I was a little disappointed my character was not encumbered by the weight. While a lot of the stuff I was taking back did not weigh much. Apart from me felt like that is never good hauling that much loot and not walking slower than a sloth. I do have a decent amount of carrying capacity from how much I’ve played the game over the years and it did come in handy.

For those who have read my Space Traveling Guide you might be wondering a few things. Is the space between the space station and the planet PvP lootable? Yes, it sure is and every space pirate within 100 lightyears would get their rocks off if they saw me flying past. Is the loot I got hunting on the space station droppable in lootable space? Yep. Did you attempt to fly it down yourself? HECK NO!!!!!

There are plenty of idiots in this game over the years that refused to pay the small petty fee of 7 PED. They attempted to fly down the loot themselves. A pirate blew them up and they lost 1k’s dollars’ worth of loot. All in an attempt to save on paying 70 cents (7 PED) to teleport down to where they wanted to be on the planet. Mind-blowing I know.

I have been stupid quite a few times in this game. I however am not that stupid. I even made sure I had the 7 PED to pay for the fee ahead of time. When I first landed up there I tossed 7 PED into storage. Just in case I spent the rest I had on me for repairs, buying ammo and whatnot.

With a game like Entropia Universe being a real cash economy I’m sure many are wondering after that many hunts and being up at a place like Crystal Palace Space Station did I make or less PED. That is quite a complex question and it depends on how you view what is profit or not. The title of this post however gave it away.

As such I’m going to be breaking things down the best I can. Numbers will be in percentages of the total amount I believe I spent in some instances. There are certain costs I have a reasonable eye on while others it’s within a margin of error. There are also some things I’ve gained that I can’t take good accounting for.

As far as the trip and all the hunting I did there are quite a few costs involved.

First was acquiring the gear and the armor plating for that gear (Gremlin Armor with MK. 5B plating.) Since these are unlimited items that can be repaired I only accounted for the decay I took resulting in repair bills.

I then have limited (L) items that can’t be repaired that are total losses when they break. The gun I used was an ArMatrix LR-35 (L), with an ArMatrix L-Amplifier 33B (L), and a P-20 (L) extender. In my notes, I broke down each hunt with what I expect fully using 100% of all the ammo I brought with me for each hunting round.

Along with that decay. I also included a markup value of the average price I was paying for these items from other players. That is because all of these items are crafted and I can’t just get them for their base TT (trade terminal) value. I also can’t repair them so I’m out the markup.

I also had two healing devices with me. A Vivo T20 (L) and an unlimited 10-Pulse Unit. The Vivo T20 (L) since it can’t be repaired I only used it during combat if I had to. Otherwise, I only used the 10-Pulse Unit. I kept track of the repair bills for the Unlimited 10-Pulse Unit per hunt along with the decay and markup for the Vivo T20 (L) usage.

There were also transportation costs. I had the gas to fly up to Crystal Palace Space Station. The decay on my (L) thruster on my ship. Along with a 7 PED teleportation fee to come back down to Calypso for selling.

Finally, you have the auction house fees for listing items for sale. The bulk of the loot I got was Shrapnel that you can convert into non-tradeable ammo for 101% markup. As I was converting into ammo I kept track of that markup.

You then have the base TT value of all the items looted. For those who only view profit in terms of TT that is highly unlikely and not how a game like Entropia Universe works. Just considering that alone this hunt is quite the loss.

Then you have the markup on items. Most of the loot I got was in large enough amounts that I could list them for sale. Not all of it did end up selling so the markup I did not consider in those situations. There were also some items I’ll be holding onto where I only included the TT value in my numbers since they were small stacks that are not worth trying to sell for now.

You then have the value of all the skill gains. Skills can be chipped out and sold to other players. While I was using 50% increase skill gain pills that I’ve been saving for quite some time. A lot of those gain value as I don’t keep track of them.

What I did keep track of is the skill gain value from finishing codexs. While the game lists them in TT amount I looked them up for the actual cost if I was going to buy them from other players and included the markup. I did this since I’m activity using and even needed those skills. Many people farm codex to save on the costs of buying skills from other players.

With all of that out of the way, it’s time to look at the first set of numbers. In total, I had 5,004.15 PED spent. I had a total of 4,484.67 TT of loot for a loss of 519.48 TT or 10.3%. Keep in mind that the bulk of this was Shrapnel that I kept converting to ammo. This is not even close to how much loot I brought back. This does not include markup on items or skill gains.

I was hunting on taxed lands since that is the only way to hunt anything on Crystal Palace. Those taxes thankfully are not something you have to take out afterward. So the 4.5% in taxes I was paying is already accounted for.

The next thing up is working out how much markup on items I’m going to list on the auction should be. Since some of these items can only be found on Crystal Palace hunting Aurli they tend to have quite a low supply or zero up for sale.

