Salem Miner and Craftsman Guide

Salem Miner and Craftsman Guide by Sevenless

Purity Grinding Metal – Possible since well before anyone except Staxjax thought it was

So, this should probably come as a shock to most players when I first write this, but it turns out purity grinding for metal has been in the game the ENTIRE beta. My little Dowsing Rods there prove it because I’ve never heard of a base level mine being 1.17 purity. Highest ever found that’s been reported is 1.12, to me personally anyway.

Turns out, and I have to give entire credit to Staxjax for this discovery, the metal purity in Salem is not based on Anvils and Smelters as one would expect coming from haven. The entirety of metal purity comes from the ore in the mines of current. But wait, didn’t we want to move away from a node system? How does this make any sense?

Apparently, mines are very very common. In the world, I’d say you might see a mine one every 100 tiles. But when you go out prospecting you only see them once every 10 minutes or so. That’s because when you’re prospecting, you can only find mines within a certain purity range of the purity of your searching tool. Obviously we all started off with woo-woo wands or 1.00p dowsing rods, meaning the best we could find was within a small range of 1.00p. It seems to be that you can find mines within a range of +/- 10 elemental concentration of your current tool. With 1.00p, that means you can get as high as 30 or so of one element. Once you get your mine, smelt the ore WITHOUT lime. Lime is foraged or quarried, but it is always 1.00p. When smelting, the lime mixes into the ore to create the final bar purity. Since that’s lower than whatever ore you find, you’ll want to do it the harder way. All you need is 2 bars this way.

From there, forge a pair of dowsing rods (anvil P doesn’t influence this). With these new rods, begin your quest for a new mine and repeat the entire process. Do remember, the rods see a range, but as far as I can tell there’s no guarantee each mine found will be higher in P. You will find mines that are lower and have to go back to searching yet again. The mines themselves are common enough that luck doesn’t terribly limit the process, and as such it isn’t like the old node system at all.

Is this system going to be kept? I’m not sure. I’ve never heard Jorbtar even mention it existed, so I’m assuming it’s been hiding and they were just waiting for the discovery to go public (fitting for the trolls they are). Furthermore this system isn’t without its flaws. Mines are the purity fountain, but since you build so many it’s actually somewhat difficult to defend them. Now this wouldn’t be true if mines were destroyable, but of current they cannot be harmed it seems. Either way though, it does force villages to defend their high purity mine(s) as well as their town. The one benefit is that it doesn’t require mass duplication of smelters and anvils if a town ever wanted to have two types of purity. And finally, what can you do with the metal? Well of current the answer is “not much”. Lover’s locket and the hunting trophy are the only two things that are influenced by metal purity that I can think of.

Either way, the knowledge is up to you to play with. Happy prospecting everyone.

Something useful Ornery mentioned:

It will find mines, Dyne. The nodes it detects are just rarer, so you’ll probably have to travel a good distance before you find one. They can be kinda easy to miss, but adding

<marker match=”gfx/terobjs/minepoint” tooltip=”true” text=”Paydirt” color=”#000000″ />

to your radar will have the nodes appear on it as a black dot while prospecting, if it’s within render distance.

How Smelters Work (as of Sep 14/2012)

Currently there is no random function involved in smelting. Each % “chance” you get is actually more like a % of an earned bar. When the smelter has accumulated 100% of a bar, that load will generate a bar of metal.

One thing veteran smelters might have noticed is that you get a bar every 2 smelts when not using any lime. I’m not sure how/why this happened, but the formula for smelting originally given was either wrong or has since been ninja updated. The current formula for the amount of bars “earned” by a smelter is as follows:

2% + 1%/lime per piece of ore in the smelter. 25 pieces of ore therefor generate 50% of a bar. 24 ore and 1 lime however generate 72% of a bar.

The ideal amount of lime to have in the smelter matters a lot on how much lime, charcoal and ore cost you. Not necessarily silver, but the effort required to get them. Anywhere between 6-10 lime is a good ratio to have. Lower amounts of lime are more “cost” effective (assuming you were buying lime/charcoal), but are less equipment efficient in that you need to burn more smelter loads to get your product.

For low amounts of smelters, 10 lime per load is probably the best. If you’re in the business of buying your inputs and selling the metal, lower amounts of lime would be better if you can make enough smelters.