Game Guides Archive

Woot, first post! Um...anyway, on to my first attempt to write a guide. Sorry if this has already been explained, but I guess I'll just write this anyway.

For those of you who didn't know, harvesters are machines that take up 1 lot and can be placed on a nice flat peice of ground, similiar to a house, except the only thing interactive about them is the control panel. Also, there is basically aharvester for every type of resource. There are Mineral Miners, Chemical Extractors, Gas Harvesters, Flora Farms, Water Vaporizers, Solar Power Generators, Wind Power Generators, and Fusion-Ion generators (Radioactive, surveyed by a Mineral Survey device), althought the exact name of each may vary.

Some extremely basic harvesters can be crafted by Artisans, but if you're looking for anything decent, you should find a Master Architect, or his vendor, to find a higher-end harvester or generator. Before we continue, a few basic Vocabulary Terms:

Harv - shortened name for harvester. Can harvest mineral, chemical, gas, or water from the environment.

Gen - shortened name for generator. Can harvest solar power, wind power, or radioactive power from the environment.

Efficiency - Basically the % of concentration of the type of resource being harvested, same as the amount displayed by a surveying device.

BER - Base Extraction Rate. Equal to the amount of resources harvested per minute assuming the harv/gen is extracting from a 100% efficiency location.

Maintenance - Cost of running a harvester. Can be paid through the Radial menu under Pay Maintenance. If this hits 0, the harvester will deactivate, and if remains at 0 long enough will begin to decay and eventually disintegrate.

Power Supply - Amount of power need to run a harvester. To add power supply to a harv/gen, you must have Solar, Wind, or Radioactive power in your inventory, then use the radial menu to "Deposit Power". While a harvester will not decay if this hits 0, it will automatically deactivate until more is depositted and the harvester is reactivated.

Lots - You start off with 10 lots in SWG. They limit how many structures you can place. E.g Small Naboo houses take 2 lots, while PA guildhalls take all 10. To place a harvester, you must have at least 1 lot available.

Now that we have the basic terms explained, lets move on to how to use harvesters. First of all, determine which kind of resource you would like to harvest. If it is, say, dolovite iron, you will need a Mineral Miner. If it is Lokian Wild Wheat, you will need to go to Lok and place a Flora Farm. Once you know what type of harvester you need, you can just search around for which planet(s) has that resource available. For this you must use a surveying device, and have at least Novice Artisan, although having Surveying 4 makes concentration analysis much, much easier. To get Surveying XP, you must succesfully sample any type of resource. You can continue sampling and getting xp until your action or mind bar run out.

So, once you have found which resource you want to collect, surveyed for it, and found a high concentration of it, its time to place your harvester. Now, remember, like any other structure, the harvester cannot be placed within NPC city limits, on rough terrain, within a certain radius of creature lairs, or within the limits of a player city without zoning rights granted by the Mayor. Now onto extraction calculation.

The factors that affect how fast a certain type of resource is collected:

- Is the maintenance paid?

- Is there at least one hour's worth of power depositted?

- What is the BER of the harvester?

- What is the efficiency of the resource being collected?

Assuming the maintenance fees and power supply are paid, the formula for how many units of a resource are collected per minute is:

<BER> * <% of Efficiency> = Units / Minute

Just to make things easier, we are going to use the formula:

<BER> * <% of Efficiency> * 60= Units / Hour

This formula is very important when considering how much it will cost to run your harvester vs how many credits you will earn by selling the resources or crafting items. This formula is also the same for power generators. Example: I currently have seven harvesters running on Tatooine, and each of them require 75 units of power per hour. That means that, in order to produce my own power, I need to collect at least 525 units of power per hour. Now lets plug in the numbers on a 14 BER generator to determine what % efficiency I need to place it on in order to produce enough power to supply all of my harvs.

14 *X * 60 = 525

840 * X = 525

0.625 = 525

This means that, in order to supply all seven harvesters with power, I have to place my power generator on a location of at least 63% efficiency.

I hope this helps someone out, and please let me know if you have any questions.

Very nice guide, and well written. Just one thing.....Guild halls take up 9 lots, not 10.

Paladin- Hunter

Kettemoor's First Trandoshan Jedi Knight

7 now...lol

--Daetlus Marconia--

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