Attention Dev, Is mining and lumber spawns dwindling down to the basic ?

[Lady Storm]

I mine alot in UO, as well as chop a great deal on many shards in its forests and have a very big question.

Is it possible that the change in spawn is weeding out the higher metals and woods?

I was on Napa mining for ore in my fav spots. Now mind you I get a nice choice of metal over the years till reciently. I was in not just one ore cave or mountain spot but many and found very little color. 99% was iron. Of the colored ore I did get it was not a full spawn of any good amount. Example: 10 iron 3 copper.
Also many mountain dig spots I use to get the pat amounts of ore now give 3 maybe 5 hits and it is telling me no more ore. Now mind you I have sat there to see if it was some other miner diging up what use to be a 23 ore count spot.
Nope.
I mine for hours on many shards and have yet to find one spot that has changed after it has gone to iron back to any other color ore. I do use my prospector's and gar picks when I need higher ore color. But even then the amount of color I get is sparse.
I am not saying I didnt get any colored ore but what I got was not even a 10th of what should be in my mining runs. Also I noticed if a ore spot turned to iron mid mining it never changes to any other ore color again. This I have watched for years happen on alot of my shards I play.

Same with lumber. I chop trees on many shards on all facits as well as I do mining. If I chop an Oak tree and it respawns back to normal wood on my next pass, it rarely ever changes back to a different wood type. It's not as bad as the ore mind you but still odd. When the change for rotation of ore and lumber was added I was getting alot of oak and ash trees ..... now i rarely get ash. Of all things.

Is it possible the down turn in the ore/lumber color and amount is a programming issue?

 

[Silverbird]

I did some mining over the weekend and havent noticed any changes to before. I strip mine the same area over and over and spots were changing back and forth to and from iron like they do since those changes went live.
What could get a checking, would be, if a spot is rerolled for changing its colour, if it should have a chance to remain at his old colour. Especially for wood, I get the feeling, that spots change too often from plain wood to plain wood. (Not that i really recognize that but from what i would guess, the ore spots seem to change colours way more often, than wood does.)
Remeber that you now can get help from the covetous void pool points. Those reward you with tools that allow you to locate coloured ore/wood spots.

 

[Tina Small]

Lady Storm, are your miners and lumberjacks human, elf, or gargoyle? And how full/heavy was your miner or lumberjack's pack when you were mining or lumberjacking?

 

[Petra Fyde]

I just went to do a little mining, I wanted iron, I went to a cave that hasn't given me anything higher than shadow the last 4 visits. I've got gold and valorite. So the secret of finding rare metals, is want iron

 

[Ender76]

I created a new miner a few weeks ago. Even after GM, I was getting over 80% iron (even using prospector tool). He was human. I switched to elf via race change token, problem fixed. I think they broke something along the way

 

[LordDrago]

Don't forget that for higher lumber and ore, you can buy the maps and items with the covetous points. Perhaps ore and lumber has been ticked down to make these purchases more desireable.

 

[Felonious Monk]

If they changed mining and jacking spawns based on a dungeon revamp without saying anything about it......
Man. Part of me thinks "nah they wouldn't do that". Then I have a rich history of gaming experience with this company that believes there is no limit to that type of decision making. Interesting........

 

[Gorbs]

As I understand the mechanic to work, when a vein is mined out it has a chance to respawn as a different color. If the highest respawn chance is iron (or reg wood) this could be happening to you. I say this based off two assumptions. First, you are randomly mining across the land. Second, a number of non-random, non-script miners are hitting veins twice and moving if they aren't getting the ore they want. Basically, if all miners are emptying the veins and causing them to respawn the probability (assuming RNG not being completely jacked) is that you will get respawns distributed across the ore types given enough respawns. If fewer miners are causing respawns then the distribution may come up with very few of the rarer ore types. On the flip side, because it's random, those few respawns could all be high end ore and cause you to believe they are over saturating the respawns.

 

[Chazztizer]

I have to agree atleast on the high end ores, I have mined for weeks looking for shad gran, I bet after collecting 7-800 shadow gran I may have found less than 10 val or ver veins, just glad i wasnt looking for those high end colors .I mine as a human and roam all over using old mining books in felucca

 

[Tina Small]

I just did some mining on Balhae using runes I marked in May for valorite, verite, and agapite spots. (I always put the date and type of ore on the rune when I mark it.) It was only about a dozen runes, but I got the expected ore from every one except one for verite, which only gave me iron. I have miners on other shards I haven't touched in months, if not longer, and I'll try to dust them off and see how it goes with them as well, using runes I marked in the past with a date and ore type. The spots are not in Fel, so I'm pretty sure no one else but me is dumb enough to use them.

