Holy shit, I never knew people took optimizing runs in DRG so seriously. At the same time my friends and me start every mission half drunk, seeing double, with suboptimal fun builds and mining every single cave dry. Leave no dwarf behind, leave no ore behind, last one to drop pod buys first round.
This just tells me we need to get management to pay us more for the gold we dig up. It's an unspeakable evil to not dig up a gold vein. This should not be a conversation.
@@OhNoTheFace auto kicking is a bit much and borderline toxic IMO. Use voice or text chat first to let them know you want to mine all the gold in the mission, so at least they have a chance to know what they’re doing wrong and respect the hosts wishes. If they continue to go against the way the rest of the team is playing, then I could see you being justified in kicking them. But at least give them a warning or let them know what’s up first :) Rock and Stone!
no one cares about your virtue signaling, optimization and fun arent mutally exclusive and repeatedly right clicking on some shiny yellow thing is less fun than spending that much more time killing bugs
in multiplayer, these gains are amplified even more than you think. because only one player has to spend time mining gold for the whole team to get paid, assuming everyone mines a similar amount of gold (more than none), the "time to mine" in multiplayer game is actually multiplied by 1/n where n is the number of players. its amplified even more by the power of teamwork. a scout/eng combo can mine way faster than 2x the rate of a solo player. and you can strip a cave bare in moments as driller. so i would hypothesize that a team of 4 could gain several times more benefit from mining gold than a solo player.
@@sup1602 This is a good point. I think in some cases playing solo feels like having a team of 2.2 players, especially on a point extraction. But if I send Bosco at a vein, it "feels" like I didn't get as much of that mineral. Maybe I just suck at the game.
But you can also apply that logic to the objective. If you can complete a mission way faster with more people, then grabbing gold is still not going to be worth it.
@@Bookslayer10 very bad comparison. There is a limit to how fast you can beat a mission, no matter the player count. For example, it takes about the same time for extraction, walking through long tunnels, waiting on time based objectives in the mission, etc. this is present in pretty much every mission except point extraction and maybe very optimized egg hunts. 4 players will find and fix mini mules 4x faster, but gain no benefits when defending the uplink and fuel cells, for example. Gold, like the mules, has no real speed limit, and can actually benefit from a full lobby much more than the rewards from the objective.
@@AveragePearEnjoyer There is a limit, but in a lot of cases the bulk of a mission would be completed much faster with more people - not just things like mining morkite, but collecting nitra, opening cargo crates, and exploring. While gold may be worth slightly more to mine in a multiplayer mission, acting as if this massively multiplies the benefit just isn't taking into consideration also completing other objectives faster with players. You'd still make more money by speedrunning the mission and getting a head start on the next.
Interesting. I didn't realize some people take farming efficiency so seriously. Just a completely different mindset from anyone I've ever played with, friends and randoms alike. Everyone takes their time to drink and dance, customize and accessorize, and spam ping the compacted gold nuggets for lols. One of the big reasons I really like this game.
If you've gotten to the point in the game where you're crunching these numbers, you probably won't have much you need to spend credits on... And I'm sure Lloyd won't care how many tips per mission he's getting.
Probably not true. There is an obscene amount of things to buy. If you're aiming to buy every weapon and every upgrade, it'll cost a lot. Then there's also the schematics, which also cost a lot.
@@jutton11 Schematics? Are you talking about the matrix core overclocks? Or is there a whole other layer of progression Im completely unaware of still?
@@moonlitegram idk wtf he's talking about, the ONLY costly thing after a few promotions is buying cosmetics from the drawer, there's only guns, upgrades for guns, and then overclocks.
What you didn't mention is the ethics of mining gold: you play as a dwarf, who likely loves gold. Also, loot bugs are cute. Your dwarf probably doesn't like not mining gold. And I personally don't wanna kill loot bugs unless they're in an easy to pgl cluster
@@aarepelaa1142 The only people who do that unironically are GreenBeards. It's a joke Perk with no point of use. (It's also a huge waste when you have stuff like Thorns, Resuply, etc. But even without those just simply shooting or hitting Lootbugs to death has the same result, with the former method being a lot quicker due to dealing more damage on average than the Pickaxe as well as being better as you can only kill LootBugs in a 5m radius while with guns you can kill them from a mid range to Long Range, even infinite range with some weapons.)
How long has it been since dwarfs lost their way? I remember the days where we would just dig deep into mountains _just to collect gold_ , and now it's considered _inefficient_ ?! RP aside, I feel gold should be worth collecting. Otherwise it might as well not be there. I hate comparing video-games to reality, but in ours, Gold is a soft metal. That said, my solution would be to just make it take one shot with a pickaxe like Nitra does, maybe it won't be such a fuss to collect then. At the end of the day, that's just my opinion. *Rock and Stone, brothers!*
This is a fantastically made video, but the fact that people are asking the question "should we mine gold?" In a dwarf game is a gross injustice. Yes you should! Always! You're dwarves! That's why you're down there! Ghost ship needs to heighten the hazard scaling for credits/gold, so mining gold on haz 4 and 5 is exponentially worth it.
@@mrosskne it's another way of having fun in a game where the devs actively encourage and acknowledge doing dumb silly stuff. You seem mad that other people enjoy the game in ways that you don't.
I see gold as a challenge. As a scout player, it's my goal to collect as many minerals as quickly as possible. If I collect all minerals in a cave, I have succeeded as a scout player. It doesn't matter to me that some of the minerals mathematically aren't worth my time, completion is a goal that reflects positively on my performance.
Earlier this week there was a cheater in my game and afterward everybody on the team receiver millions of gold, millions of the resources in the mission, and immediately hit level 25. While I was pissed about it I discovered something-I still mine every gold vein and resource I find. It’s not about the money it’s about the n e u r o n a c t i v a t i o n
Since this post is 3 weeks old this probably won't help you, but DRG makes pretty regular backups of your save file, so it would have been possible to roll those hacked resources back without losing too much progress. Otherwise you can destroy your resources at the market by selling and buying minerals until your gold and minerals are back in normal ranges.
People like that are horrible I personally don’t care if you’re doing that for yourself but if it affects other people who did NOT agree then you are a horrible horrible person it’s the same as my perspective on things like altering graphics or using broken or cheese tactics in single player stuff it affects only them and they should be able to choose that experience but when it affects other people in any negative way you just need to stop
@@randorookie8587 yeah, if you're only affecting yourself then fine, or doing something that's only affecting the specific mission(turn all bullets into fat boy or something), then that could be funny. but affecting someone's levels, money, etc
For me the question is very simple: I will imagine myself as a greedy little dwarf, and my brain instantly goes: mine everything of value (as long as it isn't inconvenient), don't kill lootbugs (occasionally pat them), leave no dwarf behind (good for morale if you play with the same people all the time). I think optimising the game to a science is cool, but it's most important to play it the way that's fun to you. Wanna mine all gold? Leave no spec behind! Wanna rush through the game at a speed of scout nearing his groundly demise? Don't touch that gold at all! Just do what you enjoy.
The most optimization I do? Do the maths occasionally to figure out ways to make my guns more ammo efficient. And even then, I don't HAVE, to do the maths to know a certain weapon overclock is consuming more ammo than another.
You know what I did once? I found a good map for an aquaris extraction with a vary large bowl in part of the zone. The gold bugs modifier was one. So naturally... I spent an hour on that mission killing bugs as effectively as possible using as little ammo as possible, mostly relying on pheromone effects. It got to a point where the pheromone bolts just stopped... working. I mean, like 1 or 2 bugs might try and kill them, but then they would just wander off aimlessly. To say the least, pheromone canisters were the only thing I had left to reliably use to get the oppressors to essentially kill everything for me. At the end of that hour, when I gave up on collecting any more of the gold sitting in the bottom of the bowl, I dipped out. 4729 gold. Was it worth it? Not really. But was it kinda fun running down the bowl with a horde of glyphyds chasing you, spider manning out if there, doing a 180, shoot the oppressor or chuck a grenade, deposit, run back down and grapple down and try and do that 3 times total per pheromone application? Yeah, it was fun. Well, except for the part where the tri jaws kept flickering out of existence and I almost got point blanked by one and nearly died. Fun thing none the less. Don't reccomend doing if you actually need credits though. You can definitely be way more efficient in an hour.
