Shipwright Archive
Thread: Harvesting Resources as a MSW
IIscandar wrote:
By having a couple of friends let me borrow their placed harvestors and with my own, I have 10 going all the time. 6 that are stationary mineral harvestors, then I switch out the other 4 and move them around as needed. I harvest anything that a shipwright might need. When I buy stuff it is usually resources that have not spawned in a long time and I've run out. Like Polymetric radioactive. Been awhile since a really good spawn was on corbantis.
How well are the stationary harvesters working for you? I've considered doing that, but I've always moved mine around. Since I just have one medium house, I typically have my harvesters split such that I have 4 on one material, and 3 or 4 on another (depending on whether I'm also running my generator). I'll harvest a material for the 5 to 9 days it typically sticks around from the time I find it, before picking up and moving to another location. I've sometimes spent as long as 45 minutes surveying for one material to find the best location. And I'm tired of that.
In the last few weeks, especially after the CU, I've started getting more aggressive about keeping the harvesters close to home.. but before that I was typically harvesting on deposits that were 80-98%.
Anyway, my rule of thumb is to harvest everything you can yourself, and only buy what you'd otherwise have a hard time finding, or need in a hurry. Generally the resource market is full of gouging. If you harvest on deposits that are maybe 75% or higher, with heavy harvesters, you end up paying less than 0.2 or 0.25 CPU, even taking into account the energy you had to harvest with a generator (if I remember correctly, and also ignoring the up-front cost of buying the harvesters themselves). Keep that in mind the next time someone wants you to pay 3 CPU for average material.
Depending on what I need, I usually try to hit the shipwright specific resouces - they seem to stay in shift for a really long time (I ended up with 1.5 million of that 999 OQ perovskitic aluminum that was in shift recently - it stuck around forever).
Using all 7 of my spare lots, and always having them pulling something useful, I have rarely needed to buy resources. Actually, I've only done so a few times since mastering and only when it's such a good deal I'd be stupid not to. I don't run a huge operation, but I keep my vendors pretty well stocked and I still always have surplus resources. I finished my first firespray schematic last week and I made 4 of them in one sitting using the best stuff I had (ended up with 212k mass which I believe is pretty good) and I still had some of those resources leftover.
I harvest in shifts, so when I find some fiberplast or aluminum or whatever with good stats and a good concentration, I'll throw all 7 harvesters at it and just stock up. Whenever I have enough of the lesser used resources I'm down on steel. Of course, I spend a lot of time babysitting the damn things, and I had to sacrifice some crafting stuff to master pistoleer so I didn't get my butt handed to me every time I went outside, but otherwise it works out pretty well for me.
If you can manage to always have harvesters down on good concentrations you can probably avoid having to buy much. Of course, that depends entirely on how much you craft...