 

[Frarc]

Right now i use all my void pool points to buy the high end ore maps and mine as much i can. I don't melt them right away till i have enough of them to fully use a talisman for 100% melting success.

 

[Tina Small]

Just checked 11 runes I marked on Formosa on July 2nd for frostwood, heartwood, and bloodwood (1 frostwood rune, 3 bloodwood, and 7 heartwood). Only 2 trees didn't give the same kind of wood today that they gave on July 2nd: One bloodwood tree gave frostwood today and one bloodwood tree gave just plain wood, but lopping off a bat's head while simultaneously trying to chop logs from it might have had something to do with that! Out of those 11 runes (none for Felucca) I got 693 plain boards, 253 heartwood, 88 bloodwood, and 154 frostwood, plus 9 bark fragments, 1 parasitic plant, and 2 luminescent fungi. My lumberjack there is human.

 

[Winker]

Right now i use all my void pool points to buy the high end ore maps and mine as much i can. I don't melt them right away till i have enough of them to fully use a talisman for 100% melting success.

how much ore did you get before the void pool map locations ran out? I was thinking about giving it a go, but its a lot of work for the points and i was unsure of how much Val ore i would get from any given map location

 

[Felonious Monk]

Right now i use all my void pool points to buy the high end ore maps and mine as much i can. I don't melt them right away till i have enough of them to fully use a talisman for 100% melting success.

Frarc where do you get a talisman for mining? I REALLY hope it isn't the Heartwood rng grind.....

Ok. I dug around uoguide a bit now that I have a lil time. Among other items Cauldrons and Talismans are available from the npc Vela depending upon ones Covetous points.
Having read that I also noticed the cauldrons. A bunch of them. One for each ore.
I'm very disappointed there isn't just one with a menu for doing all of them. Best part is the cauldrons and talismans are timed. We have to do this Over and Over.
More items. More Grind for something I already had the skill to do?
There is no such thing as casual play anymore. Wayyy to convoluted.

 

[Tina Small]

Lady Storm, I just finished doing 30 minutes of mining (and rune marking) on Origin, walking along a hillside in Trammel with a firebeetle. My miner is an elf with GM mining who was not wearing mining gloves. She only used BOD reward picks and shovels, no prospecting tools or gargoyle pickaxes and was not wearing any of the smelting talismans from Vela, nor did she use any of the maps from Vela.

Within the 30 minutes I spent on this, I marked 20 runes, one rune each time I found ore other than plain iron. These runes totalled as follows:
1 Dull Copper
3 Shadow Iron
10 Copper
4 Bronze
1 Gold
0 Agapite
1 Verite
0 Valorite

Ingots totalled as follows:
843 Iron
21 Dull Copper
62 Shadow Iron
167 Copper
60 Bronze
18 Gold
0 Agapite
19 Verite
0 Valorite

That works out to 1190 ingots total, 71% of which were iron and 29% of which were not.

She also got 8 of the ML gems (2 turquoise, 3 dark sapphire, and 3 perfect emeralds), 72 small gems, and 2 pieces of blackrock (unless there are more I just don't see).

I've gotta say nothing looks different to me with respect to these numbers than before this latest publish hit Origin. Some mining I did earlier on Origin before I started timing it, using old runes I marked in March and April, gave me quite a bit of agapite. Didn't get any valorite today because this miner just hit GM mining today, too. I suspect if I mined long enough, I'd find a few valorite spots, as 30 minutes isn't really that much of a trial.

 

[Felonious Monk]

I'm really curious to know if the the chance to gather colored resources was changed in the last patch.

 

[Tina Small]

I'm really curious to know if the the chance to gather colored resources was changed in the last patch.

That's why I tested it on Origin....

 

[Petra Fyde]

Not from my experience. I think Lady Storm has just had a bad run with the RNG governing the re-spawn

 

[Cogniac]

This may be one of those mystical "I'm not quite sure where I read this, but..." situations, but I could have sworn that this is precisely how resource spawns were supposed to work. A particular resource spawn point's chance to re-spawn with a higher-level resource is inversely correlated to the rapidity of its exhaustion.

