Armorsmith Archive

Malgg, if a harvester goes more than an hour or two without maintenance, it's more cost effective to replace it than to repair it, especially if you've got the skills to build your own. There are some owners who never pay maintenance, who just run their harvesters to zero condition, collect whatever they get, and build new ones. However, paying maintenance allows you to harvest much more efficiently and cleanly.

You pay maintenance on-site at the harvester location.

Unless I had credits to burn, I would definitely take down harvesters before going on vacation. As mentioned, there's always the chance the material will run out five minutes after you leave, meaning you spent over 10,000 cr for 16 units of material.

Personal harvesters are slower than sampling by hand. Their sole advantage is that they work 24/7, for a price.

The maintenance isn't much of a chore if you a) prepay several days in advance, or b) are out there anyway to collect materials.

The market for raw materials is still settling, but you should be able to finance a harvester just by selling part of the output on the bazaar. During the beta I was getting 10 cr per unit of water... but it was REALLY good water (900+ in both attributes).

But yeah, there is a time investment involved and harvesters tend to tie you down to one location to some extent. It might be cost effective to plop them down just before you retire for the night, log out beside them, and then collect when you wake up... but that runs the risk of waking up next to something even more alien than an uncaffeinated human female.

Harvesters run much slower than someone manually gathering resources. Their advantage is the fact that you can run as many of them as you can afford, each pulling different sets of minerals. You run around once a day, dump the hoppers, add some energy, pay maintenance and you're off to the next.

Cheers

Well, this gives me stuff to think about. I may just stick with the sample-by-hand method, since I'm gonna be working on my combat skills out in the wild anyway.

Thanks for the info, all!

"Their advantage is the fact that you can run as many of them as you can afford, each pulling different sets of minerals."

Partially correct, you can only have 10 buildings placed at a time. I wish I could run 50 harvesters at a time because I definitely have the resources to make them, hehe.

Zane

Malgg,

The harvesters are a time SAVER especially if you're primarily a combat. Set them up and run them for a couple days. You'll end up with thousands of resources. Re-deed the harvesters, and bank your deeds and excess resources. When your resource reserves run low again, break out the harvesters for another couple days. Two days worth of harvester output should last you weeks though if you're not a full-time crafter.

-When i put down a harvester and check its status, it has a maintenace requirement of 25 and power requirement of 15, what exactly does that mean?

-Is it 25 credits/minute and 15 power units/minuteto maintain the harvester?The credit maintenance is not too bad, When you put some credits in,it tells you how many days,hours the maintenance fee you just put in will last but the power maintenance, when i put in some wind energy,it gives me a number like 1:52. Can someone explain what these numbers mean?Thx in advance for your responses.

Personal harveters require:

720 cr per day to run

600 units of power (though this will change in the future with the implementation of potential energy )

2 kg/hr translates to 200 units of resource per hour assuming a 100% concentration.

the power readout on your harvester counts incriments of 60 to the left of the colon,, and straight hours up to 60 hours on the right of the colon. So 2:37 is actually 2 x 60 hours + 37 hours, or in total 157 hours. Don't ask me why they did this.

Medium Harvies:

1440 cr per day.

1200 units of power.

Heavy Harvies:

2160 cr per day.

1800 units of power.

Hope that helps.

This is all currently a mystery, and not a single person, neither the CSR nor the developers can tell you what the intent there was when it comes to these numbers.

Oh, im sure plenty of us could tell you what they are "supposed" to mean, but currently, they all pretty much mean 2 things: jack, and you can guess the other.