Gold mining tips?

[hexnessie]

So we all know how to get lots of iridium very very fast, but what is the most efficient way to do that with gold?

I.e. what level in the Mines / SC yield the largest number of gold nodes? Should I focus on going through SC or repeating levels 80-85?

(My Crystallarium fleet hit a snag when I went through thousands of gold in a week and now am short 40 machines of a full shed)

 

[FilthyGorilla]

Oof, I tend to buy the gold but honeslty the best If you are good at mining/combat is a skull cavern run.
I can get 400-500 per good run.
If not you should reset floor 80 but it is no where near as good as floor 40 in ore yeilds and you will only usually get 1-2 nodes average per floor if you have a lucky day.
When I do floor grinding early game though I do tend to skip to the floor 5 floors ahead then go down to the intended floor, this just allows me to scout a bit more for my time before going to the top of the mines.
So 85, look around for less than a second, then go to 80 and top again, repeat.
Hopefuly this works for you but gold is one of the most annoying ores to get if you don't want to spend money.

 

[One More Day]

If you just want gold ore, but don't want to spend money, just repeatedly visit floor 101 of the regular mines, preferably on a star luck day. Visit the floor, break the gold nodes then exit and repeat. Don't try and work your way down through the levels, that's just a waste of time.

If you make liberal use of explosives to save time, on a star luck day you can easily get hundreds of gold ore by continuously resetting the floor until 2am

 

[Giant Octopodes]

The Skull Cavern is nice-ish, in that you can get a lot of everything if you Deep dive and get to where overall node density is quite high. However to get to where it'll offer superior return on investment over the regular mines you need to be farming fairly deep, like at minimum 200+. The node density, combined with the inability to selectively target gold, are just not adequate at low levels. Just as a heads up as well, to my knowledge and based on documentation, the chance for ore spawns is not dependent on luck. It does affect the random ore drop rate from rocks, but not ore spawn density.

To that end, I personally tend to farm 81. The layout is great in that you can see if there are or are not nodes at a glance, and via resets you can get 200-300 quite easily without any expenditure of staircases and without flooding other ore types at the same time. Other floors work too of course but just like 41 for Iron (and Coal XD) I find the layout superior enough to outweigh any other considerations and I get more ore from it than farming elsewhere. So if I need *everything* (or resources only available in the SC, or if I want to for fun, etc) I'll deep dive the Skull Cavern. If I just need Gold Ore specifically and don't feel like draining resources to get it, regular mines are just fine.

Agreed though, Gold is the WORST! Why do Crystalariums require 5 Gold and 2 Iridium, why can't it be 2 Gold and 5 Iridium, personally I'd like that much better XD

 

[FilthyGorilla]

The Skull Cavern is nice-ish, in that you can get a lot of everything if you Deep dive and get to where overall node density is quite high. However to get to where it'll offer superior return on investment over the regular mines you need to be farming fairly deep, like at minimum 200+. The node density, combined with the inability to selectively target gold, are just not adequate at low levels. Just as a heads up as well, to my knowledge and based on documentation, the chance for ore spawns is not dependent on luck. It does affect the random ore drop rate from rocks, but not ore spawn density.

To that end, I personally tend to farm 81. The layout is great in that you can see if there are or are not nodes at a glance, and via resets you can get 200-300 quite easily without any expenditure of staircases and without flooding other ore types at the same time. Other floors work too of course but just like 41 for Iron (and Coal XD) I find the layout superior enough to outweigh any other considerations and I get more ore from it than farming elsewhere. So if I need *everything* (or resources only available in the SC, or if I want to for fun, etc) I'll deep dive the Skull Cavern. If I just need Gold Ore specifically and don't feel like draining resources to get it, regular mines are just fine.

Agreed though, Gold is the WORST! Why do Crystalariums require 5 Gold and 2 Iridium, why can't it be 2 Gold and 5 Iridium, personally I'd like that much better XD

The ore spawn rate actually is dependant on luck but to a very minimum rate.

