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pd

Data Mining Data

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TL;DR

If you don't care about skill gain/hr, stop reading now.  If you want to maximize mining skill gain per hour, keep reading!

 

Executive Summary:

Things tend to be poorly tested in wurm.  I recently returned with a new character and wanted to skill my mining.  I found the wiki's advice and the advice in freedom chat to be very lacking.  I decided I would try to determine how exactly mining skill gain works in wurm.

 

A little story:

Many moons ago in wurm (gold 1 & early gold 2) priests routinely 'blessed' items.  Why? because the conventional wisdom was that bless 'reduced damage and decay.'  I made a priest early in gold 2 and wondered how much damage reduction bless really offered.  I asked in chat and no one seemed to have an answer.  Finally my curiosity got the better of me and I decided to test it.  

 

I made two very low, same quality pickaxes and blessed one.  I mined the same number of actions with each pick on the same wall tile.  At the end of the test both had exactly the same damage.  Again I asked in freedom chat about it and didn't receive a satisfactory answer.  I asked Rolf on IRC what effect bless has on items and he responded something like "Bless only works on altars."  

 

Since then I've been very skeptical with common knowledge in Wurm as it's often untested and little more than rumor.

 

Basic Info:

There are ten mine able resource types in wurm: Rock, Iron, zine, tin, lead, copper, slate, silver, marble, and gold.  Each resource type has a hidden 'difficulty' attribute.  For a given mining skill and pickaxe quality higher difficulty resources produce fewer units at your maximum mining skill and more units at quality 1.00.  I mined all 10 resource types with the same mining skill and pickaxe of 100 units each then looking at the average quality of the piles it appears the ore difficulties appear to rank as follows:

 

rock < iron/zinc < tin < lead/copper < slate < silver < gold/marble

 

admittedly though my sample size for the piles was very low and the order of difficulties could be wrong.  Another player's testing gave this order:

 

rock < iron < copper < tin = zinc < lead = slate < silver < gold = marble

 

To get a better understanding I would really need to mine probably 300-500 of each resource type with the same pick and mining skill to clearly see how they rank.  That's another 3-5k worth of mining though at this point I would really like to mine for skill.  :)

 

Thus rock will produce the highest average quality with the most units at your mining skill and the fewest units at quality 1.00.  Conversely gold/marble will produce the fewest units at your mining skill and the most units at quality 1.00.

 

Mining increases a total of 7 attributes and 3 skills.

 

Body

Body Strength

Body Stamina

Mind

Mind Logic

Soul

Soul Strength

 

Mining

Miscellaneous

pickaxe

 

I mainly focused on the Mining skill and ways to maximize it in my tests.  I didn't look at how to maximize the other skills.  I spent considerable time mining all 10 resource types with a large number of unenchanted, coc, coc+woa, and woa, and rare pickaxes trying to figure out how exactly the skillgain for mining works.  I was confused for a good while until I noted a number of things happening:

 

You only gain mining skill if the ore/shard produced is greater than quality 1.00 and less than quality 40.00

 

In other words the unit must be from quality 1.01 to quality 39.99 inclusive.  If the unit is quality 1.00 or 40.00+ you will never gain a mining tick from it.  Please note that you can gain any of the 9 other attributes/skills from the other quality units, but not the mining skill itself.

 

I also noticed that the size of the mining tick is exactly the same regardless of the resource type you are mining holding everything else constant.  Rock shards give exactly the same size tick as gold for a given pickaxe, mining skill, and mining timer.

 

I then tested mining a capped quality 30 gold vein to see if it would produce mining ticks when the ores came out at quality 30 since a great number of them would.  It appears the server calculates what quality the ore "would have been" had the vein not been capped when determining whether you get a mining tick.  There's no advantage or disadvantage to mining capped or uncapped veins.

 

I also noticed that if you start a mining action with zero stamina the skillgain for that action is reduced by approximately 90%.  This is probably to prevent someone from setting a heavy object on their mining key bind and going to bed to mine all night with zero stamina.  Please note as long as you have some stamina when you start the mining action you will get full skill gain even if you end the action with zero stamina.

 

I also noticed that the 'size' of the mining tick is directly proportional to the length of the mining timer.  Longer timers produced larger ticks.  

