the delivery missions, it just has to get a little higher to totally replace it. It also tells me that some folks hate digging their own all the time. A good sign for miner types. That said I'm obviously not at the 8.1 that I see the market needing but then the entire system has just started rolling. It'll be a few months but I'm content to sit on thousands of units until it does and just sell small batches for a while to suppliment my destroy mission income.
Now with harvesters you have a whole nother ball of wax. First they're slow as hell, least until the heavies come out which I haven't been able to procure yet to test rates on. Plus you have the service fee to pick them back up when the resource changes or the cost of a new one (Eventually I'll finish up the math on them but that'll take a bit). That said currently I can mine what my harvesters do in a day with just slightly more than an hour of sample macroing in the same spot. I'll work out the full math on it later once I get excel reloaded, it's bugged.
In the months to come however I fully expect mined unit price to come up to somewhere between 7 and 10. Speciality units (tons of 900+ in the stats) may go for higher but the price average I'm expecting to be around 7-8. Take a long term view of things. What you can sell for today is immaterial in the extreme. The system just started. Look at what you can sell for tomorrow is what matters.
You can't sell waypoints. At least at as a miner, I wouldn't be stupid enough to buy them. The resources will always change, so you will get screwed over and have to look elsewhere. Miners are better off just scouting on their own.