Artisan Archive

I let it run without maintenance for about 30 minutes. It tells me that its 95% and it'll cost 980 credits to repair. How do I give it the 980 credits to repair? When I threw money at it, it just put it into the maintenance pool.

Also,

It say on my extractor that the "Maintenance Rate" is 30. But its using 30 of the maintenance pool alot faster than a REALTIME hour. What is the exact time unit used in thie "rate" and how is it converted to REAL TIME. (ie Is it an ingame hour, and if so, how long is an ingame hour irl.)

Thanks for the info.

I'd like the answer to the repair question too. I've been told that if you let it get to the "needs repair" stage, it's already too late and more expensive than just fronting the maintenance cost.

Place your harvester and dump 2000 creds into it up front. This gets you 2.7 days of maintenance. What I don't know is if these are real-time days. They seem to be, butmine has only been up for half a day, so I have to check tonight.

Remember folks, harvesters aren't supposed to be cheap. If you don't want to bother, and you're in Theed on Gorath, email me and I'll sell you the metals you need

-Faesheaki, Engineer, Theed, Gorath

I disagree that its "too expensive". Supposedly, building health affects your output. If Im losing 5%, that means last night I woulda got 20 more units than I did, in that six hour stretch of time. Per REAL day, thats 80 alum its not harvesting. I need to get that repaired, because 80 alum is 800 credits. The profit lost by paying the repair fee can easily be made up in one day, at least with my damage.

This is information that we need to know to create this "player run" economy that they want us us to make for them. In other words, they need to provide this information to us. Preferably within in-game documentation.

Harvest status screens are one of the only ones I've found that dont have a help button. WHY?

This information is required to properly set cost-of-business and market pricing to achieve a decent profit and establish competition in the game that isnt driven soley on whoever is willing to guess the most and lose the most money to expirimentaiton.

Thanks for the info.

I didn't mean it's too expensive to do the repairs. What I meant was that you are better off just paying the maintenance costs up front and never letting the machine get below 100%

I don't know if this is true, but it sure seems that way. When the thing gets to 85%, your repair bill will be a couple grand. And that can happen in 1 day's time without maintenance. That same money up front will keep it humming twice as long.

To give an idea how expensive repairs can get, I have one I let go on purpose and it was at 60% this morning. The repair bill was more than 10000 credits! Needless to say that thing is getting deconstructed tonight and replaced with a nice new one.

Absolutely. I didnt have any credits available at the time. I even had a friend come out and put all he had into it, but it didnt last long enough to make the trip to town and back, hence hte 5% loss on both buildings.

A harvester's maintenance rate is the number of credits required to run the harvester for 30 minutes. So, Personal Harvesters (rate 15) need 720 credits/day. Wind Generators (rate 30) need 1440 credits/day.

The power consumption rate is the amount of power required to run the harvester for 1 hour. So, personal harvesters (rate 25) need 600 power/day.

ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS pay your maintenance in advance. Repair costs are significantly higher that maintenance costs.

If you do fall behind and need to repair, just pay the repair funds into the maintenance pool. The harvester will automatically fix itself. At least, that's how it worked in Beta.

Thanks for the info folks! It seems to me that theoretically resources should cost enough to make a newharvester cost about the same as keeping one up would, or at least close. But currently the economic availability of resources seems to keep their bulk price around 2 credits per unit. So if your harvester gets you a few thousand units a day, you can sell, say, 30% of them to pay for maintenance.

This isn't a bad rate on its face, but when you compare it to how much it would cost in resources to build a new harvester every day to replace the one, it's still a LOT cheaper overall to simply rebuild them.

I think they need to figure out how to balance this. Either by reducing harvester rates, thereby driving up the cost of resources, or by reducing the maintenance cost by at least half (thereby bringing it closer to the cost of rebuilding.

However, if you aren't able to build your own harvester, and if the price stays around 3000 credits on the bazaar, then it's cheaper to pay 800 credits a day to keep it running than it is to buy a new one every few days.

Someone told me you can use radioactive resources as power for extractors. Is that true?

Yes indeed, radioactives can be used to power harvesters. The nice thing about that is the mineral harvester you use to gather the resources costs less maintenance-wise than a wind generator.

The downside, however, is that you need to dump back some of your radioactives to power the harvester that creates them, but you oftend end up with a better deal getting radioactives than with wind power (at least from my experiences on eclipse's Corellia, I have yet to see a wind resource area above 50% concentration, while radioactives are commonly in the 75% or more range).

An update for people whom are going the replace-over-repair method: remember to empty your harvester before it goes to 0% and breaks, and don't overstock a harvester near death with power, as there is no way to retrieve it once deposited. As harvesters loose efficiency with the damage they take, I would suggest replacing them at 50%, or even sooner if you wish. It may also be a good idea to mix replacement with maintenance, keeping energy producing harvesters at 100% while just replacing mineral, gas, and chemical producing harvesters.

Ok, so here are a few more questions, since we have some harvester knowledgeable folks looking in.

When can you build solar harvesters?

Do they cost the same maintenance as wind?

Is solar more prevalent than wind?

Do wind and solar resources run out too, resulting in a need to reprogram your energy harvesters?

Do radioactive resources power for the same time as the other two?

Thanks!

More questions;

- What skill is required to build harvesters? I'm at ENG II but haven't seen them yet. I'll be getting ENG III today.

- How do you all handle emptying harvesters? Don't the resources fill your pack?

The first harvesters are at Eng 3, with the rest at Eng 4.

When you empty the harvester, they resources are just like when you sample manually. They are in a single stack, up to 100,000 units. Each stack takes up 1 spot in your inventory. The units are very small.

Don't get used to building-and-let-rot, extracting. That's basically an exploit, and ALSO doesnt contribute to the economy in any way. They'll fix it by making damage to your extractor really impact your output alot. and thats fine.

I cant wait til they do, so people actually start doing real business, instead of just throwing away harvesters left and right.

Thanks for the info, however.