Verdantis Mines notes

Many people predicted that uncloning Verdantis Mines will make them like new Serpent's Spine Mines. Well, they were right. :-(

My notes after exploring Verdantis Mines (I am sure I didn't discover everything, but suspect that I covered the most of it):

• First thing first: the same problem as Serpent's Spine Mines --- very low density of ore nodes.
  • In the former copper mine, I spent several hours (3-4), and collected ... 46 copper ores.
    • Again, I collected ores as I saw them, without camping, and moved on. Most of the time I spent on fighting mobs, and adventuring/exploring.
    • I collected quite a few silver ores (less than copper ores), yet I came here for copper.
• It starts looking like a mine, which was very promising, but as soon as we are out of a front room, we are in an underground adventure area, a dungeon of sort.
  • Again areas are huge. A lot of open space.
  • Inside open areas a town with multiple buildings, and even something like a castle.
  • In general, it looks like designers went for an underground archaeological dig, rather than a traditional mine.
• While I counted ~4 ankhs on my compass, in reality in most areas I can reach and use the one at the very beginning. An accidental death (I kicked a barrel, and kicked a bucket, so to speak --- no warning, no way to know that it is deadly) effectively resets the scene, and I have to fight two areas of mobs again just to go anywhere.
• The low-level area with fire elementals is pitch black. It is difficult to navigate, even with Night Vision, but especially challenging when you died in that area (e.g., fell from above) --- now you have no assist, and everything around you uniformly black. I had major problems finding my way to the starting area, where the ankh is placed.
• The area uses breakable floors to much better effect than Serpent's Spine Mines. They look more in-place, almost organic, and instead of being a major nuisance, they add to the mood. Kudos on good use of them!
• The area do not overdo with the new stuff, yet even newer things are introduced: ropes. Again, their use is less gimmicky, and more organic. Kudos again!
  
• While mobs are not very difficult, they are spawning quickly and pretty aggressive.
• By the way, kicking the bucket ... sorry, barrel, produces unreachable areas. At least I didn't find the other way there. Now I have to reset the scene.
  • The design includes some trial-and-error actions, where an error is basically death, and destruction of a pass. I am not sure it is the right way to do, given that the death is not free, and consumes accumulated XPs, sometimes a significant amount.
    
  • It is by design that doing relatively harmless actions you can trigger your death --- so prepare to be dead multiple times, or skipping exploring stuff just to be secure, and your actions will require re-entering the scene in such cases, again, by design.

Update: When I said "pitch black" I didn't mean "it is dark". I mean that the surface of the are, and all features are made from a black material.

Another thing, which bothered me: never-ending low rumbling sound. It doesn't depends on the area, just rumbles everywhere. And, of course, the music is here too, making noise level higher.

All things considered, we have more adventure areas, and less traditional mines. They are all becoming quirky (an archaeological dig by elves, an underground village with a huge well by kobolds). I like quirky, yet when everybody around you are quirky, check carefully --- you may find yourself in an insane asylum. Quirky works only as an exception, not as a rule.

I don't know, if it was a design goal by Portalarium, but both newly redesigned mines reduced their output of ore, while requiring more efforts to mine. In general, the whole new experience of mining reminds me catching a mouse in a castle: you have to cover vast spaces looking into all nooks and crannies just to find a small rodent.

 

Hmm, I went to a nearby POT, then returned back, and ... no reset. Whatever the barrel has blown is still blown. Is it a bug? Or is it how it works now?

 

How long were you gone? I'm not sure how long it takes a scene to reset but it's at least 15 minutes?

 

Hmm. About 15. Could be less. Maybe that's the problem. But I found a way around in the scene (not sure it is the legal one).

 

Instances have a 15 minute reset timer

 

I really hope the devs will bring the ore density up in the new uncloned mines, to make it fun to mine AND adventure at the same time. If it takes that long to gather ore, there really is no incentive to go in a mine instead of another adventuring zone, aside maybe to gather crystals and gem. I can probably farm more ores in the 3-4 hours you've spent gathering 46 copper ores, just from random encounters.

 

Just for a comparison: I spent just under an hour in R40 Brightbone Pass this lunchtime and got 46 iron ore, 13 tungsten and 11 nickel (and also some cotton, wood, beetles, suet and borers). For this I had to kill three bears and seven skeletons. Could have avoided killing one of the bears if my elemental hadn't been set to aggressive.

 

If a) you know the layout well, b) handy with killing mobs, you can do better then me for sure. I expect that some GM miners will go there, and post their numbers including tungsten/nickel/tin, and how much silver they found. Yet the ore nodes density is much lower than it was before, it takes time to get to many of them, and it has less crystals than I expected.

That was exactly my impression: like I was in an adventure area casually mining, or in a never-ending random encounter with tougher mobs.

It looks like Port crunched numbers, and they had shown them, that we mine too much ore with mines being major sources. So apparently Port made a decision, to "deemphasize" mines, making mining a casual by-product of adventuring. Arguably I see their point: adventuring is more fun than mining/gathering. OTOH, nobody mines for fun --- the real fun is in crafting, which is impossible without mats (a two-step process).