 

[Elenna101]

I also prefer 81 over 101, because of the smaller space that you can see quickly, but it's not a huge difference IMO.

Oof, I tend to buy the gold but honeslty the best If you are good at mining/combat is a skull cavern run.
I can get 400-500 per good run.
If not you should reset floor 80 but it is no where near as good as floor 40 in ore yeilds and you will only usually get 1-2 nodes average per floor if you have a lucky day.
When I do floor grinding early game though I do tend to skip to the floor 5 floors ahead then go down to the intended floor, this just allows me to scout a bit more for my time before going to the top of the mines.
So 85, look around for less than a second, then go to 80 and top again, repeat.
Hopefuly this works for you but gold is one of the most annoying ores to get if you don't want to spend money.

Ore can't spawn on floors ending in 5 (at least in the regular mines, I think this is no longer true in SC? not sure). Maybe I'm missing something about the reason you're checking 85?

 

[hexnessie]

I mostly have been doing the 81 / 101 on repeat but was curious if maybe there's a better and more mathematical way to go about it.

My runs in SC generally turn up 200 gold to 500 iridium when I'm specifically trying for gold, so not ideal :(

I was wondering if the chance to get gold actually goes DOWN as you get to lower levels in SC because it all gets replaced by iridium.

 

[MissDandy]

The nice thing about mining in the regular mines though is that you can reset the most practical floors that you need for the day and access them again without having to use 80+ staircases. It's pretty practical to just do the same floors over and over again in a day, you don't lose too much time or too many resources.

 

[Giant Octopodes]

I mostly have been doing the 81 / 101 on repeat but was curious if maybe there's a better and more mathematical way to go about it.

My runs in SC generally turn up 200 gold to 500 iridium when I'm specifically trying for gold, so not ideal :(

I was wondering if the chance to get gold actually goes DOWN as you get to lower levels in SC because it all gets replaced by iridium.

Yes and no - it will Eventually, but I think you have to be DEEP to have that happen.

The Iridium will always be the most plentiful down there, but to get to where it's crowding out other ore spawns and you start getting LESS gold than if you were higher up, I think you'd need to get much further down than I ever do. On another thread NullObjects said it was 1780 to get 100% ore chance, and roughly 5700 to get 100% Iridium.

Oh nice, that data is already there. That's pretty neat. It looks like internally skull cavern was/is treated as floor 121+ in the mines and I noticed that every 5 floors there are 0% chances. With both these points in mind, did that mean there used to be elevators in skull cavern too?

According to the 1.4.1 data, it looks like at floor 1780 there is 100% chance of ore for each rock and blindly extrapolating it out, floor 5700 would be 100% chance of iridium?

Even with a script to automate (borderline cheating? ), I wonder if it is possible. I just learned about pause buffering, but wonder if there is some minimal amount of game ticks it requires in putting that staircase down and fading the screen out, etc.

I was farming for autopetters yesterday and ended up at floor 980ish before I found all the ones I was looking for (honestly just the worst imaginable luck, it was a lucky day with a total luck buff of +9, I only needed 4 but got 6 of just about everything else before finding my 2nd autopetter). I should've taken some screenshots but go figure half the rocks down there give or take were ore. So every floor was a cornucopia of iron, copper, gold, and iridium. I stopped digging and started bombing when I finally got everything I needed, around 6pm (a lot of time spent checking treasure chests after all) and got 400ish each of gold, iron, and copper, and 900ish iridium before the day was done.

Further down than 1780 and it would Definitely negatively impact your gold rate, but I wouldn't be surprised if for example 1500 is significantly better than 1000. 3 runs starting at 500 though are virtually guaranteed to get you more ore than 1 run starting at 1500 if you don't have essentially infinite staircases to work with though, and time spent getting to the floor in question is definitely a factor, especially if you can't pause buffer for any reason or just don't want to. So there's certainly not one clear and easy answer, but the tl;dr version is that within the bounds of reason, deeper is still better.

 

[hexnessie]

Yes and no - it will Eventually, but I think you have to be DEEP to have that happen.