 

Putting all this together I was able to reverse engineer the probable formula for mining skillgain.

 

 

If(quality > 1.00 && quality < 40.00 && startingStamina > 0)

 

then

 

skill gain = =0.001+t/10000-w/100000+c/100000

 

where t is the mining timer in seconds

w is the wind of ages (WoA) cast

c is the circle of cunning (CoC) cast

 

As you can see the WoA cast actually retards the skill gain.  This is to counteract the bonus you get from it lowering the mining timer.  The net effect is zero.  Circle of cunning adds to the skill gain.  Longer mining timers also increase the skillgain.  CoC increases skill gain.

 

If we disregard the effects of WoA for a moment the most optimal mining timer would actually be 0 seconds.  This is because you get 0.001 mining skill tick regardless of the timer length.  The effect of this 'bonus' is less pronounced the longer the mining timer (and thus the size of the mining tick) is.

 

At first glance having a pickaxe enchanted with WoA would seem to help as it reduces the mining timer and thus increases the effective skillgain per hour.  Unfortunately the formula subtracts some of the potential skill proportional to the size of the WoA cast.  After testing 2x QL 74 picks one with woa and one without then calculating the skillgain per hour after accounting for the size of 

 

the mining ticks and the length of the timer WoA neither helps nor hurts the overall skillgain.  It does, however, allow you to get in more mining actions per hour.

 

So how do we maximize skill gain?

 

There's no magic formula for this because there are multiple variables and only one equation.

 

In theory it doesn't matter what resource you mine (vein quality also doesn't matter) since they all give the same skillgain holding all other things constant.  The key to maximizing the skill gain is to get as many of the ores/shards to come out at 1.01 to 39.99 quality while at the same time maintaining the fastest possible mining timer.

 

If you are producing too many units at quality 1.00 then move to a lower difficulty resource and/or use a higher quality pickaxe.

 

Conversely if you are producing too many ores at your max mining skill and not enough in the optimal range then you can move to a more difficult resource type and/or use a lower quality pickaxe to increase the number of optimal units produced.  Again please note that using a lower quality pickaxe will increase the length of the mining timers which can at times adversely impact your overall skill gain.

 

Of course the answers to the above questions change as your mining skill increases.  The best combination of resource type and pickaxe quality at 30 mining will obviously be different than at 50 mining skill.  As you skill continues to improve you will need to reassess your ore type and pickaxe quality.  The best way to accomplish this is why looking at your ore piles to see what percentage of ore is being produced in the optimal quality range.

 

For example I was able to produce a full 60% of my Marble shards at optimal quality using a QL51 pickaxe (steel with coc 86) with 58 mining.  I was mining at a rate of 0.57 skill points per hour without using sleep bonus.  This is an excellent rate of skillgain.

 

~AspergersSyndrome, Mayor Grindewald, H9, Xanadu

 

link to very messy google docs


 

 

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very good read i been testing this my self wiki is way wrong about zinc and tin they just not hard anof to get skill on at 74.kill coper worked good from 60 to 70

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After reading it all, I can clearly say, this entire drivel is either a) common knowledge or B ) wrong.


 


Better off looking at tick frequency, not skillgain per hour.


Edited by Archaed
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Getting 0.001 minimum tick is wrong- I would be definitely happy to gain that much skill per tick...

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except that 1 to 40 QL stuff everything was and is common knowledge. If you wana skill a resource skill, mine with a 1QL high coc pick axe on the corresponding ore type as mentioned on the wiki page:

Rock
Iron 
Copper 
Silver, Gold or Marble

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Getting 0.001 minimum tick is wrong- I would be definitely happy to gain that much skill per tick...

 

It's entirely possible that the there could be a penalty to the size of the skillgain based on your mining skill or another such variable.  Currently with my mining in the high 50's and low 60's i've been able to calculate the size of the skill tick ahead of time by plugging in the values into the equation.

 

If you could set your skill gain in the event log to 'always' then tell me your mining timer, woa, coc, the size of your tick, and your skill level i'd be happy to look at it and investigate why it's different.  Part of scientific discovery is peer feedback.