One item I was hoping I would be looting but did not during this hunt is called Empty Skill Implant (L). They have a high value and can drop in a range of TT amounts. They are used for storing extracted skills on. Unlike most creatures in the Entropia universe where they are considered “rare” drops. On something like Aurli they are supposedly “uncommon.” Since I got zero I, for now, will disagree with that but my hunting sample is not large enough.

Then there are the harder-to-price items that I got. They required a little more digging into the numbers to try and find a “fair” price I could be listing these items for. While sure I could go a lot higher and try to take advantage of the lack of supply I’m also out an auction house fee every time if I have to keep relisting. Not to mention waiting many weeks trying to sell it.

Thankfully there are some market data available in-game. There are a lot of different numbers to look at for averages, stack sizes, dates, and so forth. I would then do further research into how often they even sell, what crafting they are used in, and other uses the item had. Along with what kind of demand for items they crafted had. In some instance, I got a little greedier than I would be if there was a lot of items listed on market.

In total after auction fees, I had a total of 156.49 extra PED made from markup. This dose includes converting shrapnel into ammo. Converting for ammo did play a decent amount of the total of this. I am a bit disappointed by how low this amount is. As it means I was only averaging a 103.48% markup on my total loot which is not enough.

I do feel in part this was some bad luck on my end and my hunting is just not a big enough sample size to be sure. There were a lot of high markup items that could have dropped at a higher rate than I was getting. I was counting on that being the case. It just did not pan out for me this time around.

The markup brings my losses down from 10.3% to 7.25%. I was hoping it would have been a few percentage points more.

Then you have the skill gains I got from codex completion but not from other activities such as healing and landing hits on a creature from shooting. Those priced at market value bring my total losses down to 2.91%.

During my hunt, I gained quite a lot of important skills. I gained almost a full level of evade. I increased my weapon skills by a level taking the ArMatrix LR-35 (L) gun I was using that was almost maxed damage and hit rate to maxed out. I also gained 2 or 3 life which is huge. Along with a lot of other skills.

Since I have a lot of data I’ve collected on my hunts there are a few things I’m going to dig into deeper on. This is a way to try and work out how in the future if I do this again I could get my costs down. The biggest factor is that skill and equipment-wise these might not be the smartest thing to hunt for me for now.

In an ideal situation, I would be taking near-zero armor decay and near-zero healing decay. A situation like that is when I was hunting something like Merps. I never heal and my armor decay is quite small.

When comparing my data sets of hunting Merps vs Aurli I can see a huge difference in how this plays out. I was usually spending 1 to 2 PED on healing when hunting Aurli per round vs 0 when hunting Merp. If I could get that to zero that would have reduced my costs by 0.68%. That is however quite a small amount and seeing as Aurli can kill me where I don’t worry about Merp doing that healing is going to be needed from time to time.

The biggest cost and where having more evade would come into play were my armor repair bills. Gremlin with Mk. 5B plates are known to be pricy when it comes to decay. Per hunting trip, I was spending between 2.3% to 3.32% of my total costs on armor repair bills when hunting Aurli.

Compared to hunting something like Merp my armor repair bills were 0.0026%. Now to be fair I was using an Unlimited weapon AMP when I hunt Merp and that does drive up the total spent. If I was to adjust those numbers to be fairer it would be 0.80%.

If I could get my repair bills down when hunting Aurli that would help slightly. If it was more on par with my Merp hunting which would be quite hard to do since there is a huge difference between the two creatures that would have saved me 1.70% of my total costs.

The other driving factors that would reduce my total costs are: per kill, shorten the length of time I’m taking damage, and get me out of a bad situation of having adds on me. This can be addressed by having a higher damage gun. Even more so if that gun had a better efficacy rating than what I have.

To get a higher efficiency rating gun at least for me at my level of play is not much of an option. I would have to go Unlimited of which most of them I lack the skills to even use. That would save me from having to pay a markup on (L) guns. However, we are talking a minimum of many thousands of dollars for that kind of gun up to tens of thousands. Even then that is considered on the “cheaper” end of things.

The more accessible route for me is to simply keep increasing my skills till I can use a higher damage limited (L) gun. That would cut down how many times Aurli regen health, make the kill quicker, and reduce my costs in other ways. The downside once you get to a big enough (L) gun the markup on them skyrockets which can be a bit counterintuitive.

Final Thoughts

I also did not luck out and get one of many different item drops that could have taken my long hunting trip into profit land. Just a slightly higher increase of better markup items would have put me over the edge. Along with a couple more globals. So many vaurables slightly changed and things would have been a lot different.

Other Content

• Crystal Palace Space Station Trip From The Start
• Entropia Universe | Leaving For Planet Cyrene

Information

Screenshots were taken and content was written by @Enjar about Entropia Universe.