Another point: nowadays if I want wood, I go to Hidden Vale (there are no dedicated forest areas), if I want cotton, I grow it myself (I don't know any place, where cotton is concentrating in the wild, but it can be cultivated), if I want hides, I go to areas where wolves are known to be in abundance (no special place, but realistically almost anywhere), if I want ore, I go to mines. That's how I can sustain my crafting habits. With mines "deemphasized", crafting becomes an expensive vice. I like crafting, but will do it less and less, if the trend continues.

Frankly, after Serpent's Spine Mines have gone, my go to mines were Verdantis (for copper and tin), and Spectral (for iron and nickel). If I needed gold or silver, I went straight to Elysium skipping lower chambers of other mines. With Verdantis gone, I don't know a good source for copper. I assume that two more mines will be "optimized" soon too.

I want to know the Port's master plan for mining and crafting. I would appreciate, if they share numbers behind their decisions, if they have any.

 

The only mine left for de-cloning is Elysium.

 

Good. It means that at least we will have iron + nickel (or is it tin in that location?). Good bye copper, and silver.

 

Iron, nickel and tungsten (and granite).

 

There is copper in Graff. Also gold on the third level.

 

Hmm, I don't know about the rest of you, but I spent a couple hours in the new Verdantis mines today and I thought it was very well done.

No, the ore nodes are not in concentrated areas like the previous version... but there were a few groups of 4-5 nodes in close proximity that I found. After killing the surrounding mobs, I had ample time to harvest all the ore nodes before respawns. In some cases, the ore nodes respawned for me to mine again too.

As a bonus, I see there are quite a few sulfurous ash nodes that we can harvest, and quite a few crystal nodes too. And I liked that when I did find a clump of ore nodes sometimes it would be like 4 copper, 1 silver. I think I even found a few gold nodes in there too. I found a few small cave areas where there were no mobs, just a few ore nodes (2 or maybe 3 ore nodes) and maybe a crystal or two. Not a whole lot to mine... but there was nothing around to interrupt you for those.

I haven't even explored the entire scene yet (thanks to a few "stuck spots" that made me have to /stuck and restart at the beginning) so there might be some even better areas for ore nodes.

To me, it wasn't a mining haven like previous mines were... but it was much more fun to kill a few things - harvest a few nodes - explore other rooms/levels - kill a few things - mine more nodes - etc. I felt like I was working my way through it and it gave a sense of accomplishment.

I know that strictly as a means of gathering resources it's better to just have concentrated nodes that you can just cycle over and over... but to me that gets very boring after about a 1/2 hour and a mine that makes me work my way through to find other nodes is just more entertaining for my time spent.

As the OP stated, this scene has breakaway bridges, ropes to climb, ladders all over, buildings all over (where you can take a short afk break if needed). I think I even saw a stalactite break away and land on me at one point! Was hard to tell for sure with a bunch of elves around me, but I could swear I saw it fall on me.

I can't wait to check the rest of this mine scene out. So far, I think this is my favorite mine in the game!

As for my production... I was in there maybe a couple hours in between doing work stuff at work, so it was very casual and definitely not hard core mining. Also, I was mostly just exploring and had passed by a bunch of ore nodes just to get further along and see more of the mine. That said, I was able to gather: 57 copper, 15 gold, 49 silver, 92 granite, 17 tin, 13 tungsten, a handful of ruby and sapphire gems and fragments, and 110 sulfurous ash. I also noticed a chest in one building, but it took me a while to get a key. It eventually dropped off of a yellow conned skeleton (I'm level 81) and like an idiot, I used it on the wrong door so I still couldn't get to that chest to see what it had. I was lured into another building that needed a key because I saw some ore nodes through the windows and didn't remember the key might break on use.

Oh, and there were a whole bunch of crates/barrells/sacks to loot throughout the place and it looks to be a pretty good source for scraps and gold and random stuff you normally get from those things. I looted a bunch of Elven Woodwind bows too that might bring me some patterns later.

All in all, I took a very leisurely stroll though there in between alt-tabbing out at work and I still got a decent amount of ore. I bet if/when I get the layout down and go there to min/max for ores... I can get a good amount and have much more fun than the old mines!

 

Well I actually liked it, though I was surprised to see something that reminded me so much of the nether level of Minecraft. I didn't have any trouble finding copper nodes, but I was looking more for silver, because that's been harder for me to find. There are quite a few other zones where you can get a lot of copper, even a few you wouldn't expect.

The difference is that SSM puts just 2 or 3 ore nodes together in plain sight far from other ores, and then surrounds them with four or more kobolds. VM has plenty of nodes in mob-free areas. The ore node density may not be as much as you are used to but it was still better than SSM. And the mob density around them is much lower, and there are a lot of places to hide. There are still breaking platforms, but they don't do much to block your way around because it's not the whole walkway at once like with SSM.

There are also like 4 or 5 silver nodes way in the back by the entrance to The Rise. It took me a while to figure how to get across into the keep, and even when I found the gate switch room, I still didn't find the switches for a while, because something opened the gate anyhow, and I slipped down the hole. About the only thing I didn't figure out was how to open the locked doors in the town area.

Scenes usually take at least 15 minutes to reset, even (and especially!) private solo instances. This was specifically because people would relog to reset an instance when they started with ores already populated, instead of waiting for them to repop.