Edited by pd

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actually the more i think about it it's clear that what my formula is missing is the modifier for the size of the skill tick based on your current mining skill.  I wasn't noticing this because i'm really looking at a shapshot with my skill at its current level.


 


Most likely the skill gain is similar to the formula i posted above then multiplied by the difference between 100 and the miner's current skill. thus something like:


 


skill gain = (0.001+t/10000-w/100000+c/100000)*(100-skill)*0.01


 


this is just a rough guess since i don't have the data points for a variety of mining skills (IE 10 mining, 30 mining, 70 mining, 90 mining etc), but these newer formula does take into account the 'penalty' that would be applied to the skill gain the higher you go.


 


If players would be willing to set their skillgain ticks to 'always' in their settings then send me a single data point with the following info I could probably work out the formula empirically:


current mining skill


length of the mining timer that gave the skill tick


the amount of the skill tick


coc on their pick


woa on their pick


 


All I really need is this info for various mining skills and I can do the rest.  PM me the info If you are willing to help.


thanks


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I commend you for taking this on as a project. it's a nice contribution to wurm .  I applaud those that go into the minutia and technical sides of things to try to fact find and debunk myth..yet where would be we in wurm without our myth and lore.  I myself derp around a good deal too much.  I can gauge the fun meter and how to waste time well, but to reiterate data at this level is not my strength of passion.  so thank you.


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As for pick QL, I find that adjusting the pick QL works best for gains. Once the optimum pick QL is found per mining skill, then I let it wear down to a point where gains are slowed, then imp it back up a bit. Using a 1 QL pick has always given poor mining gains in comparison. This just seems the easy mode of doing nothing concerning finding the optimal pick QL range adjusted to mining skill level and ore type.


 


=Ayes=


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These tests have confirmed what I have been telling others. This strategy was explained in our video about optimizing your skill gain:


 


>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewEXEEwp3Dg&list=PLgR2sKLhaNBa2fT_Y3iu-Y4DR-Q_dUq_K&index=17&spfreload=10


 


 


The big one is that the capped level of the vein does not affect skill gain. It seems there is a common misconception out there that it does, but you conclude the same as me that it doesn't.


 


Thanks for doing these tests! It is great when we can get some clear glimpses into the inner workings of the game.


 


Griphyth

Edited by McGarnicle
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coc multiplies skill gain, it does not add.

woa reduces timer length, once you see the timer woa has already had an effect. No need to add it to the formula unless you want to calculate what the same setting would yield with woa

any timer longer than 29s will only amount the same as a 29s timer

formula must be something like

skillgain_bonus = (1 + coc / 100) * (1 + knowledge_bonus / 100) * (1 + nutrition_bonus / 100) * ...skill = (min(29,timer) * some_fancy_constant * skill_malus) * skillgain_bonus
the interesting part is the skill_malus as this does not scale linear with skill. it's probably something like (100-skill)^small_number or e^(-skill)

oh, and the skill gain per action is capped at 1.0 iirc

If you'd really want to test it got to teh test server, increase the skill in steps of 1 (i assume you can still set the skill to any number up to 70) and take notes about the length of the timer and the skill gain. That should give a rough idea of the type of formula used to adjust skill gain to skill.

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Part of your statements was already said in Mamadarkness' guide (which is great btw), but great work here. Many things stated in past are considered true (and many out of them are) but they were lacking solid confirmation.


Edited by Samool

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I've never done any actual tests, but from personal observations I found that the best gains were achieved when you produced resources with a QL level at around half of what your mining skill is. To achieve this I would have to find the right QL of pickaxe relative to whatever resource I was mining. I agree with your ordering of difficulty for each resource.


 


Ofcourse, since I never actually tested anything I could be completely wrong. Was just what it seemed to me.


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I've never done any actual tests, but from personal observations I found that the best gains were achieved when you produced resources with a QL level at around half of what your mining skill is. To achieve this I would have to find the right QL of pickaxe relative to whatever resource I was mining. I agree with your ordering of difficulty for each resource.

 

Ofcourse, since I never actually tested anything I could be completely wrong. Was just what it seemed to me.

