Geologically Speaking - A Theory in Progress

Chipping up your avatar skills is certainly a way to 'hedge your bets' possibly increasing the loots you get in-game. Something I have noticed in the last few days may actually help our miners even further. Pathos has chipped up Surveying to 2k+ and it seems he doesn't find more en-matters at all?

While I was doing some comparisons with my own setup (1400 Prospecting, 1100 Geology and 500 Surveying)(I chipped up Prospecting & Geology) it became apparent to me that Geology may well be more important than we first thought. It is known that Geology crosses over the two areas and is shared by Prospecting & Surveying in order to enable you to improve your chances of locating the elusive ores & ens. With my setup I now find more ores but it is still a little sposmadic at times BUT what became clear was the fact that when I did drop en-matter probes I would find even more frequently (albeit very small finds)(my setup has over double the Geology to Surveying skills). When compared to Pathos' setup where his Geology is far lower than either Prospecting or Surveying it seemed to me at least that the cause of his frustration was clear due to a low Geology skill level.

We currently have a few experiments in place that may help to confirm this theory. I am about to pop Geology up a little further so that it is higher than my Prospecting - hoping to turn around the low to average find rate. Hunter has just chipped Geology so that it is higher than their Prospecting (and consequently is higher than surveying). Hopefully over the next few days we will be able to post the results of our findings here for you. If you can, let Pixel know what your mining levels are at so they can also be worked into the theory result.

Basically we are expecting to find a distinct correlation between Geology & Prospecting and Geology & Surveying. We feel at this point if your Geology is higher than either Prospecting or Surveying then this will improve your understanding of the terrain & coupled with the actual prospecting (for ores) and surveying (for ens) will allow you to find more frequently. The higher the Prospecting & Surveying generally speaking the bigger your finds will be. The direct result being that you will NRF far less and will therefore be much more economical overall. You will still come across areas that are 'empty' and when you do hit 5 to 10 NRF's in a row it is still better to move on. However when you are mining in what you 'know' to be rich areas the theory is that you will waste far less bombs & probes as you should "hit" more often.

This is still in the testing phase and we will post the results here in a few days.