Wow, thanks for the indepth explanation! I mostly do my SC runs around floor 200 (I mean, that's when I stop placing staircases and start bombing around) so I think I won't ever be in any danger of hurting my gold chances...

 

[FilthyGorilla]

I also prefer 81 over 101, because of the smaller space that you can see quickly, but it's not a huge difference IMO.


Ore can't spawn on floors ending in 5 (at least in the regular mines, I think this is no longer true in SC? not sure). Maybe I'm missing something about the reason you're checking 85?

Huh, I haven't mined intentially for gold for months and didn't know this, are you sure it is true? If so thank you for the info.

 

[hexnessie]

It also occurred to me I could transmute iron into gold.

Is that a viable strategy at all? Then it would take 15 iron bars to make a Crystallarium. I'm not sure that's much better than 5 gold...

 

[imnvs]

It also occurred to me I could transmute iron into gold.

Is that a viable strategy at all? Then it would take 15 iron bars to make a Crystallarium. I'm not sure that's much better than 5 gold...

If you don't need the copper, turn it into iron... and if you don't need the iron, turn it into gold. It's better than it sitting there going to waste.

 

[Virande]

If you willing to spend money to get the ores, Instead of buying from clint for 400g / 750g, you can buy Mega Bomb from the dwarf for 1000g and then using deconstructor machine, you will get 4 gold ore (@250g each)
It's also work for iron and copper ore if you are in year 2+, using the same method with bomb and cherry bomb respectively

Edit :
I checked the wiki, if you have level 7 fishing, it's more profitable if you buy treasure hunter tackle from willy...

 

[VampireCake]

Additional point to all the good suggestions here: make sure you have the mining perk that gives you +1 ore per vein at mining skill level 5. I know it's probably obvious but I didn't remember for ages when I was trying to collect Radioactive ore, and it really adds up!

 

[Giant Octopodes]

It also occurred to me I could transmute iron into gold.

Is that a viable strategy at all? Then it would take 15 iron bars to make a Crystallarium. I'm not sure that's much better than 5 gold...

It's actually only 2 iron bars for a gold one. Even if you're buying all the coal for that, it's still less than half the cost of buying the gold, and that's assuming you're using Virande's brilliant method to get it at 1/3 normal price, so definitely worth it. It also makes the Deep SC runs even more worth it since the iron counts too. So if you find 300 gold and 300 iron that's effectively 450 gold. Copper though the amount of coal needed to smelt it all means you'd actually be better off selling the copper ore and buying the gold (again using Virande's method) than smelting and transmuting it. It's not a huge difference (750 per Crystalarium) so if you have an abundance of coal it's worth it as well, just not if you're in a position to where you're regularly buying coal.

Thank you for this by the way! I hadn't even considered it and really should have.

Edit: Nevermind, with breaking down the Treasure Hunter tackle, it's not worth it. Shoot, at 375 a bar vs 250 for coal, it's barely worth it to smelt Gold! I feel like Willy is about to have a sudden influx of business. Does Clint know he's being done dirty like that, with Willy selling for 750G that which Clint is selling for 8,000G? Might affect their status as drinking buddies if he finds out...

 

[imnvs]

Yes, if you're looking to buy gold to make into crystalariums (and are late game enough to do so) you buy treasure hunter tackle and deconstruct it.

If you're just collecting random ore as you run the mines or dive the SC, you take what you get, you smelt it and then you do alchemy as necessary.

And I don't think Willy and Clint will have a problem since it takes freaking literal magic gear (the deconstructor is literally only available from Mr Qi for Qi gems, and he's some sort of alien/wizard/wotsit) to take advantage of the treasure hunter tackle exploit.

 

[One More Day]

If you willing to spend money to get the ores, Instead of buying from clint for 400g / 750g, you can buy Mega Bomb from the dwarf for 1000g and then using deconstructor machine, you will get 4 gold ore (@250g each)
It's also work for iron and copper ore if you are in year 2+, using the same method with bomb and cherry bomb respectively

Edit :
I checked the wiki, if you have level 7 fishing, it's more profitable if you buy treasure hunter tackle from willy...