I did something similar once but it was with a crassus detonator. Had it follow me around the map till it was super low health, got it into a nice tunnel and boom, sphere of gold 😍 worth every second
Tbh there might be a good setup if you have 1 driller and 3 engineers, every engineer just using plasma cutter with whatever overclocks, and max built for ammo turrets, and then turret arc or lok1 chemical explosion rounds. Maybe driller will use sludge and then actually get a gunner with burning hell on minigun for fiery sludge and a coil gun with maybe mole, also inferno or whatever with the coil gun might be good too, just a little less ammo effective, id rather use necro thermal chains with the re atomizer. Then with that just bunker up and camp all day, if you get a swarmer warning it's just vetter.
The most painful part of this would have been making all the trips to the minehead to deposit all that gold only carrying 40-60ish units at a time (depending on your perks and armor mods). If it's on a mission without the minecart, I get tempted to leave it behind. At least with the minecart you can call her to sit on a big pile of chunks and just vacuum up everything within your pickup radius.
@@jakemiller4472 When you spot a crassus, just start digging a tunnel into a wall that doesn't lead to another cave. The crassus will dig to get to you and you get a sphere of gold every time.
@@coolman5001 You shouldn't do that. The game doesn't calculate the chunks right and you get way less as opposed to filling up your bag and dumping off to the side.
I'm going to summarize this whole thing : If you're going to play the entire day, grind out missions like mad, and somehow never have downtime in your missions, ignore gold it'll be faster. If you don't do one of those things, basically mine gold. If you reaaally want to optimize your runs, just mine gold when there's downtime, like, waiting for your team who's being a bit slow, or while waiting for the drop pod in a point extraction or refining mission, or something, but prioritize finishing the mission first.
Bold of you to assume I will ever have "enough" credits :) Jokes aside, great analysis, and what I took away was that gold is more worth it for longer/larger missions, where the extra 1/2 mins spent mining/depositing gold alongside nitra is less impactful on the overall mission time. Additionally, the main difference of mining or ignoring gold is in the credits/exp ratio, as mining gold seems to almost always reduce your xp per second, while usually getting you more credits/second. I'll still be doing my usual strat of mining it if it's convenient/its shiny, or if I'm tcf driller and it'll take half a second to get.
Credit counter go brrrrrrr I wanna hit 5 million someday, but I also craft every Forge item I get, so that may take a while. Currently at about 1.5mil with 10k of each mineral on average, and recently unlocked the final weapon OC.
Imo how gold works is perfect. It's something more to do that really hits home at the game's main loop, gets you more immersed and it's not that hard or even that much of a deviance to do, as you will rarely ever have to go super far off the beaten path to get it or do something you wouldn't normally do anyways, and in multiplayer it rewards you and your whole team for keeping busy and looking for gold whilst everyone else is likely already busy with objectives or fending off enemies (assuming you're not gold-hunting during a really desperate struggle, of course). But in the same vein, it's not so valuable that you feel you can't go without doing it, especially earlier on if you're just trying to earn your weapon unlocks or get a specific mineral rather than credits.
If players would prefer to hold minerals than sell them, that means that most players consider minerals to be higher value than the credits you get for selling them. If that's true, then you can put the total value of the run higher, it's just harder to quantify exactly so using the credit value as a baseline MINIMUM value for minerals makes sense.
I'll be honest here - I feel like gold should be a bit more valuable, to the point that this question becomes irrelevant. Then mining gold would feel better and much more natural. In a game about mining it feels kind of weird to leave gold behind, but at the same time, the reward of mining it seem marginal, making you, the player, feel stupid either way, when mining it as well as when leaving it.
I wish gold had some sort of credit multiplier (with a cap) that'd incentivize going for bigger amounts. Let's say every 100 gold gathered you get a small % bonus for the total that keeps adding up. This would make Crassus Detonators way more worthwhile, spending all that time mining the 1k+ gold (if you don't have a Driller in the team) doesn't seem worth it atm.
It may not *seem* worth it but if you care about credits for whatever reason or need them for purchases then it definitely is. Multipliers would be nice, but a quantity of such a high magnitude already has a large payout and arbitrary bonuses for breaching certain milestones would just make it more ridiculous and not make much sense. Your dwarves are auto-selling the gold to the company for credits. They wouldn't get an extra five percent per unit just because they turn in 100 instead of 99. The problem is that knife-ears who only care about their blue rank number keep saying that gold isn't worth your time because they only care about XP and have plenty of credits already, so people think gold value is too low. It isn't.
@@Fourger14 It makes sense that Management (who is surely pulling a great profit from gold ore) would reward hardworking dwarves with more credits to promote continued desirable behavior. Kind of like how a car salesman might get a bonus for selling ___ cars in a month.
@@faceless2302 That's represented by the performance pass, and you get "hazard pay" for going into higher hazard zones, and bonuses for less important, secondary objectives. I usually play on Haz 4 or 5 so the gold payout feels plenty high enough to me and there are great bonuses for it already. If a truckload of extra credits that's already buffed out isn't good enough for you now, I don't think a 5% bonus for passing 500 or something will change your mind. They could make it way more valuable and ruin the balance of their game with easier to reach percentage increases at high, stacking values, but that would hurt my enjoyment by invalidating all the work I already put in.
@@Fourger14 I also always play haz 4 or 5, but even 200 hours in I'm always strapped for cash. It'd be really nice to do even the most basic of things like buy all the basic weapon upgrades or forge OCs without running back and forth to the mineral market to deplete yet another crucial resource I'll need within the next 4 hours of gameplay. I don't mind a bit of grind for the hardcore players but I think it should be mostly kept to engaging with the promotion system purposefully designed to suck you dry, some people just want to experience all the different loadouts available without sinking in 1000 hours.
I noticed you didn't mention how during longer missions (Long Mining, long egg and Escort), the Credits per second were higher for gold gathering, even counting minerals.
Dwarves mine stuff, gold is stuff to be mined. That was all the thought I ever put into it and managment is always happy to see a mountain of gold upon my return.
The problem as I see it isn't do you gather gold while speed running (10min vs 12min), the question is speedrunning vs exploring (10min vs 25min). As an example gathering Aquarq solo you can cheese that mission with Bosco in 5minutes, vs exploring the cave and gathering gold (With emphasis on the gold that is hard to reach) And if you are speedrunning in the first place it's for mats and exp, and you can sell whatever mats you get bulk of on a as needed basis
Mining gold is better because its more fun. The difference in credits is negligable. The difference in fun is huge. Plus, can you really call yourself a dwarf if you don't mine all the gold? Leaf lovers.
I feel like this misses two major factors, in multiplayer the value of gold is up to quadrupled as every player gets the credits, and in singleplayer what about only having bosco mine gold? You could reasonably micromanage him to mine gold when you don't need him for something else
Yep, you nailed it. The people going off of these spreadsheets are misled. The real loss is when you've got four miners who could clear out a room in a minute and they're just too lazy and trying to defend it with math. And for single player, just have Bosco do the gold, like you said. Problem solved.
I maintain that gold should be single hit, like Nitra, which solves both problems. Mining gold takes less time for the same reward, and people who don't want to mine it are inconvenienced less. Plus everyone benefits in the mission from extra gold and xp for mining it.
I generally try to mine as much minerals as I can (gold included). But depending on the biome, hazard level, amount of ammo/nitra, I adjust accordingly.
For me gold usually give as much if not more credits than the secondary mission, so I figure if I'm willing to spend 20 minutes scouring the entire map for that last damn fossil, it won't hurt to grab all that lovely gold.
🥺 it could give me next to nothing, but im still gonna blast it with the EPC as driller. makes my brain release the happy chemicals when a dwarf shouts GOOOOLLLDDDD!
And then there's me over here that got so pissed off with people speedrunning objectives and leaving half the cave still full of minerals that I decided Bosco was a better teammate.
