
Starfield | Not Wanting Involvement
Usually, I like to fast-forward over the mundane days and sessions since this is a 41-day event. I felt with this one I would highlight more of the reality of it all. There is a lot more going on than I tend to share.
Every grind starts the same. I make sure I’ve cleared out any loot that has been accounted for so far. I like doing things in 1k PED of ammo chunks. A fresh 5-hour instance tends to go over 2k PED worth of ammo depending on my clearing speed. I also end up decaying over 1 gun and part of a gun amp.
1k PED cycles I have also found to be generally a great stopping point I need to make to repair my armor. Thankfully the repair terminal is not that far in the instance itself. Since I don’t rack up a lot of decay I don’t find myself needing to do it more often than that.
Since I’m using Unlimited (UL) armor that can be repaired. That also means as it takes to damage the resistance it provides a slight decrease over time. The longer I go without repairing it the more it could end up costing me in having to do extra healing that I would not have needed to do otherwise.
I use my vehicle inventories to help separate the loot and keep track of what I’m manually adding up. That way even if I’m in a rush I don’t get confused. If I’m also unable to write everything down or mess up. Things are separated enough that I can take what data I have and reverse what data I’m missing.
I also keep any broken guns and gun amps in that ship's inventory. I don’t want to mistakenly just dump into my normal storage like I might do with other inventories when quickly clearing things out. I want a reminder that I’ve just burned through x amount of guns that I try and replace when I can.
I also have a car’s inventory where I dump loot that is not shrapnel after it’s been accounted for. Shrapnel gets converted into ammo for a 101% return. While at the start I had more than enough shrapnel around I could keep it with this loot. Over time my supply of that has dwindled and I still want to take advantage of that 101% worth it has.
This screenshot above was taken at random near one of my ends of a cycle. I still had some ammo left to burn before I’d done. I however needed to log out for a bit so I’d need to start up a fresh instance to finish.
Then I have other things on me that can be used for containers as well. Sometimes I’ve had a busy grinding day I’ve exceeded the weight in the cars inventory or for whatever reason I wanted to keep something else separate like interesting loot I’ve acquired during this event.
While there are third-party programs and such to use to keep track of costs and returns. I frankly prefer to use as little third-party anything when running a game like this. The only stuff that has been around for ages and even the developers of the game have indicated is fine to use I might use it.
I also do keep some spare ammo on me in case I go through the 1k ammo and I have to clear my way back to the trading terminal. There have also been instances like the boss is about to spawn and I’m a few shots short of being able to kill it before I’m done. In those cases, it’s just easy to adjust the total amount of ammo used for that run.
All that then gets input into further columns of data once a run is over. Since things like armor and healing devices that I’m using get fully repaired after each run that is when I write down those decay costs.
I also work out beyond just TT profit or loss but the markup on what is looted as well. Since Merry Mayhem has quite a standard loot structure I have a rather standardized setup for dealing with it. I do have space for myself to leave a note if any further adjustments need to be made.
I then have further information about the markup on decayed items. I however have that info way off elsewhere as I’m more interested in only seeing results in TT for the most part and things like what I looted with markup.
I mostly want to take note when 25, 50, and even higher point amounts occur. Since anything under 250, you are not getting a pop-up in the game of you getting that amount of points. This is my way of keeping track and yes keeping my sanity that I am slowly grinding to 43,000 points even if it seems like I’m forever away from it.
As a result, this data is outdated. You can however see I’ve gained a lot of skills since the start. I even had to add a new skill that I’ve unlocked since starting this event.
You can also see there are some negative numbers as well. That is because I’m taking the codex rewards out of the totals. Since these totals are outdated but the codex gains are still being taken out of as they occur. This data cannot be trusted for now and I usually ignore it.
I also need to find the formula for calculating skill points into raw TT. As it stands I have to manually enter the start and end skill data for each at a time into a website that returns to me TT value to. Creating extra work I’d rather cut out at some point.
Perhaps then I’ll have such data more up-to-date. For the time being while it’s nice to know. It’s far too time-consuming to manually do. While there are paid third-party tools for this sort of thing. I already spend way too much on this game. I don’t need to start adding monthly bills for third-party tools to my expense.
Yes, I can’t be bothered to make my spreadsheets look nice. There is just something about the raw look that I find so endearing. They are not here to loot nice and be distracting. They are here for me to crunch a lot of data out of later on.
Now that organization and accounting are out of the way. Onto the actual playing with the game open!
Before I got into a fresh instance I double-checked to check I have guns and ammo to last me a full 5 hours; and that I’d empty any loot already accounted for. Along with did I forget to write anything down into the spreadsheets.
I then double-check my daily mission. If it’s a fresh new day do I need to remove it? The daily can be reset once per day. You can only get a new one when you enter into the instance and not while you are already in there. So if I need to “reset it” I need to make sure to abandon the daily mission before going in.
Every day while I still have points to gain for the main silver mission line for Merry mayhem Annihilation. I try and make sure I’m getting to either rank 4 or 5 of the daily Mayhem mission. While it’s announcing if I go over that amount. It’s a negative to me if I drop the mission too early before I can get another one if I could have finished off another stage of it. As that would mean I would have missed out on the opportunity to earn some extra Mayhem Tokens.
While yes the boss can spawn every 30 minutes. You also need to kill 96 Merry Annihilation Daikiba. That usually means if I stay for as long as it’s worthwhile in a 5-hour instance I’m killing 8-9 bosses and 768-864 Annihilation Daikiba.
As far as why it’s not 10 bosses that is quite simple. It takes a moment to kill the boss and I’m usually not running at 30 minutes between the 96 kills. The result there are usually 10 to 20 minutes at the end of an instance that I skip doing any killing since I can’t get one more boss.
In this particular situation, I had finished rank 5 of the Merry mayhem Daily mission. I stayed long enough for the next boss spawn. It was then time to dump the instance and exit. So I could reset my daily and start over from the daily stage of one.
A few shots later I used the last of my ammo. So I ran over to take care of the accounting side of things for writing down loot, decay, and other things. I then converted some shrapnel into 1k PED worth of ammo and start shooting again.
As you might have noticed from my above data. I’ve been having quite a few bad runs. So at this point, I’ll take whatever global(s) I can get. Thankfully this was not the only one I would be getting.
I happened to have hit a nice little cluster of amazing loot. Shortly after I got the 133 PED looter that I used for the cover image of this post. I had high hopes this run was not going to be a negative one.
I did a little bit of walking around the instance clearing out some pockets of creatures to get some in the area I was standing in to respawn. Nothing much happened. Before I knew it was time to fight the boss again.
Shortly after that, I had gone through the ammo I had on me. So it was back to the start of the instance to restock, repair, and record loot and other things.
I finally then get my first big point gain of the day for 250 points. I keep hoping I’ll see some 2.5k gainers at some point but so far this event has been cheap on giving any of those out.
I then did some walking around clearing out a bunch of pockets of Annihilation Daikiba that have been alive for way too long. One of them was almost a global but not quite only giving me 48.26 PED. I’ll take it over the normal 1 to 1.4 PED I usually get on a kill.
It was then back to yet again killing another boss. It is surprising how fast 96 kills go. It is almost like all I ever do is kill bosses or something. If I’m not mistaken that boss gave me 100 points toward the mission as well.
Screenshots were taken and content was written by @Enjar about Entropia Universe.