Basic Mining Guide

A miners life in Project Entropia can be a peaceful one, well, peaceful if you ignore the noise of the exploding bombs and the attacking monsters that is!

There are currently two types of mining available, called 'ores' and 'enmatter', think of these as metals and liquids, the process is the same for each but the equipment used is different, for simplicity, we will look at mining ore's only.

Miners roam the land exploring every section looking for fertile grounds to extract minerals from.  If you like the life of an explorer, then mining may well be for you.  So lets have a look at the equipment needed and see how it's done.

Mining consists of three stages:
1, Finding a deposit
2, Extract it from the ground to your inventory
3, Refine it into usable ingots and use or sell it

In order to do this, you will need to start at the Trade Terminal to purchase equipment and supplies.  You will need to buy:

• Omegaton Detectonator MD10
• Genesis Star Earth Extractor ME/01
• Chikara Refiner MR/100
• Omegaton Seismic Bomb

The bombs are the ammunition used by the Detectonator, each time you check an area of land to see if it contains something, you use a bomb.

Now that you have all the equipment needed, select an area to mine and head out there.  You can mine almost anywhere, from the desert to the sea, and even in cities.

When you arrive at an area that you think is good, equip the detectonator by selecting it's hotkey and use it by pressing the left mouse button.  A bomb will be placed on the ground and it will start beeping, dont worry - it's not on a timer, it's remote controlled by your detectonator.  You need to be a small distance from the bomb before you can detonate it, so run away a little and then press the 'detonate' button on the Detectonator (unlock the mouse pointer with 'space' to do this)

The bomb will explode and transmit it's findings back to your detectonator, which will tell you if something has been found, it will also point the way to the centre of the deposit.

If nothing was found, then move on a little way and try again, once your detectonator indicates a deposit, move towards it using the arrows shown and look at the distance indicator to know when you are getting close.

Once you are close enough to the centre of the deposit, all 8 direction arrows on the detectonator will flash, and the 'print claim' button will become active. Press it and a Claim Rod will appear marking the deposit as being owned by you.

Now that you have found a deposit, you can extract it from the ground, for this you will need the Extractor tool, equip this on your avatar and stand in front of the claim rod.  Target the claim rod with the centre crosshair (a box will appear around it) and press the left mouse button.

The extractor will pull some of the deposit from the ground and a loot window will appear showing the raw minerals, keep clicking until all the deposit has been extracted, the claim rod will disappear when you have emptied it.  Press the 'take all' button to collect it.

You will now have some ore in your inventory, it can be quite heavy and if your avatar is too heavy, you will run slower.  Refining the ore into ingots will make it lighter so you can carry more, it also makes it easier to sell.

Equip the Refiner and press the left mouse button.  A refining window will appear as well as your inventory, drag the ore into the refining window and press the 'refine' button, this will convert the raw ore into refined ingots.

You can only refine 150 stones of ore at a time, and this will give you 50 ingots.  If you have more stones than this, you will need to split it into chunks of 150.  Do this by double-clicking with the left mouse button on the stack of ore in your inventory, a box will appear asking how much you would like to take off, type in 150 and press 'accept' repeat this if needed to turn it all into stacks of 150 or less.

Mining for 'enmatter' is almost the same, there are a few small differences:

The equipment used is:

• Omegator EnMatter Detectonator ED-10
• Genesis Star Energy Extractor EE/01
• Chikara Energy Refiner ER/100
• Omegaton Survey Probe

You do not need to move away from the probe in order to detonate it, the probes drill into the ground before exploding and so it's safe to stay close to them.

When you refine the raw enmatter, you need to do it in chunks of 100, which will make 50 refined units.

Dropping bombs
Dropping bombs and/or probes can be done in two diffrent ways. You may know an area and thus have your own opinion as to where the diffrent bombs/probes should be dropped. If you set out mining in an area you havent visited before you do not know where you should place the bombs and therefore you have to minimize the cost of finding areas wich contains minerals.

The figure to the left show how to search an area efficiently. The red lines indicates wich way you should be running (N, E, S, W) and the black circles indicate blast areas. It is generally thought that the blast radius is 45 meters. Therefore you have to run 90 meters to cover an area without overlapping the old blast mark. Those 90 meters is covered in 7-8 seconds in run mode. This pattern search leaves some, allbeit very small, holes. This way of mining should not be done when searching for new areas. This method is for covering areas wich contains minerals. When looking for new mineral sites it is adviced you run for minimum 32 seconds. This is due to the fact that profitable mineral sites often contains more than 4 claims in one direction. So by running for 8 * 4 seconds you will hit an area should you come past one.

Theories
There are endless theories about mining. All miners in Project-Entropia have their favourite theory they will die defending. The fact of the matter is sadly that no theory will work all the time. It has been confirmed from MindArk that even if they knew how the deposit respawn worked they wouldn't be able to predict it due to the fact that this game operates from input generated by every single participant.

Mining claims
When you get a claim it is often a good idea not to mine it until you have found another close by. If you find one claim chances are that you can continue in a straight line from the two first claims and find more deposits.

Leaving the claim rod standing while you explore for more deposits allows you to see where you have been, if you mine it out right away, you may end up trying the same places again and again.  Once you are sure you have all the deposits on the area marked, you should go back end extract them.

Be aware that the claim rods will not stay forever, they have a timer that will expire if not extracted soon enough, you should ensure that you leave yourself enough time to extract all your claims before they expire.