I feel that. More and more people seem to be speed running now and trying to beat the mission ASAP. The worst part is that the majority of them are still under Rank 100 and really shouldn't be leaving so many valuable minerals behind. I personally don't see the appeal of completing missions as quickly as possible cuz I'm playing primarily for fun. My level going up is merely a consequence of enjoying the game; not my main focus! Really annoying when I'm hosting and someone presses Molly's button as soon as the primary objective is completed without giving a chance to finish the sub objective. I like to fully complete missions. I appreciate that others like to play differently, but they could at least ask beforehand
I am a hard worker that prefers cleaning out an entire cave before leaving. And I have noticed that more and more people are doing that too, it's annoying. Sometimes if I find a good group I will ignore that I am level 25 and just keep playing with them as I really don't care for my rank, I just enjoy playing. But I've been enjoying it less that people seem to be less and less interested in exploring the caves and just about grinding. People need to stop turning video games into jobs.
Something that I want to add to this thread is that the people who like to efficiently clear missions are also playing for fun, they just find different things fun then you guys do.
@@Secarious the last bit about turning games into jobs reminds me of a quote. It goes "Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game." It's very true and you see it more and more as min-maxing has become the "ideal" way to play games. To me personally, once you break a game and its mechanics down into cold hard statistics and people discover the objectively best way to play, the game loses it's magic. A good example is any game in the Souls series. People have stripped the game down to the bare math that runs everything and have put together builds that 100% the best objectively speaking. Instead of having fun experimenting with different builds and play styles, people will immediately look up a guide for what is best, and then follow it to the letter. That's not fun in my opinion because you're literally just letting someone else tell you how you should play the game! Do you play DRG on PC? It would be fun to play together. I'm rank 130 something and still enjoy clearing caves out as much as I did at rank 1
@@cruelcumber5317 yeah I acknowledged that others have fun playing differently than I do and that it's fine. I appreciate your input! I just don't appreciate when they're trying to speed run the missions I'm hosting when I want to explore the cave and mine everything. Usually it's not a problem though. I just get a little annoyed when somebody calls for the pod early before we've explored everything or even gotten all the sub objectives completed. I don't kick though unless someone is actually being an asshole. I usually don't even kick cheaters either because the only ones I run into are Chinese and I know those poor people only get 3 hours to play every weekend thanks to their government. And since they only get 3 hours, they ironically seem less concerned with completing the mission ASAP and focus more on just enjoying the time they have. I'm mostly sad at just how many speed runners there seem to be nowadays in DRG. I've been playing it since release and I've noticed more and more people are adopting the play style, especially greenbeards, and I partly wonder if these efficiency videos are responsible. Again, not bashing those who do enjoy the speed running cuz at the end of the day, we all play games for fun. We just have different opinions of what that is! Rock and Stone brother
For me the tldr is: - The difference is not that big or relevant. Do whatever you enjoy the most. I usually just mine gold when i'm making time for something. Waiting group to catch up. Other guys doing objective and nothing else relevant to do, etc. And definetly not worth to do a tunnel to the ceiling to grab some shitty gold wothout a scout+engie.
I think not mining gold to save time in a game where players have an uspoken rule to ping compressed gold and mushrooms for at least half a minute, not kill lootbugs, leave no dwarves behind even if they're risking failing the mission, taking Doretta with them even though it doesn't give them anything and die in a hoop instead of drinking "Leaflover's special" is kinda pointless. However i still want to say that you've done a great job on the analysis and it might be helpful for some of the more "tryhard" players
It isn't pointless. Making informed decisions is always better than making uninformed decisions. There's nothing wrong with playing inefficiently as long as you choose to do so. But it should be a choice, not something inflicted on you by your ignorance.
I think the best compromise is to only gett ground level gold veins. If you come across a vein in a cave between rooms, sure, I'll take 5 or 6 chunks out of it which only takes like 15 seconds. If you're spending time getting the high on the ceiling gold, though, that's definitely not going to be worth your time. That way you still get the satisfaction of hoarding more ores, but you don't take too long to do so. And something to consider is that the longer you take to mine those high up golds, the more swarms you'll have to face, which are just a time sink of you're min-maxing.
Hey i really like your videos both because they are informative but also because video game statistics makes it really easy to fall asleep for some reason. Appreciate it
I've personally never been short on credits, but I also never buy minerals, nor craft every cosmetic. I also mine all the gold (within reason). Aside from being a leaflover for not mining gold, even if you save a few minutes of time, you'd have to run another full mission to exceed the same number of credits you'd get by mining the gold in the first place. Gold/credits are rarely the sole objective of any one mission, so you might as well be efficient and get what is offered to you up front instead of running extra missions.
I don't give a crap about some numbers going slightly up or down. Getting that goldussy brings me joy. If striking gold doesn't make your pickaxe hard you're no dwarf of mine
I love your videos man, keep it up! Very informative for someone just getting into the nitty gritty of playing with Overclocks and trying different weapons.
Sounds like elf propaganda to me. We don't mind gold because it makes us money. We mine gold because its the right thing to do, it's what karl would've wanted
When I watch these videos it doesn't cross my mind that I should stop mining gold, instead I think GSG should just buff gold. AxisKronos dropped another one on this topic and referenced yours.
Oh, gold should definitely be worth more. The question is what else do you change to compensate for that, because you probably don't want players to have so much credits they don't really need to make any choices about what to purchase.
@@LazyMaybe The obvious answer is to reduce gold payouts for primary and secondary objectives to compensate for mining gold being worth more, but something tells me this move won't be popular with the playerbase.
For me it was never a question of whether mining the gold was efficient or not it's whether I could be 'bothered' to do so. It might not actually take long to mine the gold but it feels that way in the game and so it feels like at the end screen you wasted your time for a couple of hundred credits at most. I think the primary reason for this is because gold takes two hits to break, most mining veins in DRG take two whacks however they're much rarer and have much higher increased value because of their rarity. The two most commons ores, Nitra and Morkite that you are expected to mine a lot of only take one whack to break instead of two. Given you see about as much gold, or maybe just slightly less, than you do Nitra, I think players would feel much better about mining if it only took one whack instead of two. This is because it would be much much quicker and feel like less of a chore. Mining gold might not actually take long but when you're doing it feels like you spend a lot of the mission time doing it and it takes twice as long as it does to mine a vein of Nitra. So I think they should either make it one whack or up the credit to gold ratio, otherwise I'm probably going to continue to skip it. As someone who rarely mines Gold I can afford any overclock, cosmetic or upgrade I desire and my credit amount still goes up. Therefor why bother.
I always laugh when it gets to the sell minerals bit on breakdowns like this. I got too much shit to upgrade and craft I ain’t selling shit. Gold and mission rewards (and pots o gold bonuses) is what I make my money on.
This part is probably important only for hardcore vets since you get credits slower than crafting mats and they literally can only spend them on cosmetics, so selling part of materials to get more credits seem logical. Buut I believe that not everyone is this much dedicated, and early-mid game you get more than enough stuff (cosmetics, OCs, weapons, mods) to never sell any minerals until you absolutely level up everything.
if you are low on minerals then they're worth 150 credits to you, so its even more worth skipping gold. Then if by skipping gold you're no longer low on materials but low on credits you sell those excess minerals and you're still being more efficient.
Some people in the comments may not understood that this man might have gone to this extent simply because he was curious and he likes to play the game anyway. This was indeed an important question in the DRG community and knowing the answer will not take the fun out of the game. Even if the result was that not mining gold is better, I know I would still mine the gold anyway because… OUR JOB IS TO MINE!
You are right that minerals are usually too valuable to sell, that's why I think it's not fair to compare the cost of selling them to mining gold. Instead you should be comparing the cost to *buy* them. It takes quite a while into DRG before you start needing credits more than minerals.
The major reason that mining gold isn’t less efficient, is because as long as you’re not playing solo, you can mine said gold without actually adding to the overall mission time provided others are busy.
