U
Yes you have to have High Seas Booster before you will get any niter deposits.I wonder if you must have added the High Seas booster to the account that the miner character is on before you can find niter deposits and mine them for saltpeter.
Commodity pricing has been broken for a long time, in that the shopkeepers would never offer to buy back an item for more than its base price. This created the problem that asking prices would inflate while offer prices would not, and therefore it would never be worth anyone's time to sell anything back. One place this is particularly problematic is with glass bottles, and the slow rate of sand mining.According to Cal's expanded patch notes, Saltpeter's going back to the commodity method - meaning that with the publish, you can buy as much of it as you want (stocking in 500s), but within a week it will be costing in the hundreds, per.
I would not expect its price to climb as high as some think it might. It's not too difficult to mine, and if the price gets too high then it will be worthwhile to mine some just to sell to the NPC shopkeepers.the only cheap saltpeter, after a week, will be from mining.
The original intent of the commodity pricing system was basically to bridge the disconnect between the NPC shopkeeper economic simulation and the player-driven economy.I thought this was intended by the devs in the past, i remember the days one doom travel can get me one million gold only in selling bandages to the vendor. It was cool so you could do gold only with trading.
If you are a GM miner and have an easily-imbued 750 luck suit, the odds of finding a niter deposit while mining from a boat are 1.25% per mining attempt. I personally have no issue digging up several hundred saltpeter in an hour on a boat, and boat mining is the easy way. I figure it's not too difficult to average 5 to 6 deposits per hour, averaging 60 or more saltpeter per deposit, and those are very conservative estimates. With a really good luck suit both the frequency and average size improve significantly.Not sure if I'm doing anything wrong, but I've mined in couple different dungeons and on a boat with 105 mining (with the +5 gloves) and a suit with over 400 luck. I've pulled up over 3,000 ingots but not a single niter deposit.
The only reason I can think of that this could possibly happen is that there is no open space on your ship's deck for niter deposits to spawn. I would suggest making sure that there is at least one space adjacent to you on the deck of your ship that is completely unoccupied. With luck as you describe and with GM mining, you definitely should be getting a niter deposit every few minutes.I'm on LA, and in the last couple of days my take of saltpeter has been... zero. Before the last couple of days I was having moderate success (luck in the 600-800 range), but in the last couple days I've mined over 3,000 ingots without a single niter deposit at sea.