In other words, the more you farm a spot, the less likely it will spawn high-end resources; the less you farm a spot, the more likely it will spawn high-end resources.

 

[Felonious Monk]

That's why I tested it on Origin....

Thank you Tina.
I have to admit my cynicism was really starting to get the best of me.
I'm glad you do what you do.

 

[MissEcho]

I agree with the OP. It isn't the fact that the ore spots change color after a certain time, that is 'normal' and you can be unlucky in getting a run of plain iron spots. The issue is the % of colorre on each spot when you actually strike color.

I was mining the other day and spots that gave color were giving less per 'mine'. Ie a spot that normally give 75% color ore and 25% iron on 'one' dig out, now gave 85% iron and 15% color. Usually spots that give color (assuming they are still giving color and haven't reverted to plain iron) give the 'same' amount of color:iron ratio. Ie a spot I mine has for years given 5 'digs' of colored ore, and 3 'digs' of iron ore. This ratio has never changed, although the color of the ore may have. (I mine 8 digs at a time) Now it gives 2 'digs' of color and 6 'digs' of iron. This was pretty much across the board on all my regular mining spots that I actually 'noticed' it when I was mining. It appeared that the % of color on any given spot was greatly reduced. It appears that now 'ALL' spots that give color are only giving one or two pick/shovel hits of colored ore out of the 10 or so hits the spot gets.

Hadn't been mining in a good few weeks so not sure when the change happened, but it was different enough for me to actually 'notice' the difference thinking it was really odd, and wondering if I had missed some change to the way the % of ore is distributed in any given node.

I haven't been lumberjacking recently but will check a few of my trees. I mark trees with the 'number' of color they give so eg Yew 160 + plain wood. The yew being the variable, could be ash or frost etc. The thing that has always been the same is the number (160) for the color % on that particular tree. Heads off to check the last trees I marked.......

 

[Felonious Monk]

Which shard. Which day?
My q's are based on changes as per publish. While I didn't start the thread I think those are pertinent points worth questioning.

 

[Ender76]

I agree with the OP. It isn't the fact that the ore spots change color after a certain time, that is 'normal' and you can be unlucky in getting a run of plain iron spots. The issue is the % of colorre on each spot when you actually strike color.

I was mining the other day and spots that gave color were giving less per 'mine'. Ie a spot that normally give 75% color ore and 25% iron on 'one' dig out, now gave 85% iron and 15% color. Usually spots that give color (assuming they are still giving color and haven't reverted to plain iron) give the 'same' amount of color:iron ratio. Ie a spot I mine has for years given 5 'digs' of colored ore, and 3 'digs' of iron ore. This ratio has never changed, although the color of the ore may have. (I mine 8 digs at a time) Now it gives 2 'digs' of color and 6 'digs' of iron. This was pretty much across the board on all my regular mining spots that I actually 'noticed' it when I was mining. It appeared that the % of color on any given spot was greatly reduced. It appears that now 'ALL' spots that give color are only giving one or two pick/shovel hits of colored ore out of the 10 or so hits the spot gets.

Is your gatherer human? I found the same thing on a human miner. ~ 80% iron, even using prospector's tool. Would get the ore upgrade, but the actual mining output was just iron.

 

[Lady Mal]

I agree with Miss Echo. I have also noticed this when mining.

 

[Frarc]

how much ore did you get before the void pool map locations ran out? I was thinking about giving it a go, but its a lot of work for the points and i was unsure of how much Val ore i would get from any given map location

Its about 250 to 280 ore of the color of the map that would result in 500 to 560 ingots. When you mine the spot you get 100 % of the color. You don't mine up anything else up then the color. Then i stock up the ore till i have enough to use all charges up on the talisman. It works realy nice like this.Before i can melt i need 750 Valorite Ore or 1500 Verite.

I like doing to void pool so getting the points is not a problem for me. Its just a nice change from mining for ore elementals

 

[Spellbound]

Friend says mining with prospector's tool is giving poor return on colored ores ( only a few colored per spot), but getting half and half without a tool on human miner.