I'm down to like 100 magnite after unlocking 3 of the new secondaries and getting my gunner his first red star, fuck no I'm not selling that! And barring a good daily deal on one of the minerals I do have in abundance, I dont really sell those either. That being said, I do tend to ignore gold unless I've got some "free time" during the mission, because its just kind of annoying to mine when theres better things to do. I'm not about to kill lootbugs over it either, especially not golden ones. They are good little lads that deserve to be pet and nothing less.
Update on this: I now have a decent stockpile of most minerals, but I still dont really tend to sell them. I'll generally pass gold veins by if theres other stuff to be done in the mission, but this does depend on some circumstances, and I do often power attack any veign I happen to pass. If I'm scout for example, and my engie puts a platform on a veign, I wont prioritize it over nitra or so, but I probably will grab it. Similarly, as a driller, I might spend a surplus C4 on a veign, and with how often I run EPC mining on my driller I do mine most gold I see like that, because its good practice and barely takes any time. With gunner and engineer, it depends a lot more, and I'll probably skip most gold unless I'm waiting for a timer or teammate for example, or if I can one hit mine the terrain behind it.
I've just recently started playing, with only about 30 hours in the game and my Gunner at Promotion 1 and haven't played anyone else, and if I really wanted to optimize my runs I would follow this video in what to do, but I just like mining stuff, even if I waste a whole bunch of time doing it. If it's a mineral and I see it, I'm going to mine it.
Only elves mine less. Also, yeah, selling minerals is insane. Even the dwarves state and know they are being ripped off when they do it (besides the daily deal). Also I never valued xp gain after the first 25 levels. I actually am in no hurry to reach the point where I need to do 4 missions before I can gain xp again :o
only did it for forging and deep dives, since thats where the real fun with weapons begins some of those overclocks are game changers from what I've seen XD
I kind of hate the mentality that I'm going to grind back to back missions all day to the point where my gold per second would allow me to squeeze out another mission. Plus, the "don't mine gold" argument also implies that there's never going to be any downtime in your team, or bugs in your path, and just feels kind of toxic if you join or host a team and then go on a mining strike.
As someone with 500 hours in the game and (almost) all of my dwarves are gold, I mine the gold. I play the game because I like being a dwarf. I like mining and shooting bugs. If you need to optimize the game this casual game to that extent, are you sure you're having fun?
I tend to spend at much time per cave as possible. Mining Morkite far beyond completing the objective. Also if you really wanna keep the grind going.. Sell all your minerals and buy them back. (Massive grind-reset right there!)
thank you for such a thorough investigation. honestly I hope they make getting gold more unambiguously "worth it," as needing to even have this look at these stats is a lot!
For me I just mine gold if I have time (ie, not mining/egg/escort, other missions you usually aren't constantly moving, so you can spend < 30 seconds on a vein without being left too far behind)
Something i thought about, wouldnt the test have been more accurate without the first trial run of running the map and that first run was the run where you tried to get the gold? since in practice no one would actually know the gold layout on a map when they plan, if they were planning on mining gold they would have to spend extra time searching as well. This gives the idea of not getting gold an even further advantage because people that try to get all gold will indeed have to spend time searching for it
this is less accurate because it would change the way the second run (whichever one it ends up being) behaves. the first run would have a negative bias because of variance that would be uncontrolled and not accounted for. he isn't measuring how much time you spend searching, both runs would need to search for the materials they want in practice, and it prevents other outlying scenarios such as getting lost/ turned around, sub-optimal routes, accidental falls, etc. you do have a point in that this does cut out some extra time searching that the gold run would take over the non-gold run, but this is likely a negligible time difference. one way to account for this would be to use a far larger sample size and use multiple players doing different styles (one mission the player goes for gold, the other they skip) but I don't know how willing the creator is to go to that much effort
People would spend extra time exploring and navigating new maps anyway even if you're skipping gold. Not to mention, a team of 4 can muktitask faster anyways.
this test basically just checks to see if mining gold is worth it when you see it. the question of "is it worth it to search every inch of cave for all gold deposits" is only worth asking after you find out if its even worth it to take the time to mine gold.
That would skew the run because he's playing solo and would take longer to find the gold. A team of 4 could probably find and mine the gold as fast or faster than he did despite knowing all the spots.
0:00 Intro/methodology
2:35 Results per mission type
3:31 Results on average
6:44 maff
9:54 note on pots of gold
now do everything again, but with pots of gold and on gold rush missions (sarcasm deeply included, please don't do it)
If you include these time stamps in the description with the name, TH-cam will automatically create chapters for the video
I read “results” as “insults” and thought you were just shutting on the guy for two chapters lmao
So 5-10% more experience for not skipping gold
If you put the timestamps in the description, it will make chapters in the video. Can literally copy/paste this comment into the description.
Holy shit, I never knew people took optimizing runs in DRG so seriously. At the same time my friends and me start every mission half drunk, seeing double, with suboptimal fun builds and mining every single cave dry. Leave no dwarf behind, leave no ore behind, last one to drop pod buys first round.
Best way to play, honestly.
Karl would approve
Gotta make sure we’re doing it as efficient as possible we’re not getting paid to be lazy leaf lovers
@@Pjgamerglasses you're getting paid?
ROCK AND STONE MY LAD!
This just tells me we need to get management to pay us more for the gold we dig up. It's an unspeakable evil to not dig up a gold vein. This should not be a conversation.
Auto kick anyone who skips or talks about skipping mining. They are actually an elf under that armour
@@OhNoTheFace auto kicking is a bit much and borderline toxic IMO. Use voice or text chat first to let them know you want to mine all the gold in the mission, so at least they have a chance to know what they’re doing wrong and respect the hosts wishes. If they continue to go against the way the rest of the team is playing, then I could see you being justified in kicking them. But at least give them a warning or let them know what’s up first :) Rock and Stone!
Not-mining is elven propaganda, confirmed.
Management dont pay us for the Gold, they let we keep the Gold. So the problems ia the Gold value.
Every ounce of gold not mined is money in the competition's pocket.
"Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game" A quote that players should keep reminding themselves of.
matthewmatosis ?
Have you considered that optimization and fun are not mutually exclusive? What if some people find searching for "the best way" fun?
I mean there is no fun in mining gold
no one cares about your virtue signaling, optimization and fun arent mutally exclusive and repeatedly right clicking on some shiny yellow thing is less fun than spending that much more time killing bugs
@@alaikee You are the intended target of the above quote.
in multiplayer, these gains are amplified even more than you think. because only one player has to spend time mining gold for the whole team to get paid, assuming everyone mines a similar amount of gold (more than none), the "time to mine" in multiplayer game is actually multiplied by 1/n where n is the number of players. its amplified even more by the power of teamwork. a scout/eng combo can mine way faster than 2x the rate of a solo player. and you can strip a cave bare in moments as driller. so i would hypothesize that a team of 4 could gain several times more benefit from mining gold than a solo player.
Idk its pretty easy to send bosco to go and mine the gold when I go and do something else.
@@sup1602 This is a good point. I think in some cases playing solo feels like having a team of 2.2 players, especially on a point extraction.
But if I send Bosco at a vein, it "feels" like I didn't get as much of that mineral. Maybe I just suck at the game.
But you can also apply that logic to the objective. If you can complete a mission way faster with more people, then grabbing gold is still not going to be worth it.
@@Bookslayer10 very bad comparison. There is a limit to how fast you can beat a mission, no matter the player count. For example, it takes about the same time for extraction, walking through long tunnels, waiting on time based objectives in the mission, etc. this is present in pretty much every mission except point extraction and maybe very optimized egg hunts. 4 players will find and fix mini mules 4x faster, but gain no benefits when defending the uplink and fuel cells, for example. Gold, like the mules, has no real speed limit, and can actually benefit from a full lobby much more than the rewards from the objective.
@@AveragePearEnjoyer There is a limit, but in a lot of cases the bulk of a mission would be completed much faster with more people - not just things like mining morkite, but collecting nitra, opening cargo crates, and exploring. While gold may be worth slightly more to mine in a multiplayer mission, acting as if this massively multiplies the benefit just isn't taking into consideration also completing other objectives faster with players. You'd still make more money by speedrunning the mission and getting a head start on the next.
