Artisan Archive

I don't mind harvesting things and managing my infrastructure, I make verygood money from sales of premiumresources(>800 quality in most areas)to demanding artisans at c4-c8/unit, and a little from selling any good weapons I craft. I play1-3 hours a night, which is plenty to keep things running, and even slip in a tiny bit of role-playing after I run all over the planet micro-managing my harvesters. The biggest time sink I've run into is surveying for veins of good-quality materials. Surveying isn't any more boring than running destroy missions over and over for money, but I don't want to do either - I want to run my business and actually have 10 minutes to spare to talk to other people, relax, and enjoy the game.

There are several master surveyors running around the game - I see them everywhere, but unless they can make a living passing on survey information, they aren't going to just run around surveying and giving that info away. It's a real shame that waypoints can't be auctioned on the bazaar, this would help a lot. Until then, does anyone have any ideas what sort of pay rates would be good enough motivation for surveyors to bring us info about resource concentrations? If they charged c1000 for each waypoint to a concentration over 50% would this be enough to keep them happy? I'd definately pay that much if it was a good resource, and if they sold each waypoint to 3-4 people they should be making a good living since they have no overhead. I don't really see anyone selling resource info as of yet though, so any suggestions on how to encourage them would help us all out. Let's here some ideas.

tryswgcraft.com they have a running resource reporting page.

You could still sell that info. It would be tough though.

You'd have to trust the seller. First to tell the truth, and second to not have already sold the info to 10 other people. (Yep it's 90%, but there are already harvesters in every direction.)

Add to that the fact that resource turnover occurs, you don't know how long the information would be any good.

Most all artisan professions max out Survey early and cap out at something like 20K xp. It might be a hold over from (or prelude to the return of) the miner profession from Beta.

It might be nice if at Survey IV, a spec was granted for soil analysis tools. These would be like the survey tools, but they would give a report on all (of a certain type) resource concentrations in the area. Much like the resource selection in the harvester menus. It would be even more useful if that soil sample analysis showed the stats on each resource found.

I am an arch but i have sold the info, though i have also givin it away for free just because i have no intrest in being a **edit** plus i'm just that nice

Ramses, try this: ASK someone! If you're an architect, and you see a Droid Engineer wandering around, ASK him where his harvesters are at or where he's found good % of materials. Chances are, since you're not a competitor to him especially, he'll tell you for FREE. Occasionally, DEs need Architects, just like Armorsmiths need Tailors, etc. Trust me, any elite Artisan worth his salt will help you out for free if they can.