 

[Winker]

Its about 250 to 280 ore of the color of the map that would result in 500 to 560 ingots. When you mine the spot you get 100 % of the color. You don't mine up anything else up then the color. Then i stock up the ore till i have enough to use all charges up on the talisman. It works realy nice like this.Before i can melt i need 750 Valorite Ore or 1500 Verite.

I like doing to void pool so getting the points is not a problem for me. Its just a nice change from mining for ore elementals

thx

 

[MissEcho]

Is your gatherer human? I found the same thing on a human miner. ~ 80% iron, even using prospector's tool. Would get the ore upgrade, but the actual mining output was just iron.

My miner is female elf and I do not generally use a prospector's tool.

 

[Lady Storm]

All but 2 of my miners are human, other 2 are elf (made them when they said they got better but I find its not so bit a difference)
I mine on most of my shards and have noticed this on Napa, and a few others ... both tram and fel sides
I seem to get 99% iron and if a spot of color pops up its less then 3 pieces. I have mined caves, mountain sides, dungeons, everywhere you name the facit. Ome mine cave has been one I mine almost every day in fel. Its been slowly loosing all the colored ores and is now almosy fully iron only. Not one spot once it turns to iron ever goes back to a color ore.
In the past that cave would shift ore color but not loose all but a tad of color. I have alson known spots like it on Origin, Cats, Oceaina, and have seen signs of it on Atl. Dont get me wrong I do find ore or at least use my tools to get what i need. Its just something I have been keeping track of over the last few years. I was told once by a gm that the ore cycles so if a spot is copper the next it should change to is bronze and so forth but that was ages ago before the big push to stop scripters.
Now when an ore color spot changes (and it will change mid dig) 99% of the time it goes strait to iron. I have yet to have a iron spot change back to a color once it hits iron. I dont stop digging mind you. Iron ore comes in handy.
Some trees do this also. I have chopped many trees over the years abd have regular set runs for wood but of late the trees stoped changing ... its quite odd.

 

[Tina Small]

I seem to get 99% iron and if a spot of color pops up its less then 3 pieces.

I've noticed two things that seem to cause you to get less ore or fewer logs per spot:

• Any significant inconsistency in the rhythm of mining a spot. In other words, if you have to stop to switch to another shovel because your shovel ran out of charges or you use a shovel, then a prospector's tool or garg pickaxe, and then switch back to your shovel or regular pickaxe, you have to do the switching very, very smoothly and try to avoid getting the "you must wait" message. It's tricky to do, I know. However, it seems to me that the more you're able to keep up a steady, consistent rhythm and avoid getting the "you must wait" message, the more ore you pull from the stop. It almost feels to me as if getting the "you must wait" message too many times, even if it's because you have a crummy connection, triggers some sort of flag on the spot to act as if you've finished mining it dry (for the moment, anyway).
• Your character's backpack has gotten too full. Like the "inconsistent rhythm" situation, I think there may be some flag/switch that is triggered if your character hits a certain weight relative to its strength and race.

Also, as you know, a certain amount of time seems to be required before you can mine or lumberjack a certain location after it was previously emptied of resources. That amount of time seems to be random and as someone mentioned above, might be tied into the type of ore or wood that was currently associated with a location. However, I'm not sure that it's true that the longer you wait between mining or lumberjacking a spot, the more resources you will gather from it. If I repeatedly walk through a cave mining, with fire beetle in tow, how much ore I get from the first spot vs. the second spot vs. the third spot, and so on, seems to have no consistency whatsoever. I might get 5 good strikes on spot #1, 3 on spot #2, and 7 or more on spot #3, even though the amount of time since I last mined each spot is approximately the same.

 

[Tina Small]

Lady Storm, I just finished doing 30 minutes of mining (and rune marking) on Origin, walking along a hillside in Trammel with a firebeetle. My miner is an elf with GM mining who was not wearing mining gloves. She only used BOD reward picks and shovels, no prospecting tools or gargoyle pickaxes and was not wearing any of the smelting talismans from Vela, nor did she use any of the maps from Vela.

Within the 30 minutes I spent on this, I marked 20 runes, one rune each time I found ore other than plain iron. These runes totalled as follows:
1 Dull Copper
3 Shadow Iron
10 Copper
4 Bronze
1 Gold
0 Agapite
1 Verite
0 Valorite

Ingots totalled as follows:
843 Iron
21 Dull Copper
62 Shadow Iron
167 Copper
60 Bronze
18 Gold
0 Agapite
19 Verite
0 Valorite

That works out to 1190 ingots total, 71% of which were iron and 29% of which were not.