Interesting. I didn't realize some people take farming efficiency so seriously. Just a completely different mindset from anyone I've ever played with, friends and randoms alike. Everyone takes their time to drink and dance, customize and accessorize, and spam ping the compacted gold nuggets for lols. One of the big reasons I really like this game.
“We’re rich!”
MUSH room!
Goo sack
we're rich!
Exactly. Super efficiency in this game sure sounds . . . elvish
If you've gotten to the point in the game where you're crunching these numbers, you probably won't have much you need to spend credits on... And I'm sure Lloyd won't care how many tips per mission he's getting.
New players can watch youtube videos as well, even if they are new they still may want to use the most efficient strategy.
Probably not true. There is an obscene amount of things to buy. If you're aiming to buy every weapon and every upgrade, it'll cost a lot. Then there's also the schematics, which also cost a lot.
@@jutton11 Schematics? Are you talking about the matrix core overclocks? Or is there a whole other layer of progression Im completely unaware of still?
@@moonlitegram idk wtf he's talking about, the ONLY costly thing after a few promotions is buying cosmetics from the drawer, there's only guns, upgrades for guns, and then overclocks.
I just kick anyone that talks about efficiency in video games.
Those two minutes you save are GONE as soon as you and your teammates spot a chunk of compressed gold or a mushroom
What you didn't mention is the ethics of mining gold: you play as a dwarf, who likely loves gold. Also, loot bugs are cute. Your dwarf probably doesn't like not mining gold. And I personally don't wanna kill loot bugs unless they're in an easy to pgl cluster
Mining gold makes the happy chemical. Petting loot bugs makes the happy chemical. Killing loot bugs is for leaf lovers
Rock and stone
@@squidcultist0022 how about people who run the it's a bug thing perk?
@@aarepelaa1142 The only people who do that unironically are GreenBeards. It's a joke Perk with no point of use.
(It's also a huge waste when you have stuff like Thorns, Resuply, etc. But even without those just simply shooting or hitting Lootbugs to death has the same result, with the former method being a lot quicker due to dealing more damage on average than the Pickaxe as well as being better as you can only kill LootBugs in a 5m radius while with guns you can kill them from a mid range to Long Range, even infinite range with some weapons.)
real dwarfs harms no lootbugs
(i only kill them to put them off from their missery when they're frozen, other than that, i just tend to pet 'em all).
How long has it been since dwarfs lost their way? I remember the days where we would just dig deep into mountains _just to collect gold_ , and now it's considered _inefficient_ ?!
RP aside, I feel gold should be worth collecting. Otherwise it might as well not be there.
I hate comparing video-games to reality, but in ours, Gold is a soft metal. That said, my solution would be to just make it take one shot with a pickaxe like Nitra does, maybe it won't be such a fuss to collect then.
At the end of the day, that's just my opinion. *Rock and Stone, brothers!*
This is a fantastically made video, but the fact that people are asking the question "should we mine gold?" In a dwarf game is a gross injustice. Yes you should! Always! You're dwarves! That's why you're down there! Ghost ship needs to heighten the hazard scaling for credits/gold, so mining gold on haz 4 and 5 is exponentially worth it.
What we really need is:
Haz 6: Brutal
Haz 7: Super Lethal Brutal
Haz 8: Custom difficulty with extreme deadly consequences.
Nope, we're down there to complete missions. And not to roleplay.
@@mrosskne That's a little boring, isn't it?
@@holetm9346 No, it isn't. If you want to play make believe, join a theater group and stay the fuck out of my lobby.
@@mrosskne it's another way of having fun in a game where the devs actively encourage and acknowledge doing dumb silly stuff. You seem mad that other people enjoy the game in ways that you don't.
I'm a dwarf, and no true dwarf would ever leave gold behind.
You're not a dwarf. Grow up.
@@mrosskne "You're not a dwarf, grow up 🤓🤓"
@@mrosskne seethe
@@mrosskne no i will not
@@mrosskne
🤓🤓🤓
I see gold as a challenge. As a scout player, it's my goal to collect as many minerals as quickly as possible. If I collect all minerals in a cave, I have succeeded as a scout player. It doesn't matter to me that some of the minerals mathematically aren't worth my time, completion is a goal that reflects positively on my performance.
Came here to say this!!
true, if i'm not mining 50%-95% of my team's overall haul as scout i'm failing, and gold helps me pad that
And as an Engineer its a faliure on my part if i dont help the local scout out with a platform to get minerals in akward places
As a driller my job is to c4 you.
Im always at 500+ Mining Score XD
Earlier this week there was a cheater in my game and afterward everybody on the team receiver millions of gold, millions of the resources in the mission, and immediately hit level 25.
While I was pissed about it I discovered something-I still mine every gold vein and resource I find. It’s not about the money it’s about the n e u r o n a c t i v a t i o n
Since this post is 3 weeks old this probably won't help you, but DRG makes pretty regular backups of your save file, so it would have been possible to roll those hacked resources back without losing too much progress. Otherwise you can destroy your resources at the market by selling and buying minerals until your gold and minerals are back in normal ranges.
@@SethAbercromby I’ve just steadily been doing the second thing lol
I would be pissed off too. Destination is not rewarding without the journey.
People like that are horrible I personally don’t care if you’re doing that for yourself but if it affects other people who did NOT agree then you are a horrible horrible person it’s the same as my perspective on things like altering graphics or using broken or cheese tactics in single player stuff it affects only them and they should be able to choose that experience but when it affects other people in any negative way you just need to stop
@@randorookie8587 yeah, if you're only affecting yourself then fine, or doing something that's only affecting the specific mission(turn all bullets into fat boy or something), then that could be funny. but affecting someone's levels, money, etc
For me the question is very simple: I will imagine myself as a greedy little dwarf, and my brain instantly goes: mine everything of value (as long as it isn't inconvenient), don't kill lootbugs (occasionally pat them), leave no dwarf behind (good for morale if you play with the same people all the time).
I think optimising the game to a science is cool, but it's most important to play it the way that's fun to you. Wanna mine all gold? Leave no spec behind! Wanna rush through the game at a speed of scout nearing his groundly demise? Don't touch that gold at all! Just do what you enjoy.
I love how loot bugs are made, i feel so bad everytime i have to kill one
How long until Mike the elf gets here.
The most optimization I do? Do the maths occasionally to figure out ways to make my guns more ammo efficient. And even then, I don't HAVE, to do the maths to know a certain weapon overclock is consuming more ammo than another.
How did i only found this video year after release, this is some gold standard min max stuff. Hats off mate, good job.
You know what I did once? I found a good map for an aquaris extraction with a vary large bowl in part of the zone. The gold bugs modifier was one. So naturally...
I spent an hour on that mission killing bugs as effectively as possible using as little ammo as possible, mostly relying on pheromone effects. It got to a point where the pheromone bolts just stopped... working. I mean, like 1 or 2 bugs might try and kill them, but then they would just wander off aimlessly. To say the least, pheromone canisters were the only thing I had left to reliably use to get the oppressors to essentially kill everything for me.
At the end of that hour, when I gave up on collecting any more of the gold sitting in the bottom of the bowl, I dipped out.
4729 gold.
Was it worth it? Not really. But was it kinda fun running down the bowl with a horde of glyphyds chasing you, spider manning out if there, doing a 180, shoot the oppressor or chuck a grenade, deposit, run back down and grapple down and try and do that 3 times total per pheromone application? Yeah, it was fun. Well, except for the part where the tri jaws kept flickering out of existence and I almost got point blanked by one and nearly died.
Fun thing none the less. Don't reccomend doing if you actually need credits though. You can definitely be way more efficient in an hour.
I did something similar once but it was with a crassus detonator. Had it follow me around the map till it was super low health, got it into a nice tunnel and boom, sphere of gold 😍 worth every second
Tbh there might be a good setup if you have 1 driller and 3 engineers, every engineer just using plasma cutter with whatever overclocks, and max built for ammo turrets, and then turret arc or lok1 chemical explosion rounds. Maybe driller will use sludge and then actually get a gunner with burning hell on minigun for fiery sludge and a coil gun with maybe mole, also inferno or whatever with the coil gun might be good too, just a little less ammo effective, id rather use necro thermal chains with the re atomizer.
