Artisan Archive
Thread: Are Harvesters worth it?
How'd you ever make MA with ever using harvesters?
Like a lot of other things, it takes some practice to do well, and activities that some folks enjoy and others don't. It isn't suprising that you didn't feel successfull on your first attempt.
You don't say what your skills are like, but an optimized "city crafter" as you call it isn't the same as you would want for harvesting. To harvest effectivly you need good enough combat skill so that a kreetle attack can be dealt with by reflex (no need to use specials), and so that you don't spend too much re-insuring clones. A few scout skills to mask scent are nice as well, but not as big a deal now with fast transportation instead of having to run everywhere.If you really hate being attacked, and risking death, you may hate mining.
Others have talked about the economics, but not really on the time sink involved. You will spend a fair amount of time surveying for resources, and more servicing your harvesters. It pay to look at each one every day, since they will continue to eat maint when the resources shift. You can easily consume 2 hours of playtime a day just atmining. Selling excess resources is on top of that, the bazaar quickly becomes ineffective for the purpose due to the price limit. You have also comitted to signing on almost every day, as a harvester is a huge money sink if maint runs out or resources shift. Your harvester's won't care if your baby is sick or your friend has an extra ticket to the big game, they will catch on fire and cost a fortune to repair anyway.
Mining scales nicely as you get into it, without an obvious upper bound. You can move up from personals to heavies to triple your product, and findfolks who will rent lot space. If you make good sales contacts you can readilyreach millionaire levels doing just that. But to do that, you will be spending most of your time on it and be playing quite a different game.
Lots of soloexploration and self defense in that game, along with calling players at home to see why they haven't showed up to move that harvester since the resource shift. Not everyone's cup of tea.
If you don't like it, let somebody who does sell you resources and there will be two happier players.
As the spokesman for Pittville Sand& Gravel, I say no. Buy your resources from us. Grind quality material is never more than 2cr/unit. <grin>
On the other hand, if you can't find a mining outfit to get a reliable supply of material from running your own harvesters is well worth it. To be honest about it, I used to run a Fusion Ion, 2 Med. Mineral and 1 Chem (all built by a guild mate before experimentation, so I had a FIG at 13, and the Med.s at 4 each. Gave me more than enough resources to grind with and I had plenty of excess that I sold to make a small fortune...I was in a rather large guild so if I needed a resource I couldn't mine with those harvesters I traded for it. Of course as soon as I maxxed that character I got tired of playing her...
Now I'm the Station frontman for a small Mining outfit on Talus where we play the market from a little bit. Right now we have more havesters than lots, so we just keep our Fusion Ion's and water harvesters running and try and find a good resource for the rest. I spend about 2 hours a week or so moving the Fusions, the rest of my game time is mine. We have others though that have been spending large amounts of their in game time chasing resources. It depends on what you like spending your time doing....
Sure they're worth it. I'm a mostly combat class. I just started dabbling with mining the other day. I've got the novice artisan and like surveying 1 
Hey, I run all over planets, killing things. Might as well check to see what it is I'm running over. Course the negative side for me not being that familiar with the artisan class is knowing how to price things. I picked up some Dylinium Intrusive and played around it with it on the bazaar for a few days. Started at 3 cpu and ended up at 10 cpu.
Been miner almost from a start and yes it's worth it. Problem is a start, least first week or 2 because you dont propably have much cash and power. What I did was that I made missions enough for buying 8 personal mineral harvesters and2 wind harvies and enough cash for 2 day maintenance. I did enough destroy missions for next 2 days and so on. After 3 weeks I was earning enough to make profit and didnt have to do missions for getting maintenance (also got armada of personal harvies)
I didnt use hardly any resource myself so I was on my own faster. Now I have 10 of each mediums (er10) I can make really good living, havent done missions for credits for ages. It's tiresome sometimes but if you do play a lot I can say it's must for any crafter and pays out.
With 1 ER9 wind generator and 3 ER10 mid harvester, I’m pulling in .5mil a week at 3c/unit. The holocrazy is killing the game but is a huge boom for miners. Most holo grinders will need 200k of metal to complete a crafting profession, not to mention, Reactive Gasses, Ores, Fiberplast.
No, harvesters are not worth it. Your likely to have some nasty spawn all over them. You have to maintenance them every few days. You may even need to fly to far off planets to put them down on the "good" spots. No, definitely not worth it.
And since they suck so much, you probably don't need your lots (or at least not 10 of them). Therefore, I'll take your lots. I'll suffer through all of the pain of maintaining those dreaded harvs, while you have fun doing whatever else you enjoy doing.
I put one personal wind generator on a 50-60% resource location and can get enough power to run 2-3 personal mineral harvesters.
Thanks for the input on harvesters, I've found new interest in them and found a spot to mine Ice that looks like an awesome resource.
As for how I made MA without harvesters, that was easy: I'm a Smuggler. I need lots of metal and copper and build slicing tools all the time. These tools give general craft xp. if you have a ton of copper its easy to make many many tools with just the one resource. What i didn't just sample, I bought. I considered myself a city crafter (I bought from all of you) and just made tools along the way. I didnt power grind to the profession, I just realized one day 'Hey, I'm close to MA'. Since training any skill to people gives the same AP, I had enough. Artisan was what I started off as but took an Artisan sabaticle to be a smuggler. So I can slice missions to make a bunch of money to feed harvesters.
I'm learning from your posts and trying to make the process easier by placing power havesters close enough to the mineral harvesters. That and not relying on 1 wind generator.
-Netherbeast
The only harvestors that are good are the advanced ones. I am a Arcutect/Droid Engineer/Master Artsian on Shadow Fire and all the Harvestors that I build are cheapbecause on arcutect im /0/0/1/0 right now. But I guess if you got the money and/orresorcesfor the good ones i guess there worth it.