She also got 8 of the ML gems (2 turquoise, 3 dark sapphire, and 3 perfect emeralds), 72 small gems, and 2 pieces of blackrock (unless there are more I just don't see).

In order to do a comparison to the above results from yesterday, I just finished doing a 30-minute timed test on Baja using a human miner. She has GM mining, mined the exact same area on Baja as my elf miner mined on Origin, using a fire beetle, but also not wearing mining gloves. In other words, everything was the same except for the shard (Baja vs. Origin) and the race (human vs. elf). Unfortunately, without mining gloves on, smelting the valorite, verite, agapite, and gold (usually 1 or 2 ore at a time) led to less than spectacular results!

Within the 30 minutes I spent on this, I marked 24 runes, one rune each time I found ore other than plain iron. These runes totalled as follows:
9 Dull Copper
5 Shadow Iron
2 Copper
0 Bronze
1 Gold
3 Agapite
2 Verite
2 Valorite

Ingots totalled as follows:
828 Iron
167 Dull Copper
45 Shadow Iron
31 Copper
0 Bronze
7 Gold
29 Agapite
28 Verite
12 Valorite

That works out to 1147 ingots total, 72% of which were iron and 28% of which were not.

She also got 8 of the ML gems (3 turquoise, 2 fire rubies, 1 blue diamond, and 2 perfect emeralds), 63 small gems, and 1 piece of blackrock (unless there are more I just don't see).

I'd also like to note that I had 16 runes in this miner's backpack from April 9th, the last time I mined with her, that I tried out just to see how many had changed in that time. Yes, I know someone else could have mined that cave in the meantime, but after seeing the results, I tend to doubt it. Here's how that little test went:

Agapite rune - Still agapite.
Copper rune - Changed to bronze.
Bronze rune - Still bronze.
Bronze rune - Still bronze.
Bronze rune - Still bronze.
Copper rune - Iron only.
Dull rune - Iron only.
Valorite rune - Still valorite
Shadow rune - Changed to dull.
Copper rune - Still copper.
Dull rune - Changed to bronze.
Copper rune - Still copper.
Valorite rune - Changed to copper.
Bronze rune - Still bronze.
Dull rune - Iron only.
Shadow rune - Still shadow.

From going through those 16 old runes, my human miner, who was wearing her +5 mining gloves, got 361 iron ingots, 10 dull, 14 shadow, 33 copper, 46 bronze, 0 gold, 6 agapite, 0 verite, and 5 valorite, as well as 6 blackrock, 12 small gems, and no ML gems.

I realize both of these tests were rather brief, but I'm not seeing anything I didn't expect. I wish I had a human miner on Origin, but I don't. Best I could do at this point to try to see if there's been a recent unannounced change was to test on one of the shards that has also had the extended maintenance.

 

[Larisa]

I mine on Origin all the time...well of course I do that's my home!

My miner is an elf, I have 5 runebooks, all in Fel of course, full of mining locations. Some in caves, some along the mountains...I like mining in the solen trails you just have to find the right spots so no solens get ya!

I get random ore every time...I actually tested this not that long ago..I would strip mine one area then go to the next...complete one round of one runebook and go back and start over. By that time the spots had replentished and I got a different ore type every time.

I would have to say maybe 60% of the ore I mined was Iron..very little Valorite but alot of the others. I'd have to say it's working as intended...though I do wish I could find more valorite, I like to make stone furniture and the Valorite/Agapite color combination is my favorite

 

[Lady Storm]

Tina
When I mine I have my bug and alot of times my packie in tow... I do keep track of the amount of weight Longfellow/Fayn/Gen and the rest dig up. Its a habit I got into long ago so weight and shoval use is metered... I could never do a script mining hehe I like too much to manage my characters !! hehe I have done Fel and have seen you Larisa. You have seen Longfellow many times... On napa my 3 miners have cut their teeth on my private mine. I have mined every facit of each shard for hours on end... like Larisa said its my fav hobby. Val on any shard has become as rare as hens teeth. Though I do get a decient amount on Hokuto.
Its bad that I need to rely on ore carts for a decient amount of color... I am not sure these days if we have that many scripters digging up the country side...