Then with that just bunker up and camp all day, if you get a swarmer warning it's just vetter.
The most painful part of this would have been making all the trips to the minehead to deposit all that gold only carrying 40-60ish units at a time (depending on your perks and armor mods). If it's on a mission without the minecart, I get tempted to leave it behind. At least with the minecart you can call her to sit on a big pile of chunks and just vacuum up everything within your pickup radius.
@@jakemiller4472 When you spot a crassus, just start digging a tunnel into a wall that doesn't lead to another cave. The crassus will dig to get to you and you get a sphere of gold every time.
@@coolman5001 You shouldn't do that. The game doesn't calculate the chunks right and you get way less as opposed to filling up your bag and dumping off to the side.
I'm going to summarize this whole thing :
If you're going to play the entire day, grind out missions like mad, and somehow never have downtime in your missions, ignore gold it'll be faster.
If you don't do one of those things, basically mine gold.
If you reaaally want to optimize your runs, just mine gold when there's downtime, like, waiting for your team who's being a bit slow, or while waiting for the drop pod in a point extraction or refining mission, or something, but prioritize finishing the mission first.
thank you kind stranger!
Oh my god the amount of math, I could not, huge respect for this whole video dude, all this effort shows huge props
Depends
1: skipping gold is faster
2: getting all gold is more valuable
3: mining everything is the ROCK AND STONE thing to do.
Gatekeep Girlboss!
indeed it is Brother Rock And Stone
@@Ozcaty
What are you talking about, o’ 2 weeks old post that TH-cam didn’t tell me existed like it’s supposed to.
I just mine everything I see, efficiency be damned. Rock and stone, to the bone.
Bold of you to assume I will ever have "enough" credits :)
Jokes aside, great analysis, and what I took away was that gold is more worth it for longer/larger missions, where the extra 1/2 mins spent mining/depositing gold alongside nitra is less impactful on the overall mission time. Additionally, the main difference of mining or ignoring gold is in the credits/exp ratio, as mining gold seems to almost always reduce your xp per second, while usually getting you more credits/second.
I'll still be doing my usual strat of mining it if it's convenient/its shiny, or if I'm tcf driller and it'll take half a second to get.
Credit counter go brrrrrrr
I wanna hit 5 million someday, but I also craft every Forge item I get, so that may take a while. Currently at about 1.5mil with 10k of each mineral on average, and recently unlocked the final weapon OC.
I always pick up all the gold because it's additional neuron activation.
god damn you are insane with these tests, amazing and thank you for this info!
I can’t just look at a gold vein and leave it, it feels so wrong
Imo how gold works is perfect. It's something more to do that really hits home at the game's main loop, gets you more immersed and it's not that hard or even that much of a deviance to do, as you will rarely ever have to go super far off the beaten path to get it or do something you wouldn't normally do anyways, and in multiplayer it rewards you and your whole team for keeping busy and looking for gold whilst everyone else is likely already busy with objectives or fending off enemies (assuming you're not gold-hunting during a really desperate struggle, of course). But in the same vein, it's not so valuable that you feel you can't go without doing it, especially earlier on if you're just trying to earn your weapon unlocks or get a specific mineral rather than credits.
If you don't mine every single gold vein in sight, then you must not be a dwarf. And therefore, there is no clause about not leaving you behind.
If players would prefer to hold minerals than sell them, that means that most players consider minerals to be higher value than the credits you get for selling them. If that's true, then you can put the total value of the run higher, it's just harder to quantify exactly so using the credit value as a baseline MINIMUM value for minerals makes sense.
I mean, they literally are higher value than credits. You only gain 1/3 of the value of the mineral when you sell it compared to buying it.
I'll be honest here - I feel like gold should be a bit more valuable, to the point that this question becomes irrelevant. Then mining gold would feel better and much more natural. In a game about mining it feels kind of weird to leave gold behind, but at the same time, the reward of mining it seem marginal, making you, the player, feel stupid either way, when mining it as well as when leaving it.
I wish gold had some sort of credit multiplier (with a cap) that'd incentivize going for bigger amounts. Let's say every 100 gold gathered you get a small % bonus for the total that keeps adding up. This would make Crassus Detonators way more worthwhile, spending all that time mining the 1k+ gold (if you don't have a Driller in the team) doesn't seem worth it atm.
Yes
It may not *seem* worth it but if you care about credits for whatever reason or need them for purchases then it definitely is. Multipliers would be nice, but a quantity of such a high magnitude already has a large payout and arbitrary bonuses for breaching certain milestones would just make it more ridiculous and not make much sense. Your dwarves are auto-selling the gold to the company for credits. They wouldn't get an extra five percent per unit just because they turn in 100 instead of 99. The problem is that knife-ears who only care about their blue rank number keep saying that gold isn't worth your time because they only care about XP and have plenty of credits already, so people think gold value is too low. It isn't.
@@Fourger14 It makes sense that Management (who is surely pulling a great profit from gold ore) would reward hardworking dwarves with more credits to promote continued desirable behavior. Kind of like how a car salesman might get a bonus for selling ___ cars in a month.
@@faceless2302 That's represented by the performance pass, and you get "hazard pay" for going into higher hazard zones, and bonuses for less important, secondary objectives. I usually play on Haz 4 or 5 so the gold payout feels plenty high enough to me and there are great bonuses for it already. If a truckload of extra credits that's already buffed out isn't good enough for you now, I don't think a 5% bonus for passing 500 or something will change your mind. They could make it way more valuable and ruin the balance of their game with easier to reach percentage increases at high, stacking values, but that would hurt my enjoyment by invalidating all the work I already put in.
@@Fourger14 I also always play haz 4 or 5, but even 200 hours in I'm always strapped for cash. It'd be really nice to do even the most basic of things like buy all the basic weapon upgrades or forge OCs without running back and forth to the mineral market to deplete yet another crucial resource I'll need within the next 4 hours of gameplay. I don't mind a bit of grind for the hardcore players but I think it should be mostly kept to engaging with the promotion system purposefully designed to suck you dry, some people just want to experience all the different loadouts available without sinking in 1000 hours.
I noticed you didn't mention how during longer missions (Long Mining, long egg and Escort), the Credits per second were higher for gold gathering, even counting minerals.
Dwarves mine stuff, gold is stuff to be mined. That was all the thought I ever put into it and managment is always happy to see a mountain of gold upon my return.
I'm a simple dwarf, if I see gold, I mine it.
I don’t care if it’s ineffective to mine gold. I am a dwarf and it is my duty to do so
the "we're rich" quote is definetly worth mining for
My wife and I mine every last mineral in a mission before leaving, like true dwarves ;) Rock and Stone brothers!
The problem as I see it isn't do you gather gold while speed running (10min vs 12min),
the question is speedrunning vs exploring (10min vs 25min).
As an example gathering Aquarq solo you can cheese that mission with Bosco in 5minutes, vs exploring the cave and gathering gold (With emphasis on the gold that is hard to reach)
And if you are speedrunning in the first place it's for mats and exp, and you can sell whatever mats you get bulk of on a as needed basis
I think the best is a in-between, if you're waiting on something might as well get a little extra on the way
Mining gold is better because its more fun. The difference in credits is negligable. The difference in fun is huge. Plus, can you really call yourself a dwarf if you don't mine all the gold? Leaf lovers.
I feel like this misses two major factors, in multiplayer the value of gold is up to quadrupled as every player gets the credits, and in singleplayer what about only having bosco mine gold? You could reasonably micromanage him to mine gold when you don't need him for something else
Yep, you nailed it. The people going off of these spreadsheets are misled. The real loss is when you've got four miners who could clear out a room in a minute and they're just too lazy and trying to defend it with math.
And for single player, just have Bosco do the gold, like you said. Problem solved.
I maintain that gold should be single hit, like Nitra, which solves both problems. Mining gold takes less time for the same reward, and people who don't want to mine it are inconvenienced less. Plus everyone benefits in the mission from extra gold and xp for mining it.