At 60 minutes cycle time each, that's an awful lot of time and effort to save such a minuscule amount of money on 4 pieces of gold ore, and totally not worth it. In the same amount of time while you wait for it to process, you could hit up floor 101 a few times and get quite a lot more gold ore, and for absolutely free.

In any case, the deconstructor is an end game item, and at that point you will be swimming in cash anyway, so buying gold ore if needed isn't a financial problem

 

[Giant Octopodes]

At 60 minutes cycle time each, that's an awful lot of time and effort to save such a minuscule amount of money on 4 pieces of gold ore, and totally not worth it. In the same amount of time while you wait for it to process, you could hit up floor 101 a few times and get quite a lot more gold ore, and for absolutely free.

In any case, the deconstructor is an end game item, and at that point you will be swimming in cash anyway, so buying gold ore if needed isn't a financial problem

Gotta respectfully disagree on this one. Since we’re certainly discussing late game considerations, let’s look at a shed of Crystalariums.

Money wise: if you buy the gold for them from Clint, that’s 750x25 = 18750 per. For 137 that’s 2,568,750. Using the bombs, it’s 250x25 = 6250 per, or 856,250 for the lot. A savings of 1.7 million. If you use the treasure hunters, that’s 2,500 per, or 342,500 for the lot, a savings of over 2.2 million, and more importantly a whopping 86%. For me at least, that’s certainly not chump change.

Time wise: 2 ways to look at this. From a smelting standpoint, since treasure hunters are pre smelted, you’re actually getting 10 hours of smelting in 1 hour of deconstructing. Relative quantities come into play of course but it’s certainly high efficiency. From a resource gathering standpoint, 250 gold per day seems like a fair assessment. For the 3425 total ore needed then, that’s 13.7 days of ore gathering replaced with 342,500 of expenses. If you can earn even just 25,000 a day elsewhere, it’s worth it.

Now certainly I’m not saying don’t gather or smelt ore. But from my perspective there’s no reason not to supplement with this. Just like furnaces I plan on sticking this at the top of the mines or elsewhere where I have easy access, and interacting with it when convenient. But from a “worth it” perspective, in a day I can gather 1500 to 2000 stone from the volcano and not even spend half the day. That’s 1,500,000 to 2,000,000 in avoided expenses. Compared to saving 25,000 in expenses by harvesting gold? I know which I’d prefer. I’m getting 10 deconstructors as soon as I get home tonight.

 

[FilthyGorilla]

It's actually only 2 iron bars for a gold one. Even if you're buying all the coal for that, it's still less than half the cost of buying the gold, and that's assuming you're using Virande's brilliant method to get it at 1/3 normal price, so definitely worth it. It also makes the Deep SC runs even more worth it since the iron counts too. So if you find 300 gold and 300 iron that's effectively 450 gold. Copper though the amount of coal needed to smelt it all means you'd actually be better off selling the copper ore and buying the gold (again using Virande's method) than smelting and transmuting it. It's not a huge difference (750 per Crystalarium) so if you have an abundance of coal it's worth it as well, just not if you're in a position to where you're regularly buying coal.

Thank you for this by the way! I hadn't even considered it and really should have.

Edit: Nevermind, with breaking down the Treasure Hunter tackle, it's not worth it. Shoot, at 375 a bar vs 250 for coal, it's barely worth it to smelt Gold! I feel like Willy is about to have a sudden influx of business. Does Clint know he's being done dirty like that, with Willy selling for 750G that which Clint is selling for 8,000G? Might affect their status as drinking buddies if he finds out...

Yeah, same for iron too, the only problems that arise are that money is much easier to come by than deconstructors, not too hard but annoying nonetheless.
You can also pump way more things through a singlle deconstructor and use hoppers to cincumnavigate the annoyance of putting in single tackles.
You also do only have a limited amount of tackles you can bu yat one time though which is a mild inconvenience.