The most basic observation is that the more output at 1-40 ql range, the better. 

edit: that is between 1-40, so more than 1, less than 40

Edited by Samool

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The most basic observation is that the more output at 1-40 ql range, the better. 

I'd never heard that before today.

 

I'm quite out of the loop on Wurm mechanics these days.  :P

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I've never made any stats on my mining skillgains but during my grind on my chars the following I can confirm:


* skillticks are gained only from ql 1.01-39.99 so with mining don't just look for 1ql picks but for ql that will yield the most output at that range (50-55% in range is the sweet spot)


* vein ql cap does not matter, you'll still get ticks as per above


* different veins are different difficulty, so you'll want to try to change vein type and pick ql as you progress with the skill


* 0.001 is not a minimum skilltick you gain, yesterday I got around 0.0001 total skillgain mining out about 30 rock tiles using my standard 88ql woa pick @ 94 mining skill


* exhaust your stamina filling up your action queue, as you'll get skillticks based on timer length - but do not let stamina bar run out as you won't get skillticks on actions starting with empty stam (yes my observation is in line with pd, if you start an action with some stamina left you can get a skilltick even is stam bar runs out during that action)


 


...and my most important personal recommendation: do your mining grind while you are logged in with an alt where you do some exciting activity otherwise you'll get bored as a lavafiend in a 1x1 hut (just look what they do locked in there after a few days :P ). You'll only need to refill your action queue only most of the time so you can have your focus on the other toon.


Edited by Jaz

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16 points of mining in 14 days. not too bad.


 


iZdzVlM.jpg


 


RIP gold vein soon.


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I have noticed one error in your OP. Even if you have some stamina when you begin a mining action, but run out of stamina part way through the action, then you will get the 90% skill loss.

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good job! Everything the OP said I agree with.


 


The one thing I'd like to point out that was not mentioned is maximizing active action time or minimizing stamina regen time. One of the challenges of making the WOA approach work is reducing how much time you spend in stamina regen. If you regen every action with WOA you'll see a huge portion of your timer per hour wasted. If you stack action just right you can minimize this. The thing is with long timers you don't have to worry about stacking actions just right. You can easily regen stamina every 1 or 2 action with a 30s sec timer. 


 


For me, I like no WOA and long timers. This is to minimize imping material and target material consumption. And to minimize how much effort I have to put into managing action stacking.


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yeusKo4.jpg


 


22 points of mining in just over 22 days.


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yeusKo4.jpg

 

22 points of mining in just over 22 days.

 

I have noticed you started mining gold way back at early 70 skill. Customarily gold is reserved for use at 90+ mining, so I am wondering why you took this approach.

 

Anyway, after seeing your previous post on mining gold, I also started mining it at about the same level with one of my alts, since he has a gold vein right inside the mine entrance that I wanted to get rid of anyway. I too found the gains to still be pretty decent from it at this lower mining skill, with using a coc pick and sleep bonus. I did also switch him over to lead next time sb was full and found I got a bit better gains from that than gold.

 

=Ayes=

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Anyone investigated how/what to mine to maximize body stats gains?


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I have noticed you started mining gold way back at early 70 skill. Customarily gold is reserved for use at 90+ mining, so I am wondering why you took this approach.

 

Anyway, after seeing your previous post on mining gold, I also started mining it at about the same level with one of my alts, since he has a gold vein right inside the mine entrance that I wanted to get rid of anyway. I too found the gains to still be pretty decent from it at this lower mining skill, with using a coc pick and sleep bonus. I did also switch him over to lead next time sb was full and found I got a bit better gains from that than gold.

 

=Ayes=

 

According to the info in the OP, you can get equal gains from gold as you do lead if you adjust your pickaxe ql. On a gold vein you will need a higher ql  compared to lead as it is a more difficult action. One way to figure out the sweet spot is to mine maybe 50 or 100 ore and sort the pile by ql. Count the number of 1.00 ql ore and compare it to the number of 40+ql ore. If there are more 1.00ql ores, then you need to imp your pickaxe. If there are more 40.00+ql ores, then you need a lower pickaxe. The sweet spot will be when 55% or more of the ores you mine are between 1.01 and 39.99 inclusive. This method, however, is difficult to do if the vein is capped at less than 40ql. 

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