If it's an ore, it goes into Molly
I generally try to mine as much minerals as I can (gold included). But depending on the biome, hazard level, amount of ammo/nitra, I adjust accordingly.
Gold is satisfying to mine cause it's so chunky and shiny, this is all I need to know.
Great video tho, love seeing a lot of thought and data being put into something
Considering how much time we use messing around in the bar between missions, I doubt the minute optimizations is ever going to matter.
Really well made, answered a question I’ve had since day one of picking up the game. You have earned your like and comment good sir
For me gold usually give as much if not more credits than the secondary mission, so I figure if I'm willing to spend 20 minutes scouring the entire map for that last damn fossil, it won't hurt to grab all that lovely gold.
🥺 it could give me next to nothing, but im still gonna blast it with the EPC as driller.
makes my brain release the happy chemicals when a dwarf shouts GOOOOLLLDDDD!
And then there's me over here that got so pissed off with people speedrunning objectives and leaving half the cave still full of minerals that I decided Bosco was a better teammate.
I feel that. More and more people seem to be speed running now and trying to beat the mission ASAP. The worst part is that the majority of them are still under Rank 100 and really shouldn't be leaving so many valuable minerals behind. I personally don't see the appeal of completing missions as quickly as possible cuz I'm playing primarily for fun. My level going up is merely a consequence of enjoying the game; not my main focus! Really annoying when I'm hosting and someone presses Molly's button as soon as the primary objective is completed without giving a chance to finish the sub objective. I like to fully complete missions. I appreciate that others like to play differently, but they could at least ask beforehand
I am a hard worker that prefers cleaning out an entire cave before leaving. And I have noticed that more and more people are doing that too, it's annoying. Sometimes if I find a good group I will ignore that I am level 25 and just keep playing with them as I really don't care for my rank, I just enjoy playing. But I've been enjoying it less that people seem to be less and less interested in exploring the caves and just about grinding. People need to stop turning video games into jobs.
Something that I want to add to this thread is that the people who like to efficiently clear missions are also playing for fun, they just find different things fun then you guys do.
@@Secarious the last bit about turning games into jobs reminds me of a quote. It goes "Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game." It's very true and you see it more and more as min-maxing has become the "ideal" way to play games. To me personally, once you break a game and its mechanics down into cold hard statistics and people discover the objectively best way to play, the game loses it's magic. A good example is any game in the Souls series. People have stripped the game down to the bare math that runs everything and have put together builds that 100% the best objectively speaking. Instead of having fun experimenting with different builds and play styles, people will immediately look up a guide for what is best, and then follow it to the letter. That's not fun in my opinion because you're literally just letting someone else tell you how you should play the game!
Do you play DRG on PC? It would be fun to play together. I'm rank 130 something and still enjoy clearing caves out as much as I did at rank 1
@@cruelcumber5317 yeah I acknowledged that others have fun playing differently than I do and that it's fine. I appreciate your input! I just don't appreciate when they're trying to speed run the missions I'm hosting when I want to explore the cave and mine everything. Usually it's not a problem though. I just get a little annoyed when somebody calls for the pod early before we've explored everything or even gotten all the sub objectives completed. I don't kick though unless someone is actually being an asshole. I usually don't even kick cheaters either because the only ones I run into are Chinese and I know those poor people only get 3 hours to play every weekend thanks to their government. And since they only get 3 hours, they ironically seem less concerned with completing the mission ASAP and focus more on just enjoying the time they have.
I'm mostly sad at just how many speed runners there seem to be nowadays in DRG. I've been playing it since release and I've noticed more and more people are adopting the play style, especially greenbeards, and I partly wonder if these efficiency videos are responsible.
Again, not bashing those who do enjoy the speed running cuz at the end of the day, we all play games for fun. We just have different opinions of what that is! Rock and Stone brother
For me the tldr is:
- The difference is not that big or relevant. Do whatever you enjoy the most.
I usually just mine gold when i'm making time for something. Waiting group to catch up. Other guys doing objective and nothing else relevant to do, etc.
And definetly not worth to do a tunnel to the ceiling to grab some shitty gold wothout a scout+engie.
I think not mining gold to save time in a game where players have an uspoken rule to ping compressed gold and mushrooms for at least half a minute, not kill lootbugs, leave no dwarves behind even if they're risking failing the mission, taking Doretta with them even though it doesn't give them anything and die in a hoop instead of drinking "Leaflover's special" is kinda pointless. However i still want to say that you've done a great job on the analysis and it might be helpful for some of the more "tryhard" players
True
It isn't pointless. Making informed decisions is always better than making uninformed decisions.
There's nothing wrong with playing inefficiently as long as you choose to do so. But it should be a choice, not something inflicted on you by your ignorance.
i like how youtubers with lazy in their names are usually the hardest working ones on the platform
I think the best compromise is to only gett ground level gold veins. If you come across a vein in a cave between rooms, sure, I'll take 5 or 6 chunks out of it which only takes like 15 seconds. If you're spending time getting the high on the ceiling gold, though, that's definitely not going to be worth your time. That way you still get the satisfaction of hoarding more ores, but you don't take too long to do so.
And something to consider is that the longer you take to mine those high up golds, the more swarms you'll have to face, which are just a time sink of you're min-maxing.
This is an excellent point, at that point you're also trading not just time but also potentially resources and safety
Me watching this knowing full well my goblin brain is still gonna mine gold because shiny rock:
Gold gives me the happy chemical so I'm gonna mine it regardless.
Same, rock and stone!
Hey i really like your videos both because they are informative but also because video game statistics makes it really easy to fall asleep for some reason. Appreciate it
I've personally never been short on credits, but I also never buy minerals, nor craft every cosmetic. I also mine all the gold (within reason). Aside from being a leaflover for not mining gold, even if you save a few minutes of time, you'd have to run another full mission to exceed the same number of credits you'd get by mining the gold in the first place. Gold/credits are rarely the sole objective of any one mission, so you might as well be efficient and get what is offered to you up front instead of running extra missions.
Nah I run out alot of the time one point I dead ass sold off materials for credits
I just like mining gold because for no logical reason it sends a signal to my brain that makes it happy whenever I do
I’ve never felt the need to min-max DRG. I mine gold because it’s shiny. If I miss some, no big deal.
They say they min-max but the truth is that they are just try-hard who want to Always be first even if it's useless to be.
I don't give a crap about some numbers going slightly up or down. Getting that goldussy brings me joy. If striking gold doesn't make your pickaxe hard you're no dwarf of mine
Yeah but I'm a dwarf and if any minerals are left unmined Karl would be sad
I love your videos man, keep it up! Very informative for someone just getting into the nitty gritty of playing with Overclocks and trying different weapons.
"Is gold worth it?" Bah! That's the most leaf lover thing to ask I've heard! Ask any DWARF this question and the answer is always undoubtedly YES! ✊⛏️
Sounds like elf propaganda to me.
We don't mind gold because it makes us money. We mine gold because its the right thing to do, it's what karl would've wanted
When I watch these videos it doesn't cross my mind that I should stop mining gold, instead I think GSG should just buff gold. AxisKronos dropped another one on this topic and referenced yours.
Oh, gold should definitely be worth more. The question is what else do you change to compensate for that, because you probably don't want players to have so much credits they don't really need to make any choices about what to purchase.
@@LazyMaybe The obvious answer is to reduce gold payouts for primary and secondary objectives to compensate for mining gold being worth more, but something tells me this move won't be popular with the playerbase.
For me it was never a question of whether mining the gold was efficient or not it's whether I could be 'bothered' to do so. It might not actually take long to mine the gold but it feels that way in the game and so it feels like at the end screen you wasted your time for a couple of hundred credits at most. I think the primary reason for this is because gold takes two hits to break, most mining veins in DRG take two whacks however they're much rarer and have much higher increased value because of their rarity. The two most commons ores, Nitra and Morkite that you are expected to mine a lot of only take one whack to break instead of two. Given you see about as much gold, or maybe just slightly less, than you do Nitra, I think players would feel much better about mining if it only took one whack instead of two. This is because it would be much much quicker and feel like less of a chore.
