Science & Industry

Hello,

i got a character that has all lvl V PI skills. When i place my extractors on the planet, it seems the "hottest" spots don't necessarily generate the most yield over time. Instead, a mediocre spot appears to up the total amount generated. Is this due to some places regenerating over time while others dry out? And if so, what point is there to indicate "hot spots" when they are nowhere near accurate to support placement?

Regards,

zora

What you encounter is the fact that your planet scan gives you an overview of the location of resources at that moment in time. What you are really interested is the replenishment rate of the resources.

Unfortunately the sneaky people at CCP introduced two mechanisms to distribute PI materials on a planet - hotspots and nuggets.

Hotspots will accumulate PI materials over time at a relatively high rate - they will appear hot on the map

Nuggets get a one time injection of PI materials and replenish very slowly - but they also appear hot on the map.


If you happen to have placed your ECU and its heads on a nugget instead of a hotspot - your output will drop dramatically with time, and you will be able to see the way in which the planet resources are vanishing under your extractor heads.

If someone knows of a way up front to distinguish between a hotspot and nugget before dropping in an ECU I'm sure there are a lot of interesting readers.

For reference - http://www.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bid=851 (take a look at the section headed: The resources are alive! More or less in the middle of the blog)

Interesting information so I'm doing a copy/paste for the link clicking impaired.

The resources are alive!

With Incursion 1.1.0 we finally rolled out resource depletion and resource nuggets. These features were always planned to be part of PI but didn't make it into the Tyrannis release in a meaningful way due to time constraints.

The system is designed to make the resources more mobile on the planet but without being totally random. The geography of planets is still the single most influential contributor to resource density but, with depletion, the second best spot can become the best spot once the best spot has been exploited. Depleted resources regenerate so moving extractor heads off a hotspot will allow it to grow back. It is also possible to achieve equilibrium with the resource by extracting at the same pace as it regenerates - this is achievable only by carefully tuning and monitoring the hot spot you are on to make sure it doesn't lose strength.

Another addition to the resource distribution is nuggets. The nuggets have a more random nature than the basic resource calculation and were introduced to counter the effects of increased depletion. It is now worthwhile to scan your planet every once in a while to exploit any nuggets that might have appeared.

The resource calculation is additive so you will only ever see one cohesive resource layer when you scan, but this layer is now much less static due to the nuggets and depletion.

Good rules of thumb

Multiple extractor heads on the same hot spot increases depletion
Short extractor programs that are continuously re-submitted on the same spot will deplete the planet's resources very fast
Long extractor programs are more gentle and will deplete the planet's resources less
Nuggets appear randomly
Nuggets are influenced by the base resource layer which means they are bigger in 0.0 and low sec systems, compared to systems in high security space.