Mining gold might not actually take long but when you're doing it feels like you spend a lot of the mission time doing it and it takes twice as long as it does to mine a vein of Nitra. So I think they should either make it one whack or up the credit to gold ratio, otherwise I'm probably going to continue to skip it. As someone who rarely mines Gold I can afford any overclock, cosmetic or upgrade I desire and my credit amount still goes up. Therefor why bother.
only ELVES don't mine the gold, true dwarves never skip it! wonderful video, though! i'm sure some people have had this question for a while
The guy who made the video admitted he doesn’t mine gold. I guess he isn’t a real dwarf…
"We're rich" is worth it
I always laugh when it gets to the sell minerals bit on breakdowns like this. I got too much shit to upgrade and craft I ain’t selling shit. Gold and mission rewards (and pots o gold bonuses) is what I make my money on.
This part is probably important only for hardcore vets since you get credits slower than crafting mats and they literally can only spend them on cosmetics, so selling part of materials to get more credits seem logical. Buut I believe that not everyone is this much dedicated, and early-mid game you get more than enough stuff (cosmetics, OCs, weapons, mods) to never sell any minerals until you absolutely level up everything.
if you are low on minerals then they're worth 150 credits to you, so its even more worth skipping gold. Then if by skipping gold you're no longer low on materials but low on credits you sell those excess minerals and you're still being more efficient.
No one normal is selling minerals. It's actively a rip off on purpose
@@Bruno-cb5gk no
Some people in the comments may not understood that this man might have gone to this extent simply because he was curious and he likes to play the game anyway. This was indeed an important question in the DRG community and knowing the answer will not take the fun out of the game. Even if the result was that not mining gold is better, I know I would still mine the gold anyway because… OUR JOB IS TO MINE!
You are right that minerals are usually too valuable to sell, that's why I think it's not fair to compare the cost of selling them to mining gold. Instead you should be comparing the cost to *buy* them. It takes quite a while into DRG before you start needing credits more than minerals.
I'm a simple man. I see gold, I go and mine it.
The major reason that mining gold isn’t less efficient, is because as long as you’re not playing solo, you can mine said gold without actually adding to the overall mission time provided others are busy.
Digging gold is fun. That's reason enough for me
I'm down to like 100 magnite after unlocking 3 of the new secondaries and getting my gunner his first red star, fuck no I'm not selling that!
And barring a good daily deal on one of the minerals I do have in abundance, I dont really sell those either.
That being said, I do tend to ignore gold unless I've got some "free time" during the mission, because its just kind of annoying to mine when theres better things to do.
I'm not about to kill lootbugs over it either, especially not golden ones. They are good little lads that deserve to be pet and nothing less.
Update on this: I now have a decent stockpile of most minerals, but I still dont really tend to sell them.
I'll generally pass gold veins by if theres other stuff to be done in the mission, but this does depend on some circumstances, and I do often power attack any veign I happen to pass.
If I'm scout for example, and my engie puts a platform on a veign, I wont prioritize it over nitra or so, but I probably will grab it.
Similarly, as a driller, I might spend a surplus C4 on a veign, and with how often I run EPC mining on my driller I do mine most gold I see like that, because its good practice and barely takes any time.
With gunner and engineer, it depends a lot more, and I'll probably skip most gold unless I'm waiting for a timer or teammate for example, or if I can one hit mine the terrain behind it.
No true Dwarf would leave even a single nugget of gold unmined
I never knew people obsessed over being as efficient as possible. I just use what's fun and mine everything
Not really obsessed per se, just answering the question everyone asks
Honestly this is the best way to play. No need to complain about efficiency if you just don't care about it.
I've just recently started playing, with only about 30 hours in the game and my Gunner at Promotion 1 and haven't played anyone else, and if I really wanted to optimize my runs I would follow this video in what to do, but I just like mining stuff, even if I waste a whole bunch of time doing it. If it's a mineral and I see it, I'm going to mine it.
Only elves mine less.
Also, yeah, selling minerals is insane. Even the dwarves state and know they are being ripped off when they do it (besides the daily deal). Also I never valued xp gain after the first 25 levels. I actually am in no hurry to reach the point where I need to do 4 missions before I can gain xp again :o
only did it for forging and deep dives, since thats where the real fun with weapons begins some of those overclocks are game changers from what I've seen XD
The sound of mining gold combined with the bigger number on the end screen gives me dopamine, that is why I mine gold, and will continue to do so.
I kind of hate the mentality that I'm going to grind back to back missions all day to the point where my gold per second would allow me to squeeze out another mission. Plus, the "don't mine gold" argument also implies that there's never going to be any downtime in your team, or bugs in your path, and just feels kind of toxic if you join or host a team and then go on a mining strike.
It’s also not very dwarflike, absolutely elven behaviour
GSG should really make gold one hit
i will never understand why people tryhard on deeprock
While I am somewhat with you... Nobody asked for your understanding in the first place
@@sodecdash9336 Who asked for your opinion?
Gold goes "clink, clink", neurons go "brr". Worth.
This tells me what I already knew- Nuke the gold, or C4 it, and just keep moving. Grab anything fast, and clear the mission.
Picking up gold is fine. Mining it is stupid. This has always been true.
@@FlakAttack0 You see. It makes a fun noise when I mine it and it releases a bit of dopamine.
I always go with the if it’s easy to get, mine the gold. If it’s in a crappy spot skip it.
As someone with 500 hours in the game and (almost) all of my dwarves are gold, I mine the gold. I play the game because I like being a dwarf. I like mining and shooting bugs. If you need to optimize the game this casual game to that extent, are you sure you're having fun?
If you are already roleplaying as a smelly dwarf, you may as well mine that gold and then ROCK AND STONE!
I tend to spend at much time per cave as possible. Mining Morkite far beyond completing the objective.
Also if you really wanna keep the grind going.. Sell all your minerals and buy them back. (Massive grind-reset right there!)
You forgot the value of dopamine. That makes mining gold priceless, every time.
LEAVE NO MINERAL BEHIND
thank you for such a thorough investigation. honestly I hope they make getting gold more unambiguously "worth it," as needing to even have this look at these stats is a lot!
gold, gold, looovely gold! ⛏
I feel like the reason you dont see these people that take the game and numbers so seriously is because they usually solo
For me I just mine gold if I have time (ie, not mining/egg/escort, other missions you usually aren't constantly moving, so you can spend < 30 seconds on a vein without being left too far behind)
That's like asking: "is there more to life than being a miner?"
Skipping gold in missions is the anthesis of Rock and Stone.
Honestly when I started playing I didn't even know what gold did, I just mined it for roleplay value
Something i thought about, wouldnt the test have been more accurate without the first trial run of running the map and that first run was the run where you tried to get the gold? since in practice no one would actually know the gold layout on a map when they plan, if they were planning on mining gold they would have to spend extra time searching as well.
This gives the idea of not getting gold an even further advantage because people that try to get all gold will indeed have to spend time searching for it
this is less accurate because it would change the way the second run (whichever one it ends up being) behaves. the first run would have a negative bias because of variance that would be uncontrolled and not accounted for. he isn't measuring how much time you spend searching, both runs would need to search for the materials they want in practice, and it prevents other outlying scenarios such as getting lost/ turned around, sub-optimal routes, accidental falls, etc. you do have a point in that this does cut out some extra time searching that the gold run would take over the non-gold run, but this is likely a negligible time difference. one way to account for this would be to use a far larger sample size and use multiple players doing different styles (one mission the player goes for gold, the other they skip) but I don't know how willing the creator is to go to that much effort
he only did that so he would give both ACTUAL runs a fair advantage, since they were the same layout.
People would spend extra time exploring and navigating new maps anyway even if you're skipping gold. Not to mention, a team of 4 can muktitask faster anyways.
this test basically just checks to see if mining gold is worth it when you see it. the question of "is it worth it to search every inch of cave for all gold deposits" is only worth asking after you find out if its even worth it to take the time to mine gold.
That would skew the run because he's playing solo and would take longer to find the gold.
A team of 4 could probably find and mine the gold as fast or faster than he did despite knowing all the spots.
A true